The AI Unbundling

The evolution of human communication has been about removing whatever bottleneck is in this value chain. Before humans could write, information could only be conveyed orally; that meant that the creation, vocalization, delivery, and consumption of an idea were all one-and-the-same. Writing, though, unbundled consumption, increasing the number of pe... See more

The analogy to publishing also point to what will be the long-term trend for any profession affected by these models: relatively undifferentiated creators who depended on the structural bundling of idea creation and substantiation will be reduced to competing with zero marginal cost creators for attention generated and directed from Aggregators; hi... See more

What remains is one final bundle: the creation and substantiation of an idea. To use myself as an example, I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet, the ability to distribute them around the globe; however, I still need to write them down, just as an artist needs to create an image, or a musician needs to write a song. What is becoming in... See more

But then came this summer’s unveiling of the aforementioned Midjourney, which is free to anyone via its Discord bot. An even bigger surprise was the release of Stable Diffusion, which is not only free, but also open source — and the resultant models can be run on your own computer.

To the extent that large language models (and I should note that while I’m focusing on image generation, there are a whole host of companies working on text output as well) are dependent not on carefully curated data, but rather on the Internet itself, is the extent to which AI will be democratized, for better or worse.