What happens when everybody has access to knowledge?
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Published in
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4 min read
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Mar 2, 2025
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An interesting article by Azeem Azhar on Bloomberg, “AI will upend some basic assumptions about how companies are organized”, reflects many of the points I made in an article a couple of days ago about the future of consulting and how it will extend to just about every other business sector.
The role of LLMs created by generative artificial intelligence has been, fundamentally, to facilitate access to knowledge, in much the same way that search engines did two decades ago.
When search engines began to work properly, they stopped using simplistic and easily manipulated criteria such as word frequency, opting instead for mechanisms based on attention as an indicator of relevance (actually adapting the citation metrics that Larry Page and Sergey Brin knew well from their time as doctoral students. This simplified the task of accessing knowledge, and we went from having to go to a library and rummage through shelves to being able to access knowledge from our computers.
For those of us who started our doctorates in the mid-90s, the change was impressive because we we lived through it: we started out Phd by going to the library to do our first review papers, but we ended by writing our doctoral theses pretty much from our desks. As the internet spread, publishers began to make their papers accessible online…
