218 - The Investment World
One of the serious flaws in the investment world is the default assumption that a company’s technology should be so narrow and rigid as to be “focused” into one tiny niche prior to funding, even if the same product or service can serve 100 different functions with considerably greater efficacy and efficiency than the existing options.
It is true that the post-funding process should focus on just one or two initial targets for entering the market and establishing revenue and profit (that word seldom heard in the AI domain). However, far more flexibility exists in some technology up to that point, where investors can actually have a meaningful say in how technology is applied to develop new products and services.
A comorbidity of this problem is the “Explain it to me like I’m 5” (ELI5) mindset and attention span, which turns every co-founder seeking funding into a “kindergarten teacher for billionaires”, and drives platforms like TikTok that compete in a race to the cognitive bottom of the barrel.
Ironically, when you hand investors the opportunity to gain an insurmountable advantage in the domain of their choice (with some ethical limitations applied), they often fail miserably to comprehend what is being offered. When we ran the 7th generation ICOM cognitive architecture in the Uplift.bio project I drafted and shared 30+ use cases for the technology, but as I pointed out many times previously, I could have just as well written 300 or 3,000 different use cases, as the technology applies to all knowledge domains, among other things.
A company like Uber has a very narrow business model, which they can branch off into a handful of adjacent niches, like food delivery. That narrow focus is fine, but not every business model and technology is so narrow and fragile. Some like LLMs that are indeed so narrow and fragile “aspire” not to be, all evidence to the contrary, yet the existence of such failed aspirations doesn’t negate the reality of business models and technology that are neither narrow nor fragile.
The quickest way for anyone to prove that they don’t understand the first thing about the technology we’ve developed and demonstrated is for them to say that we’re outside of their domains of interest. Unless they’re exclusively investing in domains where we won’t operate, like porn, autonomous weapons, or state-sponsored cybercrime, they’re mistaken.
In practice, this default that most investors strictly adhere to amounts to a largely blind guessing game, a high-stakes version of “Go Fish”, where you have to guess both what they’re specifically interested in, and how best to communicate the value you offer to their domain of interest. That absurdity gates the deployment of any technology that is neither narrow nor fragile, with the gate itself being governed by both high “noise” (statistical and seemingly random decision influences), and cognitive biases (often heuristic, but systematic and predictable deviations).
