Opinionated AI Products

Strong Technologies Forms Beliefs

Nov 18, 2024

👋 Hey friends, I’m Akash! Software Synthesis is where I connect the dots on AI, software and company building strategy. You can reach me at akash@earlybird.com!

Last week we organised an AI builder breakfast in London with founders and operators discussing themes like knowledge graphs, mechanistic interpretability, the future of domain-specific data, reasoning scaling laws, and more. Reach out if you’d like to join the next one!

Roughly one year ago I wrote about the increasing importance of artisanal SaaS as the barriers to creating software erode.

A recurring theme in my discussions with application builders is how many degrees of freedom to confer to the end user; the merit of being opinionated is that it forms beliefs:

For many decades, a popular intersubjective reality was that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. Salesforce feels like the 2021 version of that belief – and they are not the only company that fits that description.

Beliefs are the world’s most powerful network effects. They don’t just explain the success of software products. The price of Bitcoin, democracies and dictatorships, capitalism, and the power of the church are all based on intersubjective realities. No moat is more durable than a shared belief.

Julian Lehr

It’s no wonder why this essay from Anu Atluru on ‘Taste Eating Silicon Valley’ struck a chord a couple of months ago:

Code is cheap. Money now chases utility wrapped in taste, function sculpted with beautiful form, and technology framed in artistry.

Taste is some combination of design, user experience, and emotional resonance that defines how a product connects with people and aligns with their values and identity. At a minimum, taste isn’t bland — it’s opinionated. As Arnold Bennett famously said, ‘Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.’

Products with technology at their core are closer than ever to art. If true, this also means that other players become critical to the ecosystem: artists, designers, creators, creative directors, media companies.

In their widely shared State Of OpenCloud 2024 report, Battery Ventures predicted product design to trump traditional moats in software going forward:

The lagging retention and engagement metrics of the current cohort of AI apps often triggers debates regarding the best form factor for the technology. Steve Jobs tends to come up in this discourse - he was of course unabashedly opinionated about his philosophy of computers being a bicycle for the mind (which was orthogonal to Bill Gates and Microsoft’s position in the mobile era).

Chris Dixon characterised the iPhone as a ‘strong technology’ in this timeless essay with lessons to teach for this new paradigm shift:

During a media tour in 2007 in which Steve Jobs showed the device to reporters, there was one instance in which a journalist criticized the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.

“It doesn’t work,” the reporter said.

Jobs stopped for a moment and tilted his head. The reporter said he or she kept making typos and the keys were too small for his or her thumbs.

Jobs smiled and then replied: “Your thumbs will learn.”

Smartphones are a good example of a broader historical pattern: technologies usually arrive in pairs, a strong form and a weak form.

The mainstream technology world notices the excitement and wants to join in, but isn’t willing to go all the way and embrace the strong technology. To them, the strong technology appears to be some combination of strange, toy-like, unserious, expensive, and sometimes even dangerous. So they embrace the weak form, a compromised version that seems more familiar, productive, serious, and safe.

We’re in the very early innings of generative AI - if history’s any guide, some of the best manifestations of technology come last, in a strong form. Windows Mobile, launched in 2000, ceded the market to Apple far later:

The issue with Windows Mobile was, first and foremost, Gates himself: in his view of the world the Windows-based PC was the center of a user’s computing life, and the phone a satellite; small wonder that Windows Mobile looked and operated like a shrunken-down version of Windows

If anything, the problem with Windows Mobile is that it was too early: Android, which originally looked like a Blackberry, had the benefit of copying the iPhone; the iPhone, in stark contrast to Windows Mobile, looked nothing like the Mac, despite sharing the same internals. Instead, Steve Jobs and company started with a new interface paradigm — multi-touch — and developed a user interface that was actually suited to a handheld device

Reading between the lines of CIO surveys would lead you to think that existing vendors will capture most new AI spend - beyond data gravity or lower TCO, beliefs of the kind that sustained IBM in the past are sustaining many market leaders today.

Strong forms of a technology, when they arrive, can induce a new set of beliefs. ‘Selling work’, ‘services as software’, or ‘selling into labour budgets’ are some of the beliefs that agentic apps are tying themselves to, in anticipation of this being the strong form of AI that the public markets will eventually start to price in when evaluating incumbents. These beliefs will diffuse across buyers under pressure to deliver ROI of adopting AI, measured by the reduction of seats or headcount and higher throughput. In assessing whether to work with startups or incumbents, they’ll discern whether startups can uniquely deliver strong forms of AI - the onus is on founders to prove it.

When designing AI products, founders need to carefully thread the needle of being opinionated but also conforming to some semblance of familiarity, taking customers on a journey to convert them to a new set of beliefs.

Linus Lee of Thrive Capital and formerly of Notion AI is doing some of the most interesting thinking here:

AI models will become a creative medium as rich and culturally significant as animation and photography.

Today’s tools for AI art also tend to have an extremely low ceiling for mastery. Many commercial tools meant to be accessible, like DALL-E, are so basic and guardrailed in its interface that it’s difficult to imagine any person become a virtuoso (there’s a ceiling to how complex prompts can be), let alone find a novel way to use the tool in a way its creator didn’t expect.

Over time, I think we will see creative tools built natively around AI separate itself from tools for augmenting existing mediums in applications like Photoshop. We’ll witness virtuoso levels of performance for expressing new ideas through this new medium, as difficult as it is for us to imagine now what such mastery might look like. We’ll see artists use neural networks and data in ways they were never meant to be used. Through it all, our capacity for creation can only expand.

I’ll leave you with this:

While taste is often focused on a single thing, it is often formed through the integration of diverse, and wide-ranging inputs. 

Steve Jobs has said, “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

Brie Wolfson

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