Skip the Application, Use AI?

Agentic AI is becoming somewhat a norm. Instead of you doing something directly, you tell your agent to do it and the thing is done indirectly. This is both useful and dangerous. However, it doesn’t stop applications from still being important. Let’s begin with that last sentence. The notion that applications (and application-producing companies, such as Adobe) will go away is dead wrong. At least in the short- to mid-term. There’s too much built up capability and performance in them for anyone to give up to a server farm somewhere to reproduce from scratch. It’s just not going to happen that you suddenly have a full AI replacement for Photoshop (or most other deep, broad applications). I’ll demonstrate that later in the article. To understand AI today you need to also understand the dicotomy between centralized and decentralized computation and data. The big tech companies will always push centralization, mostly because that gives them control over you. They have your data. Only they…