What’s required to build a one-person billion-dollar company?

AI is currently overhyped, but tech progress is real and underhyped long-term

The famous CEO of a well-known Silicon Valley AI company recently said there’s an ongoing debate in a private WhatsApp group comprised of other prominent Silicon Valley CEOs about when the first 10-person and first 1-person billion-dollar startup would be founded.

Of course, this references the current incredible abilities of AI chatbots and the breathtaking (or at least perceived) rate of AI progress. It got me thinking of how this would be achieved, assuming it can be achieved.

Ignore the hype but be realistic about capabilities

The current state of AI, especially that involving Large Language Models (LLM) underlying ChatGPT and other chatbots that we think of as “AI”, is definitely not there yet or even close.

AI is way overhyped and AI Doomerism involving recursively self-improving AI(s) that somehow become(s) God and risks humanity’s extinction in a hard takeoff scenario is beyond hilarious, at least at the moment. Even the most impressive frontier LLM models trained on and running on multi-billion dollar GPU datacenters can’t reason nor plan through simple steps, since…