Online human communication is dead. Our audience is now AI agents, not people. As LLMs saturate the market and anyone can generate anything, who will pay for digital products? Maybe it's time to return to physical businesses and atoms over bits.

I believe that online human communication is pretty much dead. Most of the people who are going to read my blog posts, most of the people who are going to watch my YouTube videos—they're not going to be people anymore. They're going to be agents. Large language models. Neural networks of nothing, essentially.

We're running our entire web to train the LLMs, and then we're going to rerun the entire new web to create more tokens with those neural networks. It's just a cycle. I don't know if it's progress or not.

The Automation Boom and Its Limits

The automation landscape is experiencing tremendous growth. Everything is being automated, arguably for the better. We've seen this happening. But I'm already seeing saturation. Everyone is using the same neural nets and producing pretty much the same results.

Sure, it's been a beautiful year. We boomed. We created so much great stuff that didn't exist before—I'm not denying that. But I'm wondering: can we continue doing this for the next 10 years and have new things pop up? I don't know.

Why Would Anyone Pay for Your Product?

If you post new software, why should I even download it? I just need an MD file of what you did. I'll give it to my agent and the agent will create it. Why do I even need your software? I don't. Why do I even need your teams? I don't. Why do I even need my employees? I don't.

This is what the market is going to do.

But here's my question: in the end, who's going to buy it? Who's going to pay for it? No one.

People are going to pay for the models in order to create products that nobody's going to pay for. Who's going to pay for an ebook anymore? Why would you need an ebook? Why would you need a course on anything? Why would you pay for it? Nobody will.

The Circular Logic of LLM-Generated Products

We have these models, so we won't pay for digital products anymore because we can create our own. But what we "create" for ourselves—and I use quotation marks because we're not really creating—are products that nobody's going to buy, because everybody else can use an LLM and create them too.

This entire cycle is just... gone.

Yeah, of course people will make money. There is money to be made. Non-technical people will still pay for technical solutions. I get all of that. But I just don't see a purpose in creating digital products anymore. The digital world feels pretty much solved.

Back to the Physical World

That brings me to my conclusion: I think we should all revert back to physical things. Atoms over bits. Physical activities, physical businesses, physical products. Because there we still have an edge. We can still sell.

In the digital world? Sure, you can try to compete. But the Chinese are going to eat you alive in a few months. Everybody can open-source what you do. Maybe some people will pay you. Maybe you can make a bang for one year, maybe. But that's it. It's gone.

Would you build a business to make a million dollars for one year? Yeah, maybe. Why not? But this is not real creation anymore. It's the same templates, the same tokens, the same everything.

This is what I think. What do you think? Let me know.