The best thing I read this week: AI Will Not Make You Rich

The best thing I read this week was an article from Colossus: AI Will Not Make You Rich, written by Venture Capitalist Jerry Neumann on who the real winners of the current AI boom will be.

A lot of the money pouring into AI is therefore being invested in the wrong places, and aside from a couple of lucky early investors, those who make money will be the ones with the foresight to get out early.

Neumann compares today’s AI wave to shipping containerization:

In contrast, shipping containerization was a revolution whose value was spread so thin that in the end, it made only a single founder temporarily rich and only a single investor a little bit richer.

He concludes with how he sees the AI market playing out:

The way to invest in AI is to think through the implications of knowledge workers becoming more efficient, to imagine what markets this efficiency unlocks, and to invest in those. For decades, the way to make money was to bet on what the new thing was. Now, you have to bet on the opportunities it opens up.

If that wasn’t enough, Neumann also offers a fascinating history of the microprocessor and PC as economically transformative technologies:

As the tech took hold and started to show promise, innovations in software, memory, and peripherals like floppy disk drives and modems joined it. They reinforced one another, with each advance putting pressure on the technologies adjacent to it.