🔮 Product eats the AI company; the bitter lesson prevails; Fable 5 as CEO, undersea diplomacy & jellyfish sleep++ #579

Exponential View · 3 weeks ago

A Harvard Business School paper finds that AI-native startups are 25% smaller than comparable non-AI startups but have more engineers and denser expertise, with real value from AI coming when it is embedded directly into the product rather than added as a tool. Generalist frontier models are outperforming specialized medical AI tools in head-to-head testing, contrary to earlier expectations. The results support Richard Sutton's 2019 thesis that general computational methods ultimately outperform purpose-built specialized approaches across domains.