If you have followed us recently, you may have noticed that our publishing cadence has increased. This is no accident. In our own little way, we have become AI powerusers. Why? To bring you more value, plain and simple.
If we bring you something valuable, does it matter that AI assisted us heavily in that effort? I believe our members care primarily that we don’t let AI run amok, and that there’s editorial oversight and judgment behind everything we share with you.
This piece is 100% written by me. This is also no accident. I want to maintain a channel between us that is entirely and uniquely human. This essay and future essays like it, sent to you on an occasional Sunday, create that channel. So when I write to you under the rubric John’s Commentaries and Essays, you will know that you are hearing directly from me. I suspect this assurance will become more significant over time.
It has become a cliché by now but is no less profound to understand: We stand at the precipice of an AI-driven context explosion, the likes of which we’ve never seen. If you are sceptical of this prediction or gloss over it because you don’t quite feel it yet, here is a recent X post that blew my mind:
It is a long post, and inside it sits this tidbit: “We have the largest storytelling catalog with 770,000 titles… and 5.5B hours of playtime with minute by minute retention & engagement data.” Those are impressive numbers from a company that is unknown to most of us (Pocket FM), a company that relies on AI-generated content. With revenue having exploded to a $500 million run-rate, the content is clearly finding an audience.
A rhetorical question from the same post: “Netflix has to spend $17B to find 100 Blockbusters per year. What happens when you can produce 1M high quality shows for $1B?” We may laugh at the notion of one million “high quality shows”. We still cite The Jungle Book and Oliver Twist as examples of great storytelling, examples that remain relevant more than a century later. And yet, the prediction will most likely no longer be laughable in just a few short years.
At the moment, Latticework brings you three weekly series: Monday Morning Briefing, This Week in Special Situations, and Industry Primers, none of which we could do without the use of AI to do the heavy lifting. Those publications may be valuable to you now, but what happens when you can feed a sample issue into an LLM, and out comes a Monday Morning Briefing tailored to your investment focus, let’s say on Australia and New Zealand? Maybe we can stay a step ahead, maybe not.
This is in part why I want to open this new channel — a simple way of speaking with you directly, without any AI input (and yes, that em-dash is there because I put it there). Even when AI delivers everything you need to know, you may want to hear from a fellow human. Our struggles will overlap, not least in how we relate to AI, and what we are doing to consume it responsibly rather than get consumed by it.
One thing seems clear: An AI-augmented investor will do better than an AI-ignorant one. This means in no way that the profound wisdom of having a long time horizon and being able to “sit quietly in a room alone” is any less valid than before. In fact, that wisdom, and the advantage that results from it, will only gain in value as other market participants become ever more short term-oriented.
At Latticework, we have published an AI Bootcamp and a Claude Code Crash Course to share some of what we are doing to become AI-augmented investors. And we will do more. My goal is to make AI best practices available to all members, regardless of their level of technical prowess. Admittedly, the two courses referenced above still feel a bit too technical and a bit too tedious to implement by someone who “just wants things to work”. Stay tuned for more plug-and-play “skills” you can use immediately. You will learn as you work with those tools, not while you’re trying to get them to work.
I hope you’ll come along for the journey. If you are still a lurker here, consider upgrading your membership so we can take you along on what I expect will be an exciting and rewarding path.