Shared Memory, Knowledge Arbitrage, Why the Future of Creativity is Bright & AI Education FTW!

This edition explores how our memories will become shared, why this is the moment of knowledge arbitrage, how AI is transforming education, and an update on the state of creativity.

Edition #31 of Implications.

• This edition explores forecasts and implications around: (1) our individual memories becoming part of a shared collective memory, (2) knowledge arbitrage during platform shifts, (3) the vastly underestimated impact of AI on education, (4) why the future of creativity is still bright, yet different, and (5) some surprises and off-the-record insights at the end, as always.

• If you’re new, here’s the rundown on what to expect. This ~monthly analysis (knowledge synthesis exercise) is written for founders + investors I work with, colleagues, and a select group of subscribers. I aim for quality, density, and provocation vs. frequency and trendiness. We don’t cover news; we explore the implications of what’s happening. My goal is to ignite discussion, socialize edges that may someday become the center, and help all of us connect dots.

• If you missed the big annual analysis or more recent editions of Implications, check out recent analysis and archives here. A few recommendations based on reader engagement:

  • AI-optimized algorithms are persuading us not with words, but with carefully choreographed feeds of content that slowly shift our opinions and desires. This may seem alarmist, but this edition explores the many positives (effective and inexpensive therapy, smoking cessation, tailor-made education) as well as potential negative (the override of human value systems, widespread shifts in opinions and values, etc) consequences of tech-reliance over self-reliance.

  • A platform shift causes us to reimagine everything while (and perhaps because) we become frustrated with the current soon-to-be-antiquated aspects of our lives that linger. Don’t miss these insights for reimagining your product during platform shifts.

  • Hyper-personalized pricing, on-the-fly UI and text-based-commerce, scarcity-driven offerings, AI that will haggle for you, and a return to non-scalable one-on-one attention from fellow humans in hospitality-driven experiences, here’s a set of wild expectations for the future of commerce.

  • Alright, let’s jump into Edition #31 of Implications…

Me Becomes We: The Implications of Collective Memory

As I watch new workflows emerge within AI-native companies, I am struck by how quickly everything done, found, or saved by individuals is enriching the collective memory of the organization. Products like Glean, Notion or Atlassian’s Rovo allow enterprise search across all forms of documents and data and products like Granola capture meeting notes. The default settings of these tools increasingly contribute our individual work to train the organization’s knowledge, which is available to everyone.

Consumer-facing technologies like ChatGPT and Claude are extending their memory of our conversations and it is only a matter of time before we’re given the option to share the AI’s memory of us with our family and loved ones — much like you share a photo album or a Spotify playlist. Fast forward, as LLMs remember our schedules, memorialize our conversations, and memorize our preferences and purchases, the value of sharing selective access to this memory with others will be the equivalent of a mind-meld. Your loved ones will be able to leverage — and even inherit — your accumulated knowledge. Their AI query for good restaurants in NYC or health concerns will yield responses that are enriched with your history and experiences. And at work, colleagues will be able to mine each other’s interactions and realizations, and network in unimaginable ways to advance a business.

This starts as shared memory (in the form of syncing data or selecting context windows (memories, organized by theme)) across a family or team. But eventually, this leads to literal brain melds when the Neuralink-like chips planted in our brains are enriched by real-time AI. I’ll be able to query my memory, the world’s knowledge, and shared memory with others.

In such a world, does “me” becomes “we”? What is it like to access parts of the accumulated knowledge and experiences of others just as you recall your own lessons learned? Who do you add to the “Disallow List” for access to your personal knowledge? Will your spouse and children expect to be a part of the collective memory of your family, or avoid it? In the enterprise, a new strata of status will be those who have access to collective memory and those who don’t. When we leave a job, does the enterprise get to retain and continued to leverage our memory? Also, in a world of shared memory, trust will be exceptionally important in the process of hiring new people or starting new relationships. When you hire someone — or marry someone — they will share parts of your context window with AI (your modern memory), and the implications cannot be understated.

Knowledge Arbitrage During Platform Shifts

I remember quite vividly in the 2007-2010 timeframe when very young “social native” experts (basically people in their early twenties who were deeply familiar with every social media platform and how to use each of them) capitalized on the fact that no large company or marketing executive understood these products or how to exploit them for their business. Friends of mine like Josh Spear and Gary Vaynerchuk, among others, launched their careers by becoming essential partners for some of the biggest brands in the world during this window of “knowledge arbitrage,” in which young, less experienced yet tech-native talent ran circles around functional experts across industries.

Well, here we are again. The myriad of creative uses of LLMs, prompt engineering, and the AI-ification of daily life are very familiar to young people in their twenties and a small cohort of early adopters, while completely foreign – if not frightening – to leaders of functions in large corporations. If you’re in high school or college and use ChatGPT and the long tail of generative AI models to hack your daily life in all sorts of creative ways, you have an amazing opportunity. The majority of others are just discovering all the utility and tricks that you now use reflexively. I encourage you to capitalize on this moment of knowledge arbitrage to launch your career while helping companies and leaders that desperately need your help.

Education is the ultimate low-hanging fruit of AI.

