Speed Won't Save you (In Infinite Battleship)
I’ve been telling my team (engineering, product, and design) that we’re playing a game of Battleship®
We can be strategic and take smart shots. Lean, well researched bets. Fail fast but learn a lot from each attempt.
Or we can use brute force. Start in the top left corner and attack each space working left to right, top to bottom. Fund our best ideas and see what happens. Don’t worry too much about: upfront research. Don’t worry too much about: measuring results and course correction.
With AI we’re 10x faster going on 1000x. Brute force will work better than ever, right? It’ll get to wins faster than ever, right? Keep going?!
Here’s the thing: new analogy…
I don’t think we’re on the (finite) board from Battleship. Instead we’re on an infinite board with infinite opportunities, and infinite ways to miss. And way more misses than hits available. And competitors equipped with AI too.
Going faster in the wrong direction won’t help. Speed won’t save you.
More (AI powered) speed is like a startup raising too much capital. It hurts more than it helps. It’s easy to stay busy trying to spend the deluge of money/time/tokens instead of solving problems that customers will pay for.