It has never been easier to be in the top 1% of a field because the baseline competence has been raised to GPT-5. But conversely, it has never been harder to matter because there are exponentially more players standing on that same baseline. A 10x outcome on a billion dollars is fundamentally different from a 10x outcome on a million, yet the attention economy treats them as equal. The "founders" chasing ngmi passion projects are doing so because the algorithms have conditioned them to optimize for the wrong metric: social consensus rather than information asymmetry.
Everyone in every demographic is online in 2025. The algorithms ruthlessly synchronize consensus, so the "in-crowd" has never been larger or more coordinated. Talent is now in-fighting over publicly available information; when competence is commoditized, differentiation collapses into politics and king-making.
In this noise, net-new dollars from industries and consumers outside the circle increasingly become the higher-fidelity signal. The frontier of what's possible now lies in mining the work of people solving problems that aren't on the internet yet; extracting sequences of action across hours, days, weeks of labor to capture the tacit and hidden. We haven't even mapped our own ocean!
We're exiting the era where execution and capital were as influential as ideas and socioeconomic capital. Now ideas dominate, only if you have the compute to execute them and produce net new information.
The winners won't be using AGI to do the same things faster or cheaper. That has always existed. The difference now is the ability to produce net new information at scale. This begins to resemble a different form of capitalism entirely -- one that can hyper-concentrate power, currently bottlenecked more by politics than capability.
When is the last time you tasted something you've never tasted before? There's infinite competition in starting a restaurant; effectively they all compete on service rather than food.
Winning in some sense has never been so easy, provided you are willing to play a game that is seemingly uncompetitive.
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