 the upcoming GPT-4 has ~1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion) parameters. AI will accelerate production by an order of magnitude, just as analog technologies like the linotype accelerated production a century ago.
At the same time, AI-powered production will converge with more immersive forms of content, like VR and AR. (One of my favorite quotes is Epic Games’s Tim Sweeney on VR: “I’ve never met a skeptic of VR who has tried it.”) The next decade will see a proliferation of information and content unleashed by new tools.
Organization of Content & Information
We already covered the creation of the filing cabinet, which was essential to organizing information. A related invention was that of the index card. Before index cards, information was stored in cumbersome bounded ledgers. Around the turn of the century, information management via cards of uniform size and weight took hold; cards were stored in drawers, each representing one unit of information, and could be arranged sequentially or alphabetically.
Founded in 1895, The New York Public Library became the city’s central nervous system of knowledge. The largest free public library system in the country, it housed eight million books and one million items of research by 1913, using recent innovations like the Dewey Decimal system to catalog everything. The card-based systems underpinning the library were the databases of the analog age.
An early version of a search engine, meanwhile, took place at The New York Times headquarters. Staff on the second floor fielded phone calls from a curious public, providing answers to their questions. One clip, for instance, shows a woman answering a call from a member of the public.
“Which player had the highest batting average this year?” the caller asks.
“That would be Bill Terry, at .401,” the woman replies.
The caller thanks her and hangs up. Seventy-odd years later, Google emerged. And now, as Google turns 24, many young people instead turn to TikTok and Instagram for search: 40% of Gen Zs prefer searching TikTok and Insta over Google.
Google’s mission, famously, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” New technologies are organizing information in fascinating new ways. One of our portfolio companies at Index, for instance, is Hebbia. You can think of Hebbia as Ctrl + F for contextual search. Instead of needing an exact match, you can ask Hebbia a question. Imagine an investment banking analyst trying to sift through an SEC filing to figure out reasons revenue is down; using Hebbia, the analyst can just type in the question.
As remote and hybrid work surge, meanwhile, we see knowledge management become central to companies: software like Guru, Notion, and Tango facilitate better organization of company content and information.
We’ve come a long way from index cards and public libraries. We’ve even come a long way from Google, the most successful company to emerge from the late-90s tech boom. It’s becoming easier and easier to organize vast quantities of information, and relatedly, to make that information readily accessible. Which brings us to…
Access to Content and Information
One of the forgotten eras of analog technology was the era of the pneumatic tube. Pneumatic tubes use compressed air or a vacuum to move capsules—and New York City ran on them.
Pneumatic tubes were actually originally intended to move people: one early New York demonstration sold 400,000 rides through a block-long human-sized tube. But moving people soon proved impractical (and dangerous), so pneumatic tubes focused on moving packages.
The tubes became staples in postal offices for moving mail and in hospitals for moving lab specimens and test results (some large hospitals still use them today for this purpose). Once, a sick cat was even sent through a pneumatic tube to a veterinarian.
As E.B. White wrote in 1949’s Here Is New York:
It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her thr