Four Futures for the Machine-Speed Economy
The pace of AI development over the past three years is genuinely unlike anything in recent economic history. The Stanford AI Index has tracked frontier model capability roughly doubling on a yearly cadence, and private AI investment has reached levels that dwarf the dot-com peak in inflation-adjusted terms. What’s less widely understood is what that pace actually means for competition, investment, and the structure of the economy. The Build Time Collapse It’s not just that AI is writing code faster. Build times are collapsing across the entire software stack - design, implementation, testing, deployment - and that changes the rules of competition. ...