Cook has spent 15 years focused on the King — the thousands of decisions about industrial design, manufacturing, and supply chains that make the iPhone an iPhone. Racing in AI would have meant counting pieces while leaving the King unguarded. Ballmer counted pieces, and it cost Microsoft $5.5 billion.
One of the most compelling theories about the future of artificial intelligence comes, oddly enough, from a 161-year-old paper about the coal industry. In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that improvements to the coal-fired steam engine had not reduced Britain’s coal consumption.
Nearly 50 million Americans go to court each year without a lawyer. Low-income Americans are especially vulnerable, with most saying they “do not get any or enough legal help” for their major civil legal problems.
The frontier AI companies are building exactly the kind of cost structure Christensen warned about at a scale he could never have imagined. No companies in the history of capitalism have ever paid their employees like this.
On Monday, OpenAI announced $40 billion in new financing, the largest funding round in history, and one that nearly doubled the artificial intelligence company’s valuation to $300 billion.
