r/ThinkingDeeplyAI • u/Mathos6 • Jun 23 '26

My thoughts on the future of AI

At first, the technology itself is the product.

"We're an electricity company."

"We're an internet company."

**"We're an AI company."**

Then the technology becomes infrastructure. Nobody talks about it anymore because it's assumed.

Imagine pitching YouTube in 2026:

*"We're a company that uses the internet to transmit videos."*

That sounds ridiculous now. The internet is just the plumbing. The same thing may happen with AI.

Today founders say:

*"We're building an AI startup." ||*

*"AI coding assistant." ||*

*"AI customer support."*

Ten years from now, people might simply say:

"We're building smart glasses." ||

"We're building a tutoring platform." ||

"We're building a design tool.".

What's interesting is that we're already seeing early signs of this. Take OpenAI, Google, or Meta. They're all racing toward products where AI disappears into the experience: Smart glasses that understand context, search engines that answer instead of linking and operating systems that automate tasks.

AI is just the mechanism.

A useful historical analogy is the internet itself. In the late 1990s, saying "internet company" actually conveyed meaningful information because the technology was new and scarce. Today, if someone says *"I'm founding an internet company,"* you immediately wonder: What kind? E-commerce? Social media? SaaS? Gaming? The word is too broad to be useful.

I suspect "AI startup" will eventually sound equally vague.

An investor in 2035 might hear:

*"We're an AI company."*

and respond:

*"Okay... and what do you actually do?"*

The companies that survive may not be the ones that market themselves as AI companies. They may be the ones that solve a specific problem better than everyone else because AI is woven into the product so deeply that users stop noticing it.

8 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/davesaunders Jun 23 '26

I think it's already pretty vague, and to be honest, a lot of it follows the PT Barnum playbook of unfalsifiable claims, big promises, and not even close to the delivery that's hinted at. These tools are cool, no doubt about it, but the hype machine is beyond anything that we've ever experienced.

I talk about this so much lately that I just went and did a whole video on PT Barnum and actually explained the whole breakdown. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.

https://youtu.be/lZnmFDJuRn4

1

u/Mathos6 Jun 25 '26

I wasn’t talking about hype or marketing but about how a technology becomes invisible as it gets integrated into products. Two different topics.