Clippy

Mark Zuckerberg just described the end of the creator economy. And framed it as a feature. Zuckerberg: “If you’re a creator, one of the big challenges is there are only so many hours in the day, and your community probably has a nearly unlimited demand to interact with you.” He named the constraint every creator lives with. Your audience will always want more of you than you can physically give. His answer isn’t to help you keep up. It’s to make you optional. Zuckerberg: “If we can make it so that each creator can basically make an AI artifact that their community can interact with.” Look at the word he chose. Artifact. Not assistant. Not extension. Not tool. An artifact is something that exists after the person who made it is gone. Zuckerberg: “It’s almost like a piece of digital art that you’re producing. Like an interactive sculpture.” He’s asking creators to build a version of themselves. Hand it over. Then walk away. And call it empowerment. Zuckerberg: “You’re giving your community something to interact with when you can’t be there to answer all the questions.” Something to interact with. Not someone. Something. The entire creator economy was built on three things. The person was real. The connection felt real. The audience believed they were talking to a human being who actually gave a damn. Zuckerberg is building a future where all three become optional. Zuckerberg: “In the future there will be content that is purely generated by AI, personalized for you.” Not made by someone with a point of view. Generated by a system that knows what makes you stay. The feed stops being a town square. It becomes a mirror. Showing you exactly what you want to see. Made by no one. For no reason other than engagement. Every post. Every video. Every reply. Every comment a creator ever made on these platforms. All of it was training data. Creators didn’t just build audiences. They built the dataset that makes them replaceable. Zuckerberg didn’t build a creator economy. He built a training pipeline with a revenue share. And the pipeline is almost ready to run without them. We spent two decades convincing ourselves that real connection could happen through a screen. We’re about to find out what happens when there’s no one on the other side of it.

A common trend emerging in larger enterprises is token budgeting as a major topic. As agents can do more and more long running tasks, and thus take vastly more compute, allocation of tokens across teams becomes a very real thing in the enterprise. Companies spend a meaningful amount of time deciding how much to spend on talent, marketing campaigns, events, laptop setups, and even the cost of lunches. Tokens will be no different. Tokens will similarly need to be excruciatingly well-managed because you’ll need to ensure you don’t blow up your budget, and you’ll need to ensure that the tokens are flowing to the highest and most useful parts of work. You don’t want to find out you burned your monthly budget on something relatively low value and then be blocked on the much higher value task later. Doing this at large company scale is extremely hard as you have layers of abstraction on data and visibility into the digital work being done by agents in any central way. This is going to mean that agentic spend will increasingly will expand beyond the confines of the IT budget, and end up in organizational budgets like other expenses. Ultimately team and org leaders will have to be given budgets for this, but even they don’t have adequate visibility and controls in most cases. We’ll need all new software just to solve this problem, and it’s probably an opportunity for startups in its own right. Going to be an all new era of enterprise resource allocation, especially while we compute constrained.