064 - Future of Consulting

Consulting is a $1 trillion business annually today. If you could get the same value 10 times faster, for 10% of the price, and with 10 times more supporting evidence, how much of that $1 trillion do you think would shift over to the new option?

This isn't really a hypothetical, it is the lowest bar I'd invest my time in. If you aren't improving something like this by at least one order of magnitude (10x+), you probably aren't targeting the right opportunities.

Our last research system managed to perform roughly on par with 4 junior consultants from a major consulting firm, using less than $200 of cloud resources in the process, while offering and citing all supporting evidence and operating at roughly the same speed. The same from a consultancy could have easily cost $100,000, making the consultants over 500 times more expensive. Even counting the entire operating costs from that system running for several years, it would remain below 10% of the cost of that one engagement.

However, that system was designed specifically not to scale, and to operate in slow motion. It was intended for research purposes, not commercial deployment.

The new systems being prepared are designed for commercial deployment, operating in real-time and with full scalability. This means that compared to a 4-consultant baseline of prior performance, the new systems will be able to operate over 10,000 times faster, at over 200 times the scale in the first phase alone, and with over 10 times the memory efficiency. The net result is conservatively a 20,000,000-fold improvement.

So, how will the industry as it exists today compete with the operational equivalent of 80,000,000 consultants running on a single server?

The short answer is that it cannot. The longer answer is that since such systems are designed for cumulative value, meaning they grow more adept, with deeper and broader knowledge over time, that 80 million figure will also quickly increase. This means that even if the industry today could compete on day 1, it would be falling behind by day 2.

Consulting today is also increasingly lazy, basing their advice on the growing abundance of misinformation, or even repeating nonsense from trashbots directly. As they rarely disclose their sources, they can often get away with this.

Consulting is also just one use case in the very broad domain of developing and utilizing knowledge. There are easily dozens more opportunities requiring little or no engineering adjustment.

The "Golden Ticket" determining who has a say in guiding humanity's future will go to the investor competent enough to comprehend this. Those who pass on the opportunity won't have to worry about the future, as neither they nor their companies will have any say in it.

The next paradigm shift will be knowledge moving beyond the limits of raw data, narrow algorithms, and the human mind. Like electricity, the industrial revolution, roads, agriculture, and language before it, this shift is not optional.