Cool AI disruption

“It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If someone wishes to continue creating, they must embrace change. Miles Davis

I am a great jazz enthusiast. Traditional jazz melodies, with their vitality and exquisite finesse, drew me in from a very young age. Jazz music has been a private passion, which has helped me sense many other aspects of life and business. English poet and jazz passionate Philip Larkin started writing a monthly jazz review in the Daily Telegraph at the beginning of 1961. Although he had a deep love for traditional jazz, he was far from an expert and needed to broaden his taste to include the new modern jazz that Charlie "Bird" Parker and Dizzy Gillespie had originated. Larkin early summarized a jazz shift from 'trad' to 'mod' in the mid-1940s, changing the status quo. He understood that Parker, Davis, and Coltrane were modernists in more than a chronological sense.

The edge of chaos and the adjacent possible

Larkin defined the new jazz style as a 'descent into chaos'. He understood they invented something under the constant pressure to be different (we could say innovative). Today, looking at the big picture, we see that modern jazz and, especially, Miles Davis made a dramatic break from his past, creating a very successful style. How that break came about is interesting. Davis’ 'Kind of Blue' masterpiece has also been the most commercially successful jazz album ever. Miles Davis is an appealing example of creative leadership. 'Kind of Blue' is an example of challenging boundaries and experimenting right up to the edge of failure to innovate. Most people said that Davis played on the very edge of jazz.

Stuart Kauffman, a leading complexity theorist and theoretical biologist, highlighted a concept that strongly coincides with this definition. Kauffman began to see that living systems operated at their most efficient level in the narrow space between stability and disorder: “the edge of chaos.” To this extent, he asserts, living agents within a system engage in the fullest range of productive interactions and information exchange.

"Living systems operated at their most efficient level in the narrow space between stability and disorder: "the edge of chaos". Stuart Kauffman

Kauffman also introduced an interesting concept concerning the evolution of biospheres over time. The idea suggested that biospheres should continue to grow into their adjacent spaces, thereby increasing the diversity of potential future developments. Kauffman's concept of adjacent possibilities implies that we cannot fully predict all the potential outcomes of the future. In the same way, the emergence of new, unpredictable technologies like AI is a constant and a non-established process.

Cool AI disruption

“A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it’s going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that’s available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today, it sounds different—not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate them into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.” Miles Davis: The Autobiography

In the latest 1960's, Davis introduced fusion to his jazz records, exploring combinations by mixing funk, rhythm and blues or rhythms with the electric instruments, amplified sound, and electronic effects, and playing styles of rock music together with jazz’s complex. This marked a significant period of innovation and expansion in the adjacent possibilities. Today this experimentation is still very much with us, showing its widespread influence throughout music history. Finally, it took Larkin a decade to recognize that those 'irresponsible' men (Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, and Chet Baker), despite not producing anything resembling the jazz he loved, had earned him the respect they merit.

We are seeing how the AI boost has pointed a new shift from 'trad' to 'mod'. The digital revolution was the catalyst for this shift not too long ago. We are also witnessing a rush by companies and investors to achieve "the next big thing". The current AI explosion is about exploring adjacent possibilities, increasing the diversity of what will be next (AGI?). The market's increasing pressure to stand out and develop technological virtuosity—as Larkin once said—is the driving force behind this. Like modern jazz, AI innovation today is a descent into chaos. Predicting which innovations will rise in the next five years is a visionary topic that lies in the narrow space between stability and disorder—the edge of chaos. We could simply say we have chaos since we have exponential growth in uncertainty. This vision, far from being discouraged, is actually quite 'cool'. Let me explain why.

Miles Davis started a new genre in 1948: cool jazz. American street slang and army test pilots' language both expressed the concept of 'keeping 'cool' an expression of emotional self-control in times of crisis. The gurus of bebop raised cool jazzists, who belonged to a younger generation. But cool jazz was largely independent of the traditional preoccupation with rhythm and melody. It focused on creative sounds in a 'cool' fashion. After World War II, American attitudes were shifting due to both a newfound affluence in the 1950s and a growing uncertainty of the future.

Cool jazz reflected a subtracted emotion and quiet intellectual control.

Cool Jazz repopularized jazz and raised new audiences. But the most relevant fact was that musicians, especially black musicians, transitioned from being entertainers to explorers. They were pioneers of a musical genre, its structure, rules, and limits. And, as if this were not enough, cool jazz generated a geographical movement. Bebop was associated with the East Coast (New York); cool jazz was associated with the West Coast (California). AI giants have shifted their focus from Wall Street, opting instead to settle?in Silicon Valley.

The AI metaphor

Perhaps the reader sees this example as a metaphor for the current situation with the AI boom. I do. We have a younger generation that explores the limits (examples like OpenAI and Anthropic are just a small sample). New AI entrepreneurs aren’t any more investor's 'entertainers':

• They are explorers and pioneers of another way of understanding business with other rules and their own limits in front of a very uncertain future.
• They innovate for themselves.
• They represent a transition from 'trad' to 'mod'.
• They have brought disruptive innovation back to the mainstream.
• They remained cool and calm while the world exploded around them.
• They are changing the status quo.