Art of Message
The new layers
The bottom layer of any business is the expensive problem. But you layer so much on top of that – people, business model, strategy, requirements & plans, tech stack, product design, messaging, pricing, and more.
There’s a layering process in nature too – here’s a tiny sliver of it:
“By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers*, we would not be.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World
*by “flowers” he means fruiting/flowering plants, grasses, shrubs, trees, etc – angiosperms
From here you can choose your business metaphors – if “cloud” are the angiosperms, what comes next?
If LLMs are the angiosperms (and OpenAI is the current keystone species) here’s an inconclusive list of what comes next:
- Products that sell LLM default behavior, text generation, like Jasper.ai
- Products that sell something else, like analysis, summarization, categorization, and intelligent integration, like MyAskAI
- New services models, such as the emerging “AI automation agencies” (more than any tech startup, this phenomenon reminds me of the dotcom boom)
- Legacy software, like Notion or Brightr, that integrate AI
- Ecosystem add-ons, like aptly-named PromptLayer.com
- New LLM providers who research, design, build, deploy, host LLM services
That’s a lot of new stuff – new layers.
But that’s not surprising if you do the math on the Pollan quote – there are 1.5 trillion kilograms of humans, cows, pigs, and sheep on planet earth, all thanks to angiosperms.