Build Notes: Why You’re Ahead of the Enterprises & Governments (For Now)
TLDR: AI Diffusion is flowing bottom up
Most breakthrough tech drips down from the top—Cold‑War GPS satellites now guiding every rideshare, military‑grade encryption protocols that once required security clearances now protecting your online banking, and NASA‑born CMOS image sensors now capturing every selfie on your phone—each journey from classified lab to consumer pocket taking decades.
Andrej Karpathy points out that large language models flip the script. “The average person has never experienced a technological unlock this dramatic, this fast... LLMs generate disproportionate benefit for regular people while corporations are still catching up.” he notes.
ChatGPT’s 400 million weekly users prove the point: anyone can now draft a professional email, translate a foreign news article, or spin up a simple website mock‑up in minutes—and for free. Inside big orgs, the same models act more like a mild efficiency tweak—hampered by labyrinthine legacy stacks that struggle to plug in modern LLM APIs, conservative risk & compliance teams nervous about data leakage or hallucinations, and approval workflows so slow a weekend hack morphs into a year‑long pilot.
Takeaway: With corporations and governments still catching up—and growing impatient for reliable AI upgrades—there’s a an open lane for individual builders to to craft the solutions those institutions will need as procurement hoops and integration barriers shrink.