50) Validation

Behind-the-scenes building Vambrace AI, a company on a mission to figure out its mission. Please pardon the stream-of-consciousness style. Subscribe to follow along or visit the site here:

(typos are to make sure you’re paying attention)

Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In last week’s post, Perfect Accounting, we explored the concept of “perfect” cost accounting, meaning how one would think about perfect attribution of cost across the atomic revenue and atomic expense units of a business. It was pretty pedantic and sort of rambling, but I made a pretty graphic as part of the endeavor, and so that made it all worth it. Moving on!

Validation

Today is going to be short (and sweet). This past week, OpenAI and Anthropic both announced consulting initiatives to help accelerate the adoption of AI within actual enterprises. They’re each taking somewhat different approaches, but I think the main takeaway is consistent: the biggest challenge in entering an AI-native world is adoption.

Organizations (and maybe therefore humans, by nature) are wired to maintain the status quo, and AI represents a massive shift from the status quo. In order to start leveraging this technology for real-world impact, existing business actors need help understanding its potential and structuring implementations that complement and amplify existing workflows.

I started doing what I’m doing because I thought there’d be a longer-tail of AI adoption over the next 5-10 years required to actually get people (and companies) to realize real value from the technology. It is incredibly challenging, but these are the challenges that will define the next decade of technical and business innovation—and it’s exhilarating (albeit terrifying and occasionally overwhelming) to be on the front lines.

I don’t think OpenAI or Anthropic have any interest in the lower market, at least for now, so I view these developments quite favorably. I also am trying to adopt an abundance mindset with all of this, since there are so many people and so many companies in the country (and world).

Some of the best advice I ever received when starting out on this journey was, “find a waterfall and stick out a bucket—don’t try to convince yourself or others that there is a waterfall.” That feels like an appropriate way of describing the current moment and my attitude towards the latest market developments. I’m fine being one of many buckets reaching to capture as much of the AI waterfall as possible. At least I know that I’ll get wet. I also think I’m building a pretty sturdy bucket. And that’s really all I can ask for.

Looking Forward

Like I said, short and sweet today. I’m going to try to be a bit more concise moving forward, due in part to the fact that I have less leisure time (which is a positive reflection of having a lot of real work on my plate). Next week I think I’m going to focus on data extraction, or the end-to-end AI pipeline or something like that. We shall see.

Have a great week!

Sincerely,

Luke