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COVID accelerated Remote Work. Remote Work accelerated AI. And AI is… not accelerating, it is reshaping the job market.
A +20 Years Old Trend
Back in 2005, my first client was a media agency from Spain. It was one of my worst clients. It was also my first experience as a remote contractor.
Back then, people called it telework. I remember a professor explaining the benefits of teleworking, and all the students looked at her like she was crazy. They were picturing people in pajamas playing video games instead of working.
Anyway, COVID-19 put everyone back home, accelerating this trend.
A Much Older Trend
Back in 1936, Alan Turing asked the question: “Can a machine think?“
Since then, we’ve seen IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov – then Big Data/Machine Learning, and now LLMs.
With COVID and Remote Work, everyone was online all the time, generating huge amounts of data. Cloud providers expanded massively to meet the spike in demand. This growth in infrastructure and revenue positioned them to invest in GPUs later.
OpenAI trained and released GPT-3 in mid-2020, during this fully remote, high-investment phase.
The combination of GPUs plus big data eventually created LLMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) that (1) can write for us, (2) are not as dumb as Alexa or Siri, and (3) can explain stuff better than Google.
Where Are We Now?
If COVID pushed people to work from home… which led tech companies to invest more in infrastructure and the engineers behind LLMs to have more computer power and time to focus… where are we heading?
Adopting AI seems like a no-brainer choice. Since it is so easy to integrate, startups’ first instinct was to add AI to their products. The problem? Everyone is doing it. When something becomes abundant, it loses its value.
Some people realized that they cannot beat big companies at AI adoption. Whatever their AI feature is, it will be replaced by a much better and cheaper —free— version from a tech giant like Microsoft or Meta.
Other smart people know that buying instead of building is always a good idea. They use GitHub Copilot to write code and Grammarly to improve their writing. The problem? Everyone is doing it too.
A New Invisible Utility Powering Startups
I was shocked to read that big VC firms are investing in no-moat AI startups. What the hell?
Betting on the startup’s speed to build and attract users, believing they will find the next Facebook (which beat MySpace) or Google (which beat Yahoo!). That’s a dot-com crazy level of thinking.
The odds were leveled for everyone equally — sure, there might be some laggards, but not startups. Most of the startups I spoke to are using AI — everyone is using AI.
AI has become an invisible utility powering everything.
We’ve gone from replacing physical work (with machines) to replacing mental work (with thinking machines). We’re witnessing not just a trend, but a new class of worker.
Thinking that you have an edge using AI tools or integrating LLMs into your product is like thinking you have an advantage using electricity to power your coffee machine.
Who can implement AI the fastest?
I’ve been using LLMs since late 2021. Before that, I worked with a few startups implementing Big Data and Machine Learning data pipelines.
I know how LLMs work at some technical level, but I intentionally focused 100% on learning how to use the them.
It is outrageous —and heartbreaking— to see how some startups are forcing people back to the office, laying off, and entering hiring freeze mode. They think AI will make up for missing roles or headcounts, and they all need to be in the same office to accelerate its implementation.
They are using the very trends that facilitated AI against them.
Putting aside the engineers actually building the LLMs, the very few engineers who were early adopters —and worked from home— accumulated the most experience using them.
The explorers that the VCs are trying to find are not in no-moat startups. They are remote engineers who were early adopters of AI.
Everyone is moving 3x faster – you can move 10x faster!
At my company, InTheValley, we researched the current trends of Remote Work and AI.
We’ve found that looking for talented people with the most experience with AI and hiring them is when you truly get 10x speed.
Should they be remote? Who cares really… we are in a hybrid world; whatever works best for you and your team to get the job done, go for it.
Coming from someone who built a company of remote teams helping tech startups, my pitch might sound biased — that’s why we’ve compiled the data to back up all my arguments.
You can find the data here: You’re Not Behind on AI. You’re Behind on Talent
Time to speed up! 🚀
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