What forms the heart of the passion economy in 2024? It’s AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude. So much so, that for many, they act as ‘co-founders’, friends, mentors, and colleagues in times of crisis. The list goes on.
The best part about these AI tools is that their capabilities enable individuals to scale their businesses and ideas without large teams or substantial capital.
In a viral podcast with YC chief Garry Tan, OpenAI’s Sam Altman discussed the future of billion-dollar startups in the intelligence era—which could be just one person and 10,000 GPUs. The concept of ‘one-person billion-dollar startup’ is not new and has been spoken about by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on their own podcasts before.
This shift will empower individuals to cater to niche markets and scale their ‘passions’ globally.
“With AI doing most of the work, people might face a crisis of meaning rather than a lack of money,” said Paras Chopra, founder of Turing’s Dream, in a recent interview with AIM.
AI can contribute to a more fulfilling and purpose-driven society by enabling people to focus on their passions and interests.
Y Combinator is also increasingly funding startups that solve for a post-AGI world. These include government software, public safety, US manufacturing with AI and robotics, fintech, LLM chip design, space tech, AI engineering, human-centric jobs, and energy-efficient computing.
“What we hope is that humans can do more things that only humans can do,” noted YC chief Garry Tan, highlighting that as AI automates repetitive and operational tasks, founders will be able to concentrate on delivering more value to the world.
The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2030, 85% of new jobs will be in the passion economy, highlighting its potential in reshaping the future of work.
Turning Passion into Reality
In a keynote at UC Berkeley, former OpenAI founder Andrej Karpathy emphasised to developers how even early, seemingly naive projects can lead to AI breakthroughs. The examples are aplenty:
The GPT series originated as a Reddit chatbot project and grew into one of the most influential AI technologies, culminating in GPT-4 and revolutionising natural language processing.
GitHub Copilot began as an internal tool to support developers and evolved into a globally used AI-powered code completion tool, reshaping the software development process.
Midjourney started as a research project on AI image generation and has since emerged as a leading platform, rivalling DALL-E.
Hugging Face, once a simple chatbot app, transformed into a $2 billion hub for open-source AI models and datasets and is now widely adopted by AI researchers.
Andrew Ng’s cat-recognition model, trained on just 12 GPUs, highlighted the advantages of GPUs over CPUs, establishing NVIDIA as a dominant force in deep learning hardware.
Li Jin, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, coined the term passion economy, and its transformation from gig economy.
“The distinction was really between commoditising the worker in the gig economy, where they’re all treated as entirely fungible and substitutable, to in the passion economy, they were non-commoditised, they really emphasised and leaned into their individuality,” said Jin in a podcast.
UBI over UBC?
Systemic changes such as Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Compute (UBC) will be the foundation for this new reality, where GDP will grow because of AI, and not extra work hours.
In an interview with Lex Fridman earlier this year, Altman suggested UBC as a long-term and sustainable alternative to UBI. He also speculated on how the future will depend on the power of compute.
“Imagine owning part of the productivity, like a slice of GPT-7 compute, which you could use, donate, or resell—transforming access into empowerment,” said Altman.
Traditionally, performance was measured primarily by raw processing power (such as CPU or GPU speed), but as AI and computing demands grow, energy consumption and cost have become equally important factors to consider.
“Tokens per watt plus dollar is the best way to think about the new currency of performance,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the recent Microsoft Ignite event, reflecting on the increasing importance of sustainable computation in scaling AI.
Post Labour Economy
The global market for autonomous AI and agents is expected to hit $28.5 billion by 2028. With progress in agents and robotics, this change will speed up by 2025, impacting industries everywhere. As a result, the need for UBI is growing.
AI tools are transformative, yet their full impact isn’t widely felt yet. Diana Hu, group partner at Y Combinator, believes AI is nearing a tipping point, similar to past groundbreaking innovations.
Governments, businesses, and communities must collaborate to support change through UBI and retraining programs. As GDP becomes less relevant, we should measure progress by well-being and quality of life, not just work.
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