Why Is AI a Bigger Market Than Oil?
Sameer Dholakia says intelligence will be a bigger market than oil. Oil powers machines. Intelligence, as he puts it, powers people across consumers, smaller firms, the mid-market, enterprises, and government, and each of them needs more of it.
He has been in software for 31 years, and a trillion-dollar supercycle followed every time the technology felt like magic. He graduated in 1995 in Silicon Valley, when people could publish to the whole planet and buy without walking into a store. Later, VMware split hardware from the operating system. The software could put 10 virtual machines on one box and move a running workload from one machine to another without stopping the work. He did not see then that the supercycle would be called cloud. There is no hyperscaler and no public cloud, he says, without virtualization. On a sabbatical after Twilio he thought he might retire, then watched a demo of Jasper, an AI marketing app on GPT-3, in the winter of 2021. It felt like magic again. Five years on, he calls the current wave bigger than the internet and cloud combined.