Fine-tuned AI will substantially elevate education for the average human. Obviously. I feel trite even making this assertion in Implications because, as you spend time with state-of-the-art LLMs and consider the impact of larger context windows and free tailor-made teaching experiences for every student on the planet, the impact is obvious.

For starters, 1:1 tutoring has always been the gold standard of education. Nothing beats a deeply knowledgeable and patient tutor with the ability to personalize a lesson plan to a student’s interests and learning style, and either speed up or slow down to optimize comprehension. Elad Gil shared this graph on the “two sigma improvement in learning achievement” of 1:1 tutoring (from research by Benjamin S. Bloom), which helps validate the advantage of tutoring.

Recently I’ve been trying to understand the key pillars of effective tutoring and mapping these pillars to the ideal design of AI agents…and the longer-term and perhaps less expected implications.

• Tutor for life, tailor-made for you: The more you use next generation AI tutors, the more tailored they will become. With an extended context window of every aspect of your learning style, struggles, interests, and strengths, the tutor will be optimized specifically for you in ways no human could ever be. Our tutors will also have the world’s data set at its disposal to triangulate the type of learner you are. We’ll look back and realize how ridiculous it was that traditional education failed to accommodate different learning styles, different interests, and forced us all to conform to a common curriculum.

• Variable pacing and personalized context: There are infinite ways to teach a concept, and pacing is never a constant. The ideal tutor can speed up whenever you get it, and slow down when you don’t. If a child likes horses or race cars, every worksheet and math problem can be reimagined for better engagement. MagicSchool is one company that is outfitting teachers with AI for this exact purpose.

• Market expansion of education: We typically think of education in traditional pillars, K-12, high school, college, and then on-the-job training modules. And then, in retirement, auditing a class becomes a luxury experience for those of us lucky enough to do it. But with the wide availability and accessibility of a hyper-personalized super-intelligent tutor at our fingertips, will education permeate our lives in unexpected ways? Will young kids with a passion for aviation proactively start tutorials on aerodynamics and go deep in advanced units of mastery out of sequence with traditional paths of education? Will our personal AI tutors proactively determine our interests and just take us down meandering paths of intrigue to discover and develop passions at our own pace that may greatly transcend and eventually antiquate the very concept of “grade levels”? And will adults develop new interests and masteries much later in our lives, enabling lateral moves across industries that were once unheard of (perhaps we’ll call these “vibe careers” in modern parlance!)?

The greatest impact of AI in education is confidence. When software meets you where you are, becomes tailor-made for you, and taps into the unique things that make each of us special, we will become so much more capable and confident in our everyday work and life.

The Future of Creativity is Bright, but Different

During my time leading creative and emerging products at Adobe, I spent a lot of time chronicling the workflows of many types of creators. And now, at A24, I spend time with filmmakers and other creators involved with storytelling, trying to understand how their process has changed as a result of all this new technology. Below is a graph I shared publicly during my last public keynote at Adobe, in an attempt to summarize some of the changes in the world of creativity.

Now, as I have shifted my time from building tools for creators to working side-by-side with them, the “new era” rings true. Modern tools that unlock 100x more cycles of ideation and concepting are making a profound impact on the creators who use them. Among writers, this might involve a deep conversation with an LLM to debate a character’s mindset in a particular scene or a request for a dozen scenarios for what might happen next to spark creativity. Among early adopting filmmakers, I have seen an explosion of time spent pre-visualizing characters, costumes, and particular scenes in films (especially on more fantastical or animated projects). With so many more cycles of origination and core creation unlocked by these new technologies, creators are able to explore more surface area of possibility in record time and ultimately make better choices.

In the world of marketing, I have seen creative teams shift their time from production (translating and reformatting endless assets) and refinement/quality checks (exhaustive proof-reading and checking copy) to exploring more ideas, going further afield, and allocating more time and energy to the final mile of polish to make things perfect … turning good into great.

The most exciting implication of all – and a major source of motivation for my small yet passionate team within A24 Labs – is to help the world’s greatest creators take more creative risk. The truth is, major creative projects like Hollywood films and breakthrough art are expensive. As a result, big studios shy away from risky (aka bold and new) stories and creators in favor of less risky ventures (like major franchises, known talent, and endless sequels). However, if new tools and techniques can help creators visualize, experiment, and explore the full landscape of their imagination with far less cost, perhaps we can advance new ideas at a fraction of the cost. Perhaps we can encourage and support more creative risk in ways that transform the world of storytelling and the lives of those who need these new stories the most. That’s my hope anyway.

Ideas, Missives & Mentions

Finally, here’s a set of ideas and worthwhile mentions (and stuff I want to keep out of web-scraper reach) intended for those I work with (free for founders in my portfolio, and colleagues…ping me!) and a smaller group of subscribers. We’ll cover a few things that caught my eye and have stayed on my mind as an investor/product leader (including the renewed importance of science fiction in a world of exponential advancement, the unexpected role of writing, and data provocations on recent grads and federal land!). Subscriptions go toward organizations I support including the Museum of Modern Art. Thanks again for following along, and to those who have reached out with ideas and feedback.