// How I Think
AI Principles
Businesses fail at AI for the same reason they fail at anything else: they make decisions one at a time, based on whatever's in front of them.
There's no framework, no filter, no consistent logic — just a trail of experiments with no thread connecting them.
In AI especially, where something genuinely new drops every few weeks, we need sets of beliefs we can hold onto or the noise wins.
These are my personal principles. They're how I decide what to build, what to ignore, and what to push back on.
There Is No “Can’t.”
The only limit to AI is the laws of physics, access to GPU processing power, and our own imaginations. There is no competitive advantage to saying “can’t”. Because while you and I might agree that something is impossible, someone is already doing it because they believed they could.
10x, Not 10%.
We have 24 hours a day and we can either spend our time looking at how we can improve things by 10% or how we can improve things ten times over.
Necessary Over Nice.
AI is filled with a lot of shiny objects. There's a million ways we can add AI to an organization and most don't make a huge difference. A lot of things don't matter; a few things matter the most.
Fancy Fails, Simple Scales.
The more complicated a process is, the more ways it can fail. The harder it is to understand, and the harder it is to fix. People don't adopt what they don't get.
Don't Reinvent The Wheel.
A lot of solutions we're looking for already exist. Inventing a new utensil is great until you realize that forks and spoons have been used for centuries.
Today's Edge Is Tomorrow's Average.
Keeping up with AI is like holding on to a sled pulled by huskies and every day another dog gets added. A few months or even days can change everything. It is virtually impossible to stay on top of all that is happening, but it is possible to get 1% better every day.
Let Humans Do Human Things.
There are things right now that humans intrinsically do better than AI, and it would be wise to focus on letting humans do those things.
“The businesses that win with AI won't be the ones with the biggest budgets. They'll be the ones that stop paying humans to do computer work.”
- David Cartolano