Consulting becomes cool again
I was in Alentejo (Portugal) last week looking at a few megalithic sites which have been on my list for some time. Dolmens and menhirs extend around the entire west coast of Europe (from Portugal to the Orkney Islands) and are an incredible, and fairly mysterious, expression of the first farmer culture which lived there until about 2500BC. Ancient DNA analysis has now added a lot of understanding about where these people came from (originally Anatolia) so it was a delightful coincidence to hear Dwarkesh Patel interview David Reich (ancient geneticist) on his pod at the same time.
OpenAI and Anthropic launching AI consulting vehicles is not a surprise. I am very bullish on the AI enablement trend and it’s why we started our 10xHumans holding company. Daria at AI Enablement Insider wrote an excellent deep dive comparing the two frontier model’s specific consulting strategies.
Ben at Stratechery compared this strategy to computer consulting in the 1970s. While I think this is true, I suspect that in about a year you’ll see a lot of posts about how FDEs are also doing a lot of training. The challenge of AI enablement is not just engineering-augmenting humans requires change, training and a bunch of other wetware-level things.
I think we had a slide in our deck which pegged the total investment in new AI enablement capability at about $1.8B. Now it’s closer to $7.5B. A whole 1% of what has been invested in the frontier models! This spend will get a whole lot bigger over the next few years.
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Although in general I’m not too concerned about the current deglobalisation rhetoric (the level of economic integration of the world is 1000x more than politicians appear to understand), my recent visit to China made me quite concerned about the siloing of China, both by itself but also by the west. AI is another vehicle for this tectonic movement. Deep in the middle of an interesting and at times extremely heated conversation between Jensen Huang and Dwarkesh Patel (who really seems to have the best interviews at the moment), the former comes out with a somewhat exasperated statement which I thought captured a lot of the current politics of AI beautifully and touches on my point:
If we scare this country into thinking that AI is somehow a nuclear bomb, so that everybody hates AI and everybody’s afraid of AI, I don’t know how you’re helping the United States. You’re doing it a disservice. If we scare everybody out of doing software engineering jobs because it’s going to kill every software engineering job—and we don’t have any software engineers as a result of that—we’re doing a disservice to the United States.
If we scare everybody out of radiology so nobody wants to be a radiologist because computer vision is completely free and no AI is going to do a worse job than a radiologist, we misunderstand the difference between a job and a task. The job of a radiologist is patient care. The task is to read a scan. If we misunderstand that so profoundly and we scare everybody out of going to radiology school, we’re not going to have enough radiologists and good enough healthcare.
So I’m making the case that when you make a premise that is so extreme, everything goes from zero or infinity, we end up scaring people in a way that’s just not true. Life is not like that. Do we want the United States to be first? Of course we do. Do we need to be a leader in every layer of that stack? Of course we do. Of course we do. Today you’re talking about Mythos because Mythos is important. Sure. That’s fantastic.
But in a few years time, I’m making you the prediction that when we want the American tech stack, when we want American technology to be diffused around the world—out to India, out to the Middle East, out to Africa, out to Southeast Asia—when our country would like to export, because we would like to export our technology, we would like to export our standards, on that day, I want you and I to have that same conversation again. I will tell you exactly about today’s conversation, about how your policy and what you imagined literally caused the United States to concede the second largest market in the world for no good reason at all.
We shouldn’t concede it. If we lose it, we lose it. But why do we concede it? Now nobody is advocating an all or nothing. Nobody’s advocating all or nothing, meaning we ship everything to China at all times. Nobody’s advocating that. We should always have the best technology here. We should always have the most technology here, and the first. But we should also try to compete and win around the world. Both of those things can simultaneously happen. It requires some amount of nuance, some amount of maturity instead of absolutes. The world is just not absolutes.