We built the Burj Khalifa. Half a mile of steel and glass standing straight up in the desert because someone decided the sky is negotiable.
We built mechanical birds that defy gravity, called them “aeroplanes,” and now the main thing they inspire is various “not enough legroom” subreddits, but let’s stop and sit with this for a second, we LITERALLY taught metal to fly.
And then, somewhere in the last two years, every little thing became about data and AI. How many petabytes of data got shoveled into training some transformer based model, that became the entire conversation.
Literally every startup, every pitch deck, every other post from someone who couldn’t define a transformer if you spotted them the first three layers. A chatbot with a wrapper on it and a $40M valuation. Another one that summarizes your emails. Another one that joins your Zoom call and summarizes the meeting for you. Another one that writes the emails so the first one has something to summarize (lol the irony here).
I am going to be super brutal here. Valley PE needs to STOP funding this bullshit. I don’t mean AI is fake, it isn’t, we have seen it can do all of these things. What I mean is we have quietly decided this is what innovation looks like now: a thousand people building slightly different doors into the same three models and calling it “the future.”
That’s all it is. A wrapper is cheap, fast, and derivative. The model already exists. The demand is already proven. You raise, you ship, you flip. Nobody is betting the farm on something that might not work for fifteen years, because the thing that might not work for fifteen years doesn’t have a clean exit.
So the question we keep asking, when did we stop innovating, is the wrong question. It assumes we lost the ability. We didn’t. The engineers are still here. The ambition is still here. The talent is denser than it has ever been.
The real question, in my opinion, is why.
And the answer is boring and infuriating in equal measure: the money stopped rewarding the hard thing. Or that is the easy version of it. The truer version, the one that actually stings, is that the reward for the hard thing never went anywhere. It just got outcompeted by a faster, cheaper one.
Because the hard thing still works. It still pays. It pays obscenely.
A few weeks back $MRNA and Merck dropped phase 3 data on a personalized cancer vaccine, the kind that reads your own tumor and trains your immune system to go hunt it down. The stock roughly doubled in a single day, something like forty billion dollars in value showing up overnight, all because someone spent a decade on a problem that might not have worked.
Nobody built that with a wrapper and a weekend. It is a fifteen-year bet somebody actually sat inside of.
So the ability is here. The payoff is here. One real breakthrough still pays more in a single afternoon than a thousand email-summarizers will in their entire lifecycle.
Which means “why did we stop” has an answer, and it is not a flattering one. We did not stop because we ran out of hard problems. We stopped because we found a way to get the return without the wait. The wrapper is a bet on the next twelve months. The Burj Khalifa was a bet on the next fifty years. And somewhere in here we decided the twelve month bet was the smart money and the fifty year bet was for suckers.
So I find myself coming back to this, the generation before us built the tallest thing on earth because someone decided the sky was up for negotiation. They taught metal to fly. What are we going to leave behind? Another chatbot?
P.S. since someone is definitely going to bring it up:
Yeah, AI helped me write this. The thoughts are mine, the anger is mine, the examples are mine, I brought a pile of rough notes in my own words and worked through it with a model. I hate to admit it, and it is a little sad that this is just the way it works now, but I am not going to hide it, because hiding it would make me exactly the kind of person this whole post is about.