Incentives & the AI Economy

It all comes down to incentives.

When boards hear that AI is at risk of rendering entire companies obsolete as a result of competition taking advantage of accelerated speed of AI driven software development and automation of entire departments to LLMs, they have no choice but to pass that same mandate down to their functional teams. FOMO at its finest.

When Large Language Model providers are growing at 100x the rate of traditional startups in funding, headcount, and multi billion dollar initiative commitments, and their leadership fundamentally believes in the positive impact of AI in society, what benefit would it provide by pointing out only the risks, negatives, and downsides during the transition? It’s not like model providers aren’t issuing research on the limitations and risks of AI as a technology and as a catalyst to societal restructuring. It’s just overshadowed by the hype cycle noise, and their marketing departments amplifying the voice of visionaries.

It’s not as if the brightest in the field are shying away from the risks and trying to pull a fast one over our eyes - their voices are just muffled behind nuance and a lack of dedicated marketing to issue all-or-nothing statements about AI and its potential.