It's a Great Time To Be a Specialist

Slightly hot take: It's a great time to be a specialist. I used to think generalists had the edge. David Epstein's Range convinced me that breadth beats depth. I even switched from patent counsel to product counsel, hoping that exposure to different legal domains as a 'mini-GC' would make me a better attorney. I think it did. I never became an expert in any particular area as product counsel, but seeing how problems are solved across domains helped me stack rank legal risk.

But, you can get that exposure now without making the switch. I asked ChatGPT about privacy frameworks for AR glasses the other day. It nailed most of the issues I'd worried about as product counsel at Meta.

It used to take real effort to become a generalist. Now, with AI, anyone can become better than average in almost any field with a little initiative. When becoming a generalist is free, it stops being a moat.

Specialists still have one. Their expertise comes from years of practice and intuition developed through nuanced real-world situations. Most of it is never written down and thus remains out of reach for AI.

That’s why generalists can't use AI to think like specialists. But specialists can use AI to simulate generalist thinking.

Case in point: I asked ChatGPT "what's a good patent strategy to implement", "how many patents should I have", and "how do I manage my patent portfolio." The output was solid. Execute everything it suggests and you'd have a functional patent program. But it doesn't tell you the small moves that turn out to matter a lot. That's why we builtArcPrime: to automate not just the foundational strategies, but also the high-leverage tactics only specialists know.

This new world flips the old tradeoff. Instead of choosing depth or breadth, you can now pursue depth in multiple domains. Use AI to compress the learning curve for breadth, then spend your time developing the kind of nuanced expertise that can't be replicated by pattern matching on internet text.

Or just work in the physical world. Robots are coming too, but probably later.