Everyone Has the Same AI

The model that impressed you this week, anyone can try. Your neighbour, your competing team, a student on the other side of the world. Everyone has access to the same AI, at roughly the same time, for roughly the same money. That is worth sitting with. Because if the tool is the same for everyone, the tool cannot be what sets you apart.

And yet some teams get far more out of AI than others. Not because they found a smarter model. They use the same one you do. The difference is what they feed it.

Generic in, generic out

Ask a generic question and you get a generic answer. An answer anyone could have gotten, because the question held nothing that was yours. The model knows everything written on the internet. It knows nothing about your last client meeting, about why you made the call you made in March, about what actually went wrong in that project you would rather not talk about.

Give it that, and something changes. Now it answers your situation, not the average of everyone's. Same model, but an entirely different value, because the input was your own.

The only thing that is yours

Think of it as an equation. The model is one half and it is rented and shared. Everyone has the same. Your context is the other half and it is yours alone. No one else has sat in your meetings, built your history, gathered your decisions. It is the one part of the equation a competitor cannot buy their way to.

So when the conversation is about which model is best this week, we are talking about the half that is common to everyone. The half that decides is the one no one talks about. Namely how much of what you actually know reaches the AI.

The race is the wrong race

That is why I do not put my energy into the model leaderboard. It changes every month and it changes the same way for everyone. I put it into the system that gathers and connects my context, so that what I know is there when I ask. The model I swap out when a better one arrives. The context I built over three years, and it only grows more valuable.

That is the whole idea behind deep-thought. Not a smarter model, because I do not own that. A place where my own knowledge becomes input, instead of lying scattered and unused while I am impressed by the next launch.

Where the difference is made

The smartest model is a couple of clicks away for anyone. What your team knows is not. The more of it you get into the equation, the less it matters which model tops the list right now.

Everyone has the same AI. What you know is the only thing you have that no one else has.

See also: The Rest Goes Stale (series 42) and It doesn't start with the prompt (series 16).