The Promise of AI (Part I) - Leverage

"In a lot of fields, the difference between, say, the worst taxicab driver and the best taxicab driver to get you across town in Manhattan might be 2-to-1. The best one will get you there in 15 minutes, the worst one will get you there in half an hour... Or the best cook and the worst cook, maybe it's 3-to-1... The difference between a good software person and a great software person is probably 50 to 1, 25 to 50 to 1. Huge, dynamic range" — Steve Jobs (source)

Steve Jobs made those comments ~30 years ago. Since that time, many fortunes have been made with leverage through code. The advancement in AI means the leverage available to great software builders has undergone a step-change increase and so even greater value will be created through technology in the years to come.

It's this step change that means I am both an AI optimist and expect that the true legacy of AI will be the best founders, the best engineers and the best designers are going to create more value than ever before.

Tobi Lutke founded a company that was one of Canada's most valuable before AI accelerated in the last year. If Tobi was a 100x (1,000x?) engineer before AI, how much more valuable is he (and Shopify) now that he has additional leverage through AI? Even a quick glance at his GitHub shows he's coding more in 2026 than in maybe the prior 10 years.

Another 100x engineer and entrepreneur who built his fortune with leverage through code, Mark Zuckerberg, has also identified this step change in the value of top talent. The reported hundreds of millions pay packages that Meta was offering top AI talent shows that he understands this leverage step-change, and how it makes the most brilliant talent even more valuable.

Bill Simmons sold The Ringer for ~$200M because people all around the world can listen to him on podcast players (and now watch him on Netflix). All because of code. If Bill Simmons was only doing live shows in theaters, The Ringer would've been worth a fraction of what it sold for. How much more valuable will companies led by the next generation of creators be when they can leverage AI?

Anthropic, a company that made its first dollar of revenue less than three years ago, is now worth $380B. To put that into perspective, that's comparable to the valuation of GE and Coca-Cola. Anthropic is so valuable because a relatively small team of engineers, operating with enormous leverage through AI, are building products causing sleepless nights for CEOs in multiple industries.

This step change can be hard to grasp because we've been hardwired through hundreds of years of evolution that more people (i.e., labor) equals a bigger and better business. It's hard to think in exponential terms. In Breaking Bad, there's a scene between Walt and Skyler where Skyler points out that no car wash in the world can launder the amount of money that Walt wants her to (~$7M a year). That's because the leverage available to a car wash is labor and capital, not code (before getting into the specific challenges with a car wash, like site location and fixed asset expenditures).

The winners in this age of AI will be those companies that see AI as leverage to build remarkable products and grow, not as an excuse to cut costs.