What the AI Revolution Teaches Us About Monopolies, Acquisitions, and Innovation
Now that I'm back in the city of good air (Buenos Aires), I've been reflecting on what I learned on my trip into the heart of the AI revolution, timed perfectly for the changing expectations on what AI means to be reset and excitement to be tempered (now it's time to build).
San Francisco has changed a lot since I was born there. From 1980-2006, it was a place of insiders with few outsiders looking in (except from 1997-2000)
Now it is undeniable that what happened there has changed the world in a way few predicted (even the insiders) and fewer can handle, meta-physically speaking.
Because it is on the map in terms of the global microscope, the way things work there has changed too. In one particular way, it also became a target for an activist DOJ (department of justice, for my international friends)
This DOJ from 2020-24 was motivated to turn any bigger company into a monopoly (legally speaking, check out
's substack for more on this).I'm not bringing this up to make a political point but to make a point about a company that I was paying close attention to before expectations were reset recently:
Adept AI
Adept AI was an early startup offering what is now being called autonomous agents during the first wave that must have had access to the GPT2. They were a rising star and Amazon took notice.
Instead of doing a traditional acquisition which now sets off alarm bells inside the activist DOJ (check out the number of IPOs in the screenshot below, this also has to do with the interest rate craziness, among other factors)
So what did Amazon do?
They hired the key people and only paid out $25 million to investors (Adept rose $400 million). They licensed the technology and tried to avoid traditional scrutiny, following Microsoft's earlier deal with Inflection AI
They did not escape scrutiny (nor did Microsoft) as the FTC is now investigating both. With the new political winds it looks like this scrutiny will relax as all the 3 letter agencies are now going to be focused on their own survival (but who knows really, these bureaucracies are quite slippery and self-inforcing)
In terms of the larger IPO market and whether it will return to a pre-2020 status, that is also up for grabs. We are in new territory that most pundits can't really navigate (for reasons that I'm sure you are aware of if you tune into Crazy Wisdom show on Itunes and Spotify).
The return of Bitcoin at 100K will inevitably focus more eyes on Ethereum, Smart Contracts, and maybe even Chainlink which could allow for some sort of new mechanism for investors to navigate the changing legal landscape of an Empire which is transitioning from the Industrial age to the Information age.
I'll end with some questions?
What does an IPO look like in a world denominated in BTC (or some other hodgepodge)? Will the US allow for IPOs to happen in a different form? Can the US still prevent another form from arising?