"Meanwhile, small teams are shipping products that would have required 100-person companies two years ago. The gap between the AGI debaters and the builders (those who are developing AGI systems) isn't philosophical-it's economic. While everyone waits for perfect AI, builders are dominating markets with today's "broken" tools, those that are functioning, albeit with some quirks, that will be worked out as the technology evolves. They aren't betting on future breakthroughs, they're betting on momentum."
"As has been covered in Fast Company: Cursor went from launch to 40,000 customers by letting developers code faster with AI. Glean hit $100 million in annual revenue helping companies search their own documents. These aren't hypothetical AGI use cases. They're real businesses built on today's imperfect AI. And they're growing because they're solving problems that already exist-not waiting on capabilities that might."
Predictions for AGI have compressed dramatically, shifting from fifty years to roughly five years. GPT-5 demonstrated notable improvements in reasoning and memory, accelerating expectations and making AGI feel inevitable. Small teams are now shipping products that previously required much larger companies, and builders prioritize shipping imperfect but functional tools to capture market momentum. Adoption is driven by companies automating repetitive work rather than research labs chasing science-fiction capabilities. Examples include Cursor and Glean achieving rapid customer growth and revenue by solving concrete problems. Fireflies processes billions of conversations and uses AI to identify deal risks, surface objections, and track competitive mentions.
Read at Fast Company
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]