🚨VCs are now deploying 'kingmaking' strategies with massive early-stage checks to manufacture AI winners before they prove product-market fit—taking capital concentration to unprecedented extremes that fundamentally reshape how startups get built and compete.

We're witnessing the total collapse of the marginal cost of creation. And most people are celebrating the wrong thing.

Copywriting, design, video editing — skills that used to command a premium because of technical execution barriers are being democratized to the point of irrelevance.

Most marketers see this as an efficiency win. "I can produce 10x the output for 1/10th the cost!" They're optimizing for volume.

But here's what they're missing: When the supply of "good enough" content becomes infinite, the economic value of that content plummets to zero.

The infinite noise problem

We're entering an era where the internet will be flooded with billions of synthetically generated articles, tweets, and videos every single day. It's already happening. Just not at the quality and volume it will be in 6-12 months.

In this environment, pure volume is no longer a valid strategy. You cannot out-publish a server farm.

The alpha in modern marketing is shifting entirely from production to provenance.

Three shifts that matter

[1] The Trust Premium

As the internet becomes increasingly synthetic, we're seeing a massive flight to safety. "Is this real?" is becoming the single most important buying criterion.

We're moving away from algorithm-optimization and back towards human-optimization. Personal brands, founder-led sales, verified human voices will command an exorbitant premium.

The faceless corporate brand is dead. If a consumer can't verify the human source behind the message, they'll subconsciously label it as spam.

[2] High-Friction Marketing

For the last decade, the goal was "low friction." SEO, programmatic ads, automated email sequences.

As AI cannibalizes these low-friction channels — bots clicking on ads served by bots on sites written by bots — the smart money is moving to high-friction channels.

Live events. Physical mail. Handshakes. Closed-door dinners.

The harder it is to scale, the more valuable it becomes. You prove your value by doing things that cannot be automated.

[3] Taste as a Moat

Large Language Models function by predicting the next most likely token. By definition, they regress to the mean. They give you the average of the entire internet.

If you use AI to guide your strategy, you're opting for mediocrity at scale.

Taste — the human ability to curate, to select the outlier, to understand nuance and subtext — becomes the only defensible moat.

The future of marketing is about who has the taste to know what not to create.

The paradox

The more artificial the world becomes, the higher the premium on being undeniably human.

AI can generate infinite content. It can't generate trust. It can't generate taste. It can't generate the judgment to know what matters.

What this means

If you're competing on volume, you've already lost. The server farms will always win that game.

If you're building a brand, the moat is human provenance. People need to know there's a real person behind the message. Not just for ethics — for economics.

If you're a marketer, your job is shifting from creation to curation. The skill isn't making more content. It's knowing what's worth making.

What's next

Expect a bifurcation. One tier of marketing will be entirely synthetic — AI-generated content competing in a race to the bottom on cost and attention.

The other tier will be hyper-human — verified creators, high-friction experiences, and taste-driven curation. This is where the premium lives.

The winners won't be the ones who produce the most. They'll be the ones who produce what matters.

BTW: The death of the average means the rise of the outlier. AI makes the average free. Humans make the outlier valuable. That's the entire game.

The Recap: Amazon's custom AI chip business—Trainium for training and Inferentia for inference—has already hit multi-billion dollar revenue, proving that hyperscalers can successfully chip away at Nvidia's dominance through vertical integration. AWS CEO Andy Jassy's revelation signals that custom silicon isn't just a cost optimization play—it's a viable business that threatens the GPU monopoly.

Unpacked:

Bottom line: Amazon's success proves the hyperscaler thesis—if you control distribution and have the capital to invest in custom silicon, you can break hardware monopolies. Google has TPUs, Microsoft is building Maia, and Meta has MTIA. The AI chip market is fragmenting from Nvidia's 90%+ dominance toward a world where the largest buyers become their own suppliers. The real question isn't whether custom chips can compete technically—it's whether Nvidia's software moat (CUDA) can hold against economic pressure when customers are paying 4x more for comparable performance.

The EU launches antitrust probe into Meta's WhatsApp AI restrictions, signaling regulatory concern that incumbents will lock out competition at the AI application layer before the market even forms.

Anthropic CEO warns AI industry is in 'YOLO' bubble territory at DealBook Summit—rare public caution from a major foundation model builder who's raising billions while questioning the sector's fundamentals.

Nexus keeps only 50% of $700M fund for AI despite hype, betting sector concentration risk is real and diversification still matters when everyone else is going all-in.

Meta poaches Apple's decade-long UI design chief Alan Dye for Reality Labs, signaling serious product ambitions beyond Quest hardware as the metaverse pivot continues.

Valve secretly leads ARM gaming push for Windows, potentially reshaping PC gaming platform wars beyond x86 monopoly as efficiency becomes critical for handheld and mobile gaming.

Research shows AI could dramatically reduce persuasion costs, enabling elites to shape mass preferences at scale—a fundamental power shift in how influence operates in democratic societies.

Reverse engineering billion-dollar legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files, revealing security gaps in rushed AI product deployments when companies prioritize speed over safety.

Micron exits Crucial consumer business after decades—major signal that memory commodity margins are forcing chip makers to focus exclusively on AI and datacenter where pricing power still exists.

Best of AI™ Team

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