@paulhsu

Multiplayer AI represents the next stage of adoption for the next generation internet, where networks become smarter because every participant can contribute knowledge, judgment, and experience. For the past few years, AI has largely been a single-player experience. We ask questions, generate content, write code, and analyze information alongside an increasingly capable assistant. That is beginning to change. Across many of the companies we're seeing in broader early stage AI ecosystem, we’re starting to see products designed around groups of humans and AI working together. AI is becoming less of an individual tool and more of a participant inside teams, workflows, and communities. The internet connected people. Mobile connected everyone everywhere. AI is beginning to connect expertise. As intelligence becomes increasingly abundant, creating intelligence becomes less of the challenge. Coordinating expertise across people and AI becomes more valuable.

AI adoption will evolve in ways different than today

value endures at the app services and interface layers for AI

The sources of competitive advantages are evolving. Increasingly, it comes down to expertise. Competitive advantage comes from how a company captures, evaluates, and compounds expertise. Every customer interaction, product launch, investment decision, and sales conversation creates new data to inform expertise. Most of that knowledge previously disappears into documents, meetings, and individual experience. The companies creating durable advantages are building systems that preserve those learnings, improve them over time, and make them available to the right internal human experts at the right time for the best AI enhanced outcomes. Systems thinking for a group of individuals drives the collective systems thinking for top companies. Multiplayer AI is the frontier of collaboration. This is where AI evolves beyond individual productivity tools. AI makes expertise more accessible, faster and precise. The big opportunity is creating feedback loops that continuously improve decision making in increasingly uncertain environments. Every data collected should improve the next data collection. Every decision should make the next decision better. Every success and every mistake should strengthen the organization’s collective judgment. This is where enduring competitive advantage, for startups and venture firms, will come from. As frontier AI models become increasingly capable and widely available, they will become less of a differentiator. Organizations that learn faster, compound expertise more effectively, and distribute that expertise across every employee will continue to widen the gap. Going forward, like brand, expertise is not a static intangible asset. Expertise is a dynamic, growing, evolving asset, driven by people willing to push the frontiers of what's possible with AI.

Good to Exceptional. What separates the companies pulling ahead today from those still trying to figure out AI? Top companies think about augmenting people, not replacing them...