🔮 The AI boom is becoming an entrepreneurship boom #577

Plus, Russia's Bryan Johnson, camping chips, dreaming AI++

This post originally appeared in Exponential View.

“This is more evidence of what we called congestion two weeks ago: individual output piling up behind decision pipelines built for an earlier era.”

Faster growth, more entrepreneurs

American companies spending the most on AI have seen their revenue grow five times faster than the economy as a whole. Non-spenders are tracking the economy closely. This is according to Ramp, a fintech with a side hustle in excellent firm-level data across the US.

Ramp’s finding echoes this 2020 AEA paper by James Bessen and colleagues. Bessen examined broadly defined automation investment at the firm level across the Dutch non-financial economy between 2000 and 2016. Firms that automated grew sales 2% faster than those that didn’t.

But which firms automated? Other studies by Acemoglu et al. give some kind of answer: automotators were already largely more productive and had higher output than non-automators. In my book, I took this further, arguing that any type of automation is a complex undertaking and requires a better management team than not.