The AI market is moving at a rapid pace. Every day I see another project that is awesome or at least somewhat interesting.
The fundamental models themselves keep iterating, and OpenAI keep improving. And all the incumbent software services are implementing more tooling.
It’s fairly unnerving but at the same time sometimes you sit down and do some programming and you realise how awesome it is to just having programming helpers at your side. You can do pretty much anything that you can think of now, and that is incredibly inspiring. It definitely helps to have a great basis of programming knowledge.
Anyway, I’ve been continuing some R&D experimentation, and there’s some potential positives in the pipeline but I won’t talk about them just yet.
I am still very much in the uncertain stage but the roadmap is straightforward:
- AI Consultancy to help people navigate through AI
- AI Products that use automation and language models to produce new forms of value
The only certainty is that Microsoft will dominate
I was having a conversation yesterday, and a really good point was made. A lot of AI products are coming out at the moment, but as soon as Microsoft decides to properly implement all forms of media creation in Microsoft Word, the game is kind of over for many of them. I don’t use Office or Teams, and assume there is already rudimentary implementation… but at some point there is going to be a high quality implementation of AI into those products. At that point, loads of ill positioned startups will be wiped out.
I should probably buy Microsoft shares...
Especially once the new lightwave processors become mainstream a few years into the future… we will just have language models embedded into the operating system, and everyone will be able to generate any form of media. A new wave of creative output is already being unleashed, but it’s nothing compared to what’s coming.
Microsoft are clearly dominating in terms of positioning. They are just waiting and observing what’s going on, and when the timing is right they will pull the trigger and implement them.
Finding Market Opportunities
The AI Consultancy will also expose me to opportunities in the market for AI, so it’s a key strategy going forward. It’s also where my bread and butter money will come in. And this is still on top of my normal web development projects that may come in, although I want to predominately focus on AI driven projects.
Embracing Uncertainty
Some people are still expecting me to immediately have all the answers already. I’m only a month in, I have some ideas, but I also thought at the beginning I would be spending three months just doing R&D before anything came up that resembled a product market fit. I don’t have the answers, I don’t have a completely clear idea but I’m on the right path and that’s what counts.
That in itself can be really unsettling to some people. They want to clearly know what the plan is. And the uncertainty is somewhat unsettling to me, and I still have to be modest and honest enough to admit that nothing may come of this. I am smart enough to make something happen, but still, life doesn’t always work out the way you want it to. And if that happens, it’s also fine. As I said on day one … if things really don’t work out this year, and i’ve given it my 100%, then I think i’ll be fine deciding to take the easier albeit less exciting route of being an employee. I know I’ll be a good asset to most startups or companies, so whenever I get nervous about things I do remind myself of this.
Embracing uncertainty involves just going for it.
It’s not that I have a backup plan, it’s just I know I will be alright if it doesn’t work out. Might be tight for a while, but it will still be OK.
Getting More Organised
That said, I still want to play to win, and right now whilst I potentially can bring in a few people to help, I need to get my own time optimised and effective.
Each day I am attempting to get more organised.
For instance today I focused on sales and marketing separately.
I followed up on three sales leads, and I wrote some automation scripts for a marketing which generated webpages from markdown.
I am keeping a list of all the tools i come across, amongst all the other things that crop up each day. I am working toward setting up systems and automations in every single area of the company. And I’m fairly certain as I build the software to do this, others will benefit from it.
Tired again, but managed to write something down. One thing I’ve learnt from this process is that just writing this online journal helps cement thought processes.
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