Thriving in a World Where Everyone Can Get Answers

This month, the open-source company, ArtCraft, proudly announced using GenAI to prompt their way into cloning Adobe’s application suite. Today, you can download clones of Photoshop, Illustrator, and even the video editing software, Premiere. PhotoCraft, ArtCraft’s Photoshop clone, contains 90% of the professional tool’s capabilities. News of ArtCraft’s accomplishments hint at a future we’re quickly approaching. Ingenuity, a little time, and GenAI tools can reduce the cost of software to zero and enable everyone to produce answers. This begs the question, what matters most in a world where everyone can process data?

Where Have We Been?

For many years, bigger processors, more memory, and faster networks led to an explosion of application software. Powerful computers created an industry of desktop applications enabling workers to become more productive and helping professionals do more with less. What would manually take hours using specialized equipment and elbow grease was reduced to minutes and seconds for knowledge and skill professionals. Thanks to Adobe Photoshop, professional photographers didn’t have to manually dodge and burn prints for the perfect photograph. Office workers could write documents and mail merge without ink smudges and whiteout. Later, power chips and excess bandwidth bootstrapped a robust SaaS industry providing hundreds of billions of dollars of value in specialized use cases every.

Where Are We Now?

We live in the future. A world where if we imagine it, we can render it. If we can render it, we can print it. A massive data center build-out and GenAI are laying the foundations for possibilities we haven’t imagined. In today’s computing environment, LLMs have replaced the traditional CPU. LLMs can analyze, compute, and reason solutions from complex datasets. And…deliver passable results. Markdown files and agent instructions detail processes, procedures, and boundaries for carrying out tasks. If LLMs are the latest analog to CPUs, markdown and instructions are computing’s current operating systems.

Without applications, CPUs and operating systems don’t do much more than show blinking lights and light up your keyboard. Applications allow specialization to happen. Applications turn computers into tools and make computing worthwhile. In a world where good communications skills and the ability to articulate instructions make almost anyone a programmer, specialization is going to be dictated by APIs and tools that do one or a few things very well.

LLMs, markdown and harnesses, and discoverable tools create possibilities where skill workers can analyze complex datasets, process them, and vibe reason with an agent to get to results.

Where Are We Going?

Everyone has concerns about AI taking everyone’s job. According to Reuters, companies cited AI as the reason for cutting 120,000 jobs this year. Entry-level hiring has stalled this year, and software, legal, and other white-collar professionals are wondering what happens next for them. Across many industries, specialization and speed in application development, data processing, or computing was tied to success.

Professionals and companies who will thrive in the new era have a few things going for them. Companies with a lot of meta data may find themselves at an advantage. In many industries, the same companies may have access to similar datasets. However, many companies possess proprietary meta data based upon their workflows and internal processing. This data can prove invaluable for making policy decisions as well as future product development ideas. Companies with years of experience have insights and information competitors do not. Combined with meta information, professionals and organizations with deep experience will be better positioned to make more profitable judgment decisions and act on incomplete information.

AI’s capabilities are profound. It’s one of the most powerful technologies mankind has created. Even though we all have a cause for concern, it still holds great promise. Now is a great time to think about how you can use the technology beyond what’s already in the realm of possibility. Successful companies and professionals are homing in on their specialties and combining data only they have access to. This will enable them to explore ways to use AI that could usher in another golden age of democratizing computing, where everyone can get the answers they need and thrive.