I’d like to offer you a nice celebratory reflection on Kimi K3, which is out - and above all I’d like to celebrate the panic currently circulating in the American labs. Let’s see if now they start saying that Kimi K3 is too dangerous too, that we have to stop the Chinese because they’re irresponsible. I’ll show you soon enough how they push protectionism to block the Chinese models.
Anyway: let’s celebrate Kimi K3, which I actually tried and it’s a beast, and it costs a tenth of Opus. It’s even stronger than Opus. Godo. Vibe codo.
Intelligence as a commodity
Here’s today’s reflection. Now that intelligence - and the release of Kimi K3 makes us talk about it even more - has become a commodity, something you use on a metered basis as if it were a utility bill, what happens to the economics of information, and above all of people’s cognitive capabilities? Those capabilities are the object of this automation, digitalization, and the consequent reorganization of the economy, of information, of knowledge.
One way to think about it might be to imagine human skills as if they were MP3s.
Where before you had a musician who made a record, an album with several tracks, who then played it, recorded it in a studio, and then there was the whole physical distribution chain so it ended up in shops - with the label in the middle, and if they didn’t activate the whole network for you, musicians didn’t even emerge - and then those records had to be distributed. There was a packaging, a flow of that work, that was completely different from what we have now. Now you have artists who put the MP3s directly online on the streaming platforms, and the packaging of that stuff isn’t so much by album as by playlist, and the recommendation modules do the rest.
So the concept of the album disintegrated, and the concept of access-at-any-time to all the music you want took its place. You no longer pay per album, you pay per time. You don’t buy the music, you rent it. All of these mechanisms. I could give dozens of examples for music, for video, for a thousand other things that have happened over these years.
So what has happened to our cognitive capabilities? The ability to program, the ability to interpret laws, the ability to do everything we spent years learning how to do?
I’ll offer you several points to reflect on. I don’t have all the answers - some I do, and I talk about them in my corporate course, which is called Reskill. Bookings are open for the coming months, after the summer; get in touch if you’re interested.
1. Distribution
How do cognitive capabilities get distributed? Where before you actually had to go to a person, in the final analysis, now you don’t go to a person: you contact an endpoint, you invoke a chatbot. The distribution of cognitive capabilities is about to be completely upended. These skills scale. Nobody needs to physically move, it doesn’t need to be a person, and those skills can be delivered in 10,000 places at the same time. There’s something to think about here.
2. Packaging
Since distribution changes, so does what you might call the package. Right now you might pay a consultant by the hour, or pay a company for a project made of various activities with time carved up in a certain way. In this new case, how do you package cognitive capabilities and expertise delivered by agents? It’s not the same thing. It isn’t a given that I have to organize myself the way I would if they were people. So what shape does the package of intelligence take? How do you package intelligent capabilities and expertise?
3. Differentiation
The third question is how we differentiate ourselves. We are producers of knowledge, and we may end up publishing agents that are able to carry and use that knowledge for third parties. How do we differentiate? And above all, how do we retain it? How do we make sure it isn’t easily copied? What makes us different from others in a world where knowledge can be easily copied, transferred and scaled?
And again, I’m not just talking about knowledge in terms of data, written things. I’m talking about knowledge in terms of knowing how to do the things we consider intelligent: cognition, wisdom, interpretation, knowing how to put things in order, knowing how to intervene in contexts that are fragmented.
4. So what do we sell?
Since it’s hard to differentiate and hard to stop these cognitive skills being copied, the question becomes: what are we selling? Are we selling those skills, or do we keep those skills to ourselves and sell the result? Do we sell results in streaming?
I don’t know what to think. I leave you with that open question.
Remember always: vibe codo, vibe godo.
