There are no new ideas

Any idea is free, but the best are expensive.

It’s been a few months since I’ve shared something new on Day to Data — four to be exact. It’s not that I haven’t sat down and tried to write something.

Two things have occurred. First - life happened! Since February, I’ve been on over 20 flights, spent lots of time with family, ran the Boston marathon, moved into a new apartment, bought a new domain for this blog and enjoyed some weekend trips out of NYC. A second thing plagued my ability to write — I worry that there are no new ideas. This is driven by the fact that the cost of ideas is going to zero.

I believe we are experiencing two things at once — the biggest Cambrian explosion in ideas of all times (anyone can have an idea, just chat with an LLM!) alongside a great creative consolidation (how can you have a good idea when everyone has access to the same machine?). The cost of an idea is going to zero, but the cost of a good, new idea is rising. Great ideas are getting more expensive.

The creative consolidation started with social media

Last year, I read Filterworld. The book explores how social media algorithms have led to the progressive flattening of culture. Social media platforms can both connect communities across the globe, while also being built on algorithms that reward sameness. Users crave perpetual fluency (ease in processing visual stimulus). We want content we can understand and absorb, quickly and easily, so sameness just breeds more engagement which breeds more sameness.

Algorithms flattened culture on a global scale. In 2015, if you were in NYC or Madrid or Seoul, every coffee shop had white subway tile and a cursive neon sign hanging behind the baristas. These common threads of culture appeared everywhere, as the sharing culture encouraged this sameness beyond borders.

Generating a flattened culture

Fast forward to today — AI is the most disruptive catalyst to technical change that we’ve seen since the semiconductor, or maybe fire. The large language models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT and the likes exist as a snapshot in time. When a large language model is trained, it creates a generalized understanding of the world. LLMs by their nature are supposed to predict the most probable next word based on patterns detected in its training data. However, this means LLMs naturally favor the average. Outliers are statistically suppressed. They don’t generate novelty, but rather an average of all novelty that has existed in the window of its training. LLMs are perpetually stuck in the ideas and attitudes of their training data. LLMs are a mechanism to generate flattened culture, picking the familiar over the fringe. Culture, once layered and strange, will be optimized for fluency in an AI world.

We can’t ignore the magic!

So, good ideas are expensive and we’re heading towards a cultural convergence, propelled by LLMs. It may be a pessimistic view. However, I believe it encourages us to set our bar higher, to push our thinking, and to resist the urge of average.

I remember vividly taking a test in high school that included a reading about visiting the Grand Canyon. The writer argued that for each visitor that saw the Grand Canyon after the first person to ever see it had an experience that was marginally worse, less exciting, and less unique than everyone that came before them. An experience, once magical to a few, has become normalized to the many. With each new fantastical experience that new technology is creating for us, somehow our bar for jaw dropping, impressive, world changing, and unique continues to get higher. This will push us to new, optimistic heights.

I wrote this piece up last weekend, when apparently mine and Sam Altman’s writer’s block ended at the same time. His latest piece, the Gentle Singularity, discusses the rising bar:

Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; or from being amazed that it can make live-saving medical diagnoses to wondering when it can develop the cures; or from being amazed it can create a small computer program to wondering when it can create an entire new company. This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.

It’s not a bad thing! Any single idea may diminish in value, but good ideas will be rewarded. Good ideas will still emerge from the fringe, the novel, and the nuanced. We will have to encourage outliers, even when LLMs may push us towards an average. Artificial intelligence is not a replacement for creativity. Ideation, powered by creativity, obscurity, and wonder, will be encouraged.

For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of “the idea guys”; people who had an idea and were looking for a team to build it. It now looks to me like they are about to have their day in the sun.

The cost of any idea is going to zero. But the cost of good, novel, and new have never been more valuable. The same systems that will flatten culture may also open it up. When ideas become free, the barrier to enter is lower, but the ceiling is farther away. The world is truly opening up. Anyone can write that novel, start that business, or make that movie. Ideas are cheap, but now the tools to bring them to life are powerful and accessible. We can bring the jumble of ideas in our head into reality in a way we haven’t been able to before AI. In a world where ideas are plentiful, we’ll get to focus on the novel, the unusual, the different, and the obscure. I am excited for this reality.

Thanks for reading. This Substack is now available at day-to-data.com as well as on the Substack platform. Making things official around here. Looking forward to the next one.