The Great Intelligence Inflection: From Scarcity to Abundance in the AI Reasoning Era

In Jan 2024, I wrote about how technology can take something that is scarce and make it abundant. In an excellent piece from Azeem Azhar, titled "How AI 'Reasoning' Models Will Change Companies and the Economy," he elevates this concept further.

This represents the next evolution in our millennia-long journey of democratizing intelligence:

• Printing press → Mass literacy

• Public education → Industrialization

• Internet → Information access

• AI Reasoning → Automated expertise

When intelligence becomes practically free, our constraints shift from "Can we think of a solution?" to "How quickly can we implement these ideas?"

Companies that understand this shift will experience what I call "cognitive acceleration" – the ability to run thousands of strategic experiments at a fraction of the traditional cost, failing faster and pivoting more effectively than competitors.

• Perplexity's "Deep Research" is a game-changer

• OpenAI is reportedly proposing PhD-level AI for $20K/month

• Manus launched an example of what a general-purpose AI could look like

• Salesforce answers 25K+/week using AI agents (86% of total volume) 

In fact, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year that today's cohort of CEOs will be the last to lead all-human workforces.

Yes, there are many challenges to overcome: trust, privacy, regulation, sustainability, balance. 

But perhaps the greatest one isn't that AI reasoning systems will fail to deliver on their promise - it's that organizations will underestimate the comprehensive transformation required to harness their potential.

What's becoming increasingly clear is that successful AI Adoption isn't primarily a technical challenge - it's a leadership and people challenge. 

The future belongs to those who reimagine what's possible when human creativity and judgment combine with machine intelligence. The greatest breakthroughs will come from teams where human wisdom guides AI's reasoning capabilities toward solving our most pressing challenges with unprecedented speed and insight.

Having access to ubiquitous intelligence is only part of the game.

What we do with it matters more today, than ever before.

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A Message From Ram:

My mission is to illuminate the path toward humanity's exponential future. If you're a leader, innovator, or changemaker passionate about leveraging breakthrough technologies to create unprecedented positive impact, you're in the right place. If you know others who share this vision, please share these insights. Together, we can accelerate the trajectory of human progress.

Disclaimer:

Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Exponential Human."

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