The Great Fracturing of Consumer AI
The market for personal AI is going to be highly fragmented.
To understand why, you need to understand two forces shaping our world today, one social and one technological:
- The death of the mainstream,
- and the rising tide of an open agent infrastructure ecosystem.
Death of the mainstream
Humans are extremely heterogeneous, yet deeply mimetic. We crave individuality, and yet are intensely social. Our idiosyncratic interests and identities used to be a backdrop against which the "main plot" of mainstream media unfolded.
Now, it's the opposite.
"Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities." — YOUTH MODE, khole.net
The rising tide of an open agent infrastructure ecosystem
Soon, personal AIs will accompany you across the web…acting, thinking, and generating on your behalf.
They are going to hone their skills in simulations of the internet and practice the art of conversation with simulations of users.
As they become more useful, we will see an explosion in consumer demand for them. For example, agentic capabilities will expand the use cases beyond chatbots at least 100x. Interactive video will 100x the use cases beyond that.
It's tempting to think only a handful of companies will be able to build this technology. However, we don't think that matches the reality of what is happening. A robust ecosystem of agent infrastructure and AI research is empowering a long tail of creators beyond the core research labs to create personal AIs with genuinely cutting-edge tech. We also don't see significant technical switching costs when moving between AI experiences. You can use your old personal AI to onboard to your new one. This makes it significantly easier for startups and amateur creators to compete with the big labs that have already built out distribution channels.
The Great Fracturing
Personal AIs are not just agent harnesses that service commoditized intelligence. They are intelligence wrapped up with a set of world views, a definition of cool, a definition of truth, an identity, a social network, a personality, a set of friends, a set of preferred vendors, etc. And a sycophantic lack of world view is a world view in itself. These things are not fungible.
In a world where
- culture has fragmented into thousands of microcosms;
- personal AIs are not fungible;
- and it's feasible for companies outside the big labs to build high-quality consumer AI experiences;
the future of AI will not be one assistant serving everyone. It will be a long tail of experiences built by and for all different kinds of needs and subcultures.