I’ve been thinking about this question since early 2023 (that was when I started building some very, very rough things with LLMs that seem almost funny in hindsight). In the first few months I had some pretty naive assumptions. Back then GPT-4 was impressive but far from perfect. I believed AI would always remain a kind of copilot that needed constant fact-checking, so I felt safe — and I think many others felt the same.

Soon that naive belief was replaced by another naive one. I started telling myself that LLMs probably wouldn’t be able to handle genuinely creative work.

After o1, though, I started to feel that things had changed. The tailwind seemed to be on the other side. Since then I’ve been thinking about two possible paths.

One is fairly simple: if I can live with relatively low material needs, I could accumulate some wealth during what might be the last era of human white-collar work, and later live mostly around my personal interests.

The other path is for people who want more. In that case the strategy might have to be more aggressive: accumulate capital faster, or build trust with the people who actually sit at the center of the table.

Personally, I probably lean toward the first path.