The Fourth Transition

A plain-language guide to why AI, like electricity, the telegraph, and the computer before it, will underdeliver until we build the missing layer around it.

The most capable software ever built is being handed to the largest companies in the world, and inside many of them it is quietly letting people down. The demo impresses. The pilot often works. Then, somewhere between the pilot and the real operation, the thing weakens and fades.

The easy explanation is that the model is not smart enough yet. I spent most of the last decade helping startups and large companies try to put new technology to work together, watching what happens after the model is already good enough, and I came to think the easy explanation is wrong. In most cases the model is not the problem. The problem is that the world around the model has not been rebuilt to fit it.

That is not a guess. It has happened three times before.

The Missing Layer of Physical AI

Why the next AI transition will run on habitat, not models.

There is a building in Tel Aviv that does not look like the beginning of a theory. Eight hundred square meters. Concrete floors. High ceilings. Mediocre parking. Near a Honda motorbike dealership. Inside, for almost a decade, a handful of early-stage startups shared desks, whiteboards, and a kitchen with people from some of the world's largest corporations, companies whose combined revenue exceeds what most nations produce in a year.