Before ChatGPT, Sam Altman told Alex Halliday "the AI stuff's getting really good." This simple, non-specific comment was enough to send Halliday down the LLM rabbit hole, ultimately leading him to pivot his entire company. It shows the power of acting on weak signals from trusted sources.

According to Sequoia's Pat Grady, the best time to start an AI application company is now. The foundational playbook has been established through three key technological leaps: pre-training (ChatGPT), reasoning (01), and long-horizon agency (Claude). This clarity provides a stable platform for building valuable applications.

Oseary views founders as artists with a vision to share. He applies his music industry framework to tech investing: identifying talent early, helping build their "audience" (user base), and crafting a compelling narrative (their "first single") to help them reach the world.

The core technology behind ChatGPT was available to developers for two years via the GPT-3 API. Its explosive adoption wasn't due to a sudden technical leap but to a simple, accessible UI, proving that distribution and user experience can be as disruptive as the underlying invention.

AI represents a fundamental technological shift, akin to the industrial revolution. Unlike fads like NFTs, companies that are overly cautious and fail to adopt AI now risk being permanently left behind as the technology advances exponentially.

Many people's last experience with AI was with early ChatGPT in 2023, which was prone to errors. The rapid advancement of models like Claude is creating a shockwave, forcing a re-evaluation of AI's disruptive potential, similar to the societal shifts seen during major technological revolutions.

The recent explosion in AI adoption wasn't solely due to better models, but because the chat interface made the technology accessible to anyone. For the first time, non-technical users could interact with a powerful AI without prescriptive instructions, making its capabilities feel tangible and widespread.

Unlike prior technologies like early ML that were adopted by enterprises first, Gen AI's power was immediately accessible to individuals. This consumer-first adoption democratized advanced technology in a new way, fueling a level of public excitement not seen with previous tech cycles like blockchain or quantum.

The ChatGPT App Store launch is being compared to the original Apple App Store. Developers who are early and build useful applications for its 800 million weekly active users have the opportunity to create significant businesses, mirroring the success of early mobile app pioneers who capitalized on first-mover advantage.