| Follow the money. When software was first a thing: 50s-70s it was only about micro automation on giant mainframes. This was very inefficient, from a computing perspective, because computers were very expensive and not very powerful. They still paid for themselves many times over. Then came the personal computer. In the 80s-90s desktop applications were the focus. Then came the internet and now owning data at large data centers is the primary money maker since the later 90s. Data is king. The data economy is on its way out. The LLMs are its last big attempt at inventing money, but it’s the tail end of an dying step in a larger cycle. The thing that will replace the data economy is already here, but it’s not big business yet. It’s fragmented and still almost exclusively in the hands of hobbyists. But it’s rapidly growing in popularity and already denting the giant data economy without substantial revenue streams of its own. What’s important to understand is that each of these big cycles aren’t just changes in technology. They are changes in consumption, which has consequences to adjacent economies. Media has, over the last 10 years, drifted into the data economy. So when the data economy is replaced by this next thing the media economy will also risk being replaced. |