One thing all these people (mostly dudes, let’s be honest) have in common, from the AI bros to the crypto bros all the way back to the Beanie Baby Bros is an enormous amount of totally unearned confidence in their own ability to spot a revolution and profit from it IMMEDIATELY.

The other common feature, although this is more about the nature of hype itself, and the things that we’ve seen explode and fizzle recently, is this: the idea that in order for something to be huge, to be truly paradigm shifting, it has to be open source, distributive and outside any sort of normal societal structure.

Our culture has developed such an aversion to expertise that we would rather hitch ourselves to a pair of sunglasses with a fauxhawk that barks at us through our screens about “bIg TeCh DoEsN’t wAnT yOu tO sUcCeEd, bRo!” than actually look at what the organizations and companies who have been studying artificial intelligence for literal decades are doing.

And what are they doing, the Microsofts, the Alphabets, the Apples of the world? The same thing they always do in a gold rush: sell shovels.

Google Bard? Shovel
Microsoft Azure AI? Shovel
Amazon Bedrock? BIG shovel