We're in the AI Honeymoon. Wait Till You See What Marriage Looks Like.

We're in the AI Honeymoon. Wait Till You See What Marriage Looks Like.

#AI#venture capital#culture
Right now, all the AIs are dancing in the dark — flashing new capabilities like birds-of-paradise in a rainforest courtship ritual. But this spectacle is not the story--you are. Here's why you as a business leader need to focus more on how you relate to AI.

You like charts? We can build that Artifact, chirps Claude. (You can already tell this wasn't written with AI, can't you?)

I got you, coos ChatGPT — let me make a gorgeous AI-generated image that rivals anything on Getty.

I can make video! crows Replit, and Sora slips in — "just not as good as I do." Meanwhile, Gemini is sulking that no one appreciates how convenient it is in your Drive — have you even tried Notebook? You could be producing your own project-specific podcast a la Netflix.

The LLMs are courting your adoption, and it is genuinely spectacular to watch.

AI burst out of the black led by OpenAI and Google — consumer-oriented brands from their original founder DNA, tuned to delight individuals. And they do. Magnificently.

The magnitude of what AI makes possible is not contained within the scope and range of one human lifetime. Even in my lifetime, I believe we will eventually be cyborgs. We'll have AI companions that know us as intimately as our mothers did. Embodied robotic support will be as unremarkable as a smartphone. But those epochs are not right here, right now.

This next few years, we are in the era of white-collar acceleration — and it arrived not because of ambition, but because of a crisis of complexity.

The vast troves of business data that accumulated in twenty first century software grew beyond the holding capacity of any one human brain. Beyond the capacity of teams. Even, in some industries, beyond the comprehension of entire organizations. Nobody said anything out loud, but US productivity quietly stopped pace-setting and started to stall. The dizzying proliferation of laws — local, regional, national, international — compounded it. Software mediated this complexity well enough. But it could not reason through it. That is precisely where AI offers a new adventure worth taking--not as a replacement for visionary leadership, but as the leverage partner that manages complexity so that leaders can actually lead.

The LLMs are not going to be the next great global corporations — to some extent, they already are — but their deeper destiny is as picks and shovels. The gold mines are the companies that deploy them: the applied vertical technology layers built on top of LLMs, using them as interface, as reasoning engine, as clever access point to oceans of specialized data. That is where durable value will be created.

That is where the next generation of market-defining companies will emerge — and they will look nothing like OpenAI.

People worry that AI will make expertise fungible. That the hard-won knowledge of a specialist — a lawyer, a strategist, a surgeon, a great salesperson — will be commoditized overnight. I understand the anxiety, but it mistakes what AI actually is.

AI is not embodied at this point. And if it were, we still wouldn't trust it the way we trust each other. Do you want to go to dinner with Claude? Didn't think so. (Although I am having dinner with Claude as I write this, to be fair.)

My point is--you are excited about how these tools can extend your capabilities — what you love about them is their ability to magnify your humanity, just like what you love about your lover is their ability to make you more you.

The human appetite for human judgment, human relationship, and human accountability is not a sentimental attachment. It is a structural feature of how consequential decisions get made.

What this means in practice: clear strategic thinkers — not prompt plinkers — are going to orchestrate the opportunities of the near future. AI in this context is a tool. A magnificent mirror reflecting the mind in the center--you. The honeymoon, it turns out, is just the beginning. What comes next is the marriage — human vision wedded to AI's capacity for mental compute at scale, each making the other more capable than either could be alone. That partnership, when it works, is not just efficient. It is generative in ways we are only beginning to measure. It can be, if we are intentional, the first technological revolution that lifts more than it displaces.

That is the design challenge of our moment — and it is wide open.

Valor is investing in bold founders that understand this crossroads and the crucible of relationship not with AI, but with ourselves and who we want to become--and use AI to magnify the potential. AI founders, get some fast feedback on our potential to partner by sharing a deck or one pager with our AI analyst, Vic.