People have mused that if Allen Ginsberg had lived past 1997, he might have said something like, “I saw the best minds of my generation were employed by Google to sell programmatic advertising.” Or, as early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it in 2013, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
But past the “kids these days” anguish of our forebears — who put people on the moon, laid telecommunications cables across oceans, and made medical breakthroughs — is the simple fact that the cutting edge of tech is often happening at companies that are trying to serve you more personalized advertising in line with your interests.
Whether Meta has the ambition to spread its cutting-edge AI technology across the industry remains to be seen. But as Mark Zuckerberg once described his business, “Senator, we run ads.”
For Google, the journey from the core product of ad sales (Search and Gmail) to cloud computing will be an interesting one. Ditto for Microsoft, whose OpenAI ChatGPT alliance could be considered a marketing tool for its computers.
All of this goes into a theory we’ve written about in these pages. Last year, Myles Udland wrote that we’re thinking either too small or too big about AI. And it’s hard because the technology will thread a needle through a specific industry before it expands across the economy.
As another Bank of America analyst, Alkesh Shah, wrote this week, “Investors frequently overestimate the magnitude of tech disruption in the near-term and underestimate it over the longer-term.”
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