Mica Perillo

Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first-year San Francisco MTS. You just got finished readin’ some scaling-laws paper, Jared Kaplan, probably. You’re convinced data and compute are the only constraints, whoever trains the next frontier model wins, everybody else is just buildin’ wrappers. You’re gonna be convinced of that ’til next month when you get to Alex Karp, and then you’re gonna be talkin’ about how open-source models are drivin’ the cost of intelligence to zero and the real value’s in the ontology of the firm. Takin’ those models, givin’ ’em proprietary context, reinforcement learnin’ on the company’s actual workflows. Specialized models for every business function. Deployed. Integrated. Suddenly the model’s a commodity, the business is the training environment, and you’re an organizational theorist. That’s gonna last until next year- you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Ray Kurzweil, talkin’ about, you know, the post-human corporation and the enduring economic value of human connection. Suddenly the singularity’s inevitable, intelligence is abundant, and the last real competitive advantage is knowin’ how to get three people to agree on a meeting time. “Well, actually, I won’t, because Kurzweil fundamentally underestimates the importance of proprietary context, especially the accumulation of-” firm-specific decision traces that can’t be reconstructed from the final state of the database. Yeah. I listened to the podcast too.