Good Friday afternoon, everyone:

Our conversation on Monday about how we ’re beginning to learn more about the application of AI to our, and our partners ’, work caused me to reflect on just how dizzyingly fast the universe of AI technology is expanding. Which, in turn, reminded me of how very different our frame of reference was just a handful of years ago. For example, a note I wrote just five years ago reproduced a map of the “online world ” depicting the relative size of various web platforms:

Despite its complexity, this today seems an almost quaint depiction of where the digital world finds itself. I was hoping that the firm that produced it, Halcyon Maps (an independent art project by Slovak digital artist Martin Vargic), had created an updated version to somehow reflect the distortion fields introduced by AI, but no luck.

So, I had to resort to less visually arresting graphics. Here, for example, is a visualization of the 100 most promising AI start-ups by industry cluster.

Or, the different forms of agentic AI:

And, a cut by the dominant firms:

I asked Claude whether it could construct a Halcyon-like map of AI. He/she/they/it demurred – more precisely, it reported: “Due to unexpected capacity constraints, Claude is unable to respond to your message. ” Indeed. Suggests we may have to wait for a Claude-goes-rogue moment.

Rip

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