Ever wanted 45 min with one of AIās most fascinating minds? Was with @thomwolf at HumanX Vegas. Sharing my notes of his Q&A with the pressācompletely changed how I think about AIās future:
1ļøā£ The next wave of successful AI companies wonāt be defined by who has the best model but by who builds the most useful real-world solutions. "We all have engines in our cars, but thatās rarely the only reason we buy one. We expect it to work well, and thatās enough. LLMs will be the same."
2ļøā£ Big players are pivoting: "Closed-source companiesāOpenAI being the firstāhave largely shifted from LLM announcements to product announcements."
3ļøā£ Open source is changing everything: "DeepSeek was open source AIās ChatGPT moment. Basically, everyone outside the bubble realized you can get a model for freeāand itās just as good as the paid ones."
4ļøā£ Product innovation is being democratized: Take Manus, for exampleāthey built a product on top of Anthropicās models thatās "actually better than Anthropicās own product for now, in terms of agents." This proves that anyone can build great products with existing models.
Weāre entering a "multi-LLM world," where models are becoming commoditized, and all the tools to build are readily availableājust look at the flurry of daily new releases on Hugging Face.
Thom's comparison to the internet era is spot-on: "In the beginning you made a lot of money by making websites... but nowadays the huge internet companies are not the companies that built websites. Like Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, they just use the internet as a medium to make something for real life use cases."