The Great Unbundling Continues: How LLMs like ChatGPT are Further Ripping Apart Our World.
An analysis of AI's role in accelerating a more personalized, on-demand future and changing the everyday interactions of people, politics, and profit.
In a previous article, I introduced and labeled a massive cross-generational technology-powered trend I call “Unbundling.”
Unbundling refers to breaking down traditional systems, industries, and products into their constituent components, enabling people to have more personalized experiences.
In the post, I highlight several historic examples across various industries that showcase the transformative power of this process. For instance, the music industry shifted from physical albums to digital formats, allowing listeners to cherry-pick individual songs rather than purchasing an entire album. This unbundling of music disrupted traditional business models and reshaped consumer behavior.
Similarly, in television, we’ve witnessed the unbundling of channels, giving rise to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu that offer à la carte programming. This shift has empowered viewers to curate their own content experience, breaking free from the constraints of traditional cable packages.
In the software industry, monolithic applications have been replaced by highly polished mobile apps that tend to do just a few things really well. Users can highly personalize their mobile productivity experience, using the operating system as the connective tissue.
More recently, technologies like blockchain have unbundled trust from institutions and money from governments, with peer-to-peer networks filling the gaps with immutable ledgers and distributed consensus.
These examples — and many more — illustrate the profound impact of unbundling across a wide range of industries and business models.
The article, however, was written before the mainstream had ever heard of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
These models, as predicted by my original article, further accelerate the pace and implications of the ongoing unbundling meta-trend.
Intelligence Unbundled from Biological Brains
At the most basic level, LLMs like ChatGPT challenge the notion that intelligence is exclusive to biological brains. By processing vast amounts of data and generating human-like responses, LLMs are revolutionizing our understanding of intelligence itself.
Like Apple Silicon is optimized for Mac software and use cases, we can imagine an entire field of innovation dedicated to developing new substrates and computing architectures optimized for running non-biological intelligence.
As AI models like ChatGPT continue to evolve and improve, we will undoubtedly see further unbundling of intelligence from its biological constraints. This shift will lead to new forms of collaboration between humans and AI, where the strengths of each can be combined to overcome their individual limitations and further amplify the personal reach and power of individuals to personalize their experience of the world.
Productivity Unbundled from Work
LLMs are also driving a wedge between traditional work and new concepts and scales of productivity. As AI becomes more capable, it is automating tasks that were once considered labor-intensive.
Of course, this unbundling has the potential to free up human labor for more meaningful and creative pursuits. However, it will also force a redefinition of our understanding of productivity and its relationship with work and income.
Content Unbundled from Knowledge
Traditionally, content has been intrinsically linked to the knowledge and expertise of an individual. However, with LLMs, we are witnessing the dawn of a new era where AI-generated content sourced from simple prompts increasingly becomes indistinguishable from material written by experts.
In such a world, the intrinsic link between knowledge and authorship is broken, allowing individuals to author content rooted not in what they know but rather in what they’re curious about.
This will ultimately challenge our understanding of authoritative content and its relationship with knowledge. In a world where AI can create convincing and compelling content on any subject, our ability to identify real human expertise will become increasingly difficult.
Insight Unbundled from Investigation & Research
While content and expertise are important in our society, discovering genuinely new insights fundamentally moves humanity forward.
Historically insight has required deep analysis and research. However, as AI-generated analysis becomes more sophisticated, insights can become unbundled from anything resembling a traditional investigative process.
Instead, the skill of asking carefully crafted questions about existing datasets and patterns will likely become more valuable. This could actually result in democratizing the creation of breakthrough new ideas.
What happens next?
As I wrote in my original post, in many cases, we’re just at the beginning of the Unbundling process.
As such, the rise of ChatGPT and similar AI technologies is just another major step in a decades-long trend of unbundling powered by technology.
Like a fractal, the pattern repeats over and over.
Each inexorable step forward leads to a world of increasing choices and personalization for individuals. However, it will also cause a great deal of pain, frustration, and disruption to the governments, corporations, and people caught in the transition.
Taken to its logical conclusion, one could imagine a world where each individual gets precisely what they want, the moment they want it, at the perfect price, without exerting much effort. Will this be a utopia of abundance or an isolating, myopic hellscape? As with most things, it will likely be something in between.
The question is, given these trends, how can you get ahead of the curve and capitalize on the new patterns and tools that emerge?
