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Who Gets Rich in the AI Gold Rush?
The people who find the gold, or those who help find it?
The 1848–52 California Gold Rush
In the mid 1800s, news of untold riches drew hundreds of thousands of people to California. 2 billion dollars worth of gold was extracted, but few prospectors made anything.
The more reliable source of income was selling tools to prospectors. No matter who you were, if you were coming to find gold, you needed picks, shovels and all sorts of other tools.
The latest California gold rush is more of a silicon rush, in particular, to the untold riches promised by Artificial Intelligence. Just like with the 1840s gold rush, plenty of AI prospectors will turn up empty handed.
The more sensible investments might not be in AI directly, but in the vendors of tools that are arming AI prospectors.
Let’s go over them, shall we?
The Shovels
The “gold” of AI is probably not a tangible thing, like a version of ChatGPT, but a product that you can sell and market. To unearth that product, you’ll need to train and run it somewhere. At a basic level, you’ll need —
