The Unwritten Cannot be Written

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Generative AI cannot write what hasn’t been written.

This is a subtle but profound truth the tech industry is just fully coming to understand.

Ask a question of any large language model – from ChatGPT to Grok go Gemini – and you notice that LLMs cannot deliver reliable answers for topics that haven’t been covered.

Gen AI programs work well when you are researching big companies like Nvidia and famous people like Tim Cook but not at all for the obscure or unsung.

Since there is no way humans can keep up, the somewhat counterintuitive solution to this problem is to tap Gen AI to create a vast library of digital content.

Effectively, we need machines to write articles so other machines can read them.

To illustrate the challenge, consider Perplexity, an AI search engine, which is building a finance vertical. The biggest challenge won’t be the speed or depth of the LLMs that they leverage, but the lack of historical news about companies.

In many cases, these are small or mid-sized companies that were never covered by reporters at Bloomberg or Reuters or the New York Times.

Remember: Generative AI cannot write what hasn’t been written.

The importance of specialized content was driven home by the recent announcement by DeepSeek, a Chinese LLM, when it said it had unveiled a high-performing open source large language model at a fraction of the cost of the version created by OpenAI.

The DeepSeek announcement signaled that model enhancements will continue to come fast and furious, each leap-frogging the previous one and driving down inference costs.

Developers seeking to build moats around their applications will rely less on model performance and more and more on the quality, reliability and comprehensiveness of content. 

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

BE MIGHTY: Timely reminder taped to a sign post in Manhattan.

LEARNING: “I didn’t learn anything” is one of the best learnings I’ve seen in a while. It’s a reminder that so often we do things we know we shouldn’t do even when we know better.

MOMENTUM: Internal Tech Emails is one of my favorite accounts on social media. It gives you these little visual snippets into how execs think.

THE OCULUS: For such an iconic building, the Oculus - the main subway and train station in downtown New York City - is hard to capture in a photograph.

WANTING IT BADLY: He’s not wrong on this one.