Ryan Connor | RockawayX 🇺🇸

The fact that model intelligence is converging but monetization is not tells you everything you need to know LLMs are not commodities & there are deep moats at the frontier

‘Member of Technical Staff’ at Anthropic is now easily the most under-stated and prestigious engineering title in technology. It’s the corporate equivalent of introducing Michael Jordan as ‘works in athletics.’

As a VC, Fable is better than me at VC work. It breaks down white papers better than I do. It's better at financial analysis. It chews through mountains of diligence in minutes. There is no single well-scoped intellectual task where I beat a frontier AI. I catch its mistakes sometimes, but it catches mine more often. If my job is "VC work," then Fable is better than me at my job. But Fable alone would be a mediocre investor. It would quickly pass on all the bunk, sure. But among the set of doable deals, it can't find the one with the je ne sais quoi. It doesn't have the bias toward special people, wild ideas, or risk-taking. Its tweets and thinkpieces are OK, but they're too safe, too obvious. I can prompt it in the right direction, but even then it's not quite right. It's too suggestible. It changes its mind too easily. It's not stubborn, self-assured, irrationally confident about how the future will play out, the way great investors are. But me + Fable is really good. Better than either of us alone. In fact every investor on our team has leveled up with AI in the same way. We all feel we have more to do now, not less. We feel more capable, not less. My theory is that AI disempowers service providers and empowers owners. If you sell your labor by the task, AI is genuinely terrifying. It can accomplish that task cheaper, faster, with more control and less bullshit. But if you own the outcome, if you're using AI to do something for you, then AI is amazing. It's empowering, not disempowering. Make your own logo, design your own website, write your own copy, build your own systems. It also means is that you should aim to reorganize yourself in the food chain. If you don't, AI will do it for you. Don't be a service provider, be an owner. If you're building something, you are a beneficiary of AI, all of the incredible gains that AI is enabling will accrue to you too. But if you're a tax on people building things, just know that the tax rate on building is rapidly going to 0.