It was my first time at London Tech Week this year.
All I remember is a lot of people walking around, not knowing where to go, trying to understand what’s going on. Or maybe that was just me. Definitely me. Maybe not just me.
Other than actual people, of which there were around 20 to 30 thousand in all, the only other thing at the exhibition hall which was comparable in magnitude was AI. Thing. I wonder how long we will use this term for AI.
The only session by a well-known person or company I attended, that too partly towards the end of it, was Lovable’s Fabian Hedin. His presentation talked about building the last piece of code, about how Lovable had made it a lot more accessible for anyone with an idea to become a founder. True, vibe coding has made it a lot easier to ship products. Good or bad isn’t important at this point, rather it’s that the bar has gone down ridiculously low. Everyone can be a founder.
One of the criticisms of microfinance has been that you can give small amounts of money to underserved groups, but money alone can’t make everyone an entrepreneur. And if everyone in that community was to become an entrepreneur, who is the consumer in that community? I’ve not looked up if there is any data around this, but I may not be entirely wrong in believing that within such communities, the lines of business pursued by microentrepreneurs is fairly homogeneous and narrow. Almost everyone does the same thing, or between a narrow range of a few. Of course there have been long term studies studying the impact of microfinance on communities, some of which haven’t really been so positive (see Banerjee & Duflo). The real winners are always the banks and NBFCs.
I can’t help but think of how similar this is to the case of many, actually everyone, being given free AI tokens to develop products, many people to developing mediocre products, most of which end up similar to each other in many ways, trying to sell to each other, not really succeeding, buying more AI tokens, and keeping at it, till you run out of steam. It’s quite clear to see who the winners here will be, and that’s the reason why everyone is pumping money into them.
AI companies may just be the new banks and tokens the new currency.
I’m quite good at making up absurd stuff, right.