The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy; Asset-light Software Businesses, and More

Hello, and happy Sunday!

If you’re still thinking about how to go about achieving your 2024 goals, check out our new course, Maximize Your Mind With ChatGPT. It’s a four-week program that marries cutting-edge AI with the best of what psychology knows about developing your potential. Dan Shipper is teaching it with clinical psychologist Dr. Gena Gorlin, and it starts on February 5. 

Now, on to everything we published this week, along with our take on the latest AI news.

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Our stories

“The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy” by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: We’re all managers now—model managers, that is. So says Dan, who argues that with AI like ChatGPT being used for tasks like summarizing, our roles are transforming from executing tasks to managing and allocating work to AI. Read this to understand the skills that you’ll need to prepare for and adapt to an AI-enabled future.

“Asset-light Software Businesses: The New Paradigm for Startups” by John Kennedy and Will Manidis: The old playbook for building software businesses—raise lots of venture capital to spend on fixed costs that would pay back over time—is out, and a new one, fueled by low costs and generative AI, is in. Read this for a vision that challenges the conventional wisdom about how startups will be funded and built in the future.

🎧“How David Perell Uses ChatGPT to Write for Millions” by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: As an online writer, the host of a podcast about writing, and the founder of a popular online writing course, David Perell was already insanely prolific. Now ChatGPT has made him even more so. Watch (or listen to) the latest episode of How Do You Use ChatGPT? to learn how he uses AI to analyze his favorite books, unpack business strategy, understand his leadership style, and uncover anecdotes for his writing.

Chain of links

If you suck at your job, AI will give you an advantage. An interesting new study out of Harvard Business School evaluated AI’s performance enhancement capabilities for consultants. Those who used AI benefited across the board, completing 12.2 percent more tasks at a 25 percent increase in speed. But consultants who were ordinarily below-average performers benefited the most: a 43 percent increase in performance versus a 17 percent increase for those who were ordinarily above average.

Zuck is determined to be the Android equivalent to OpenAI’s Apple. He recently announced that Meta has acquired an eye-watering 350,000 H100s—the coveted, rare, and pricy GPUs that are used to train AI models. The company is also in the process of training Llama 3, its next-generation large language model, which will be completely open-source. Let the games begin.

That’s all for this week.