Recently I had coffee at my favorite place and on the way out I bumped into someone I met at an event before. He wore a dark suit, but did not seem to sweat at all, despite the scorching 2pm heat. The sun reflected weirdly off the expensive-looking bead bracelet above his Rolex.Last time I met him he wore sunglasses indoors at 7pm, so this was probably another part of an eccentric wardrobe.
What are you up to these days? I asked him. He told me he’s working on a new tech thing: “We are building an AI company at the intersection of health-tech and deep finance”
Ever since Steve Jobs said something about the intersection of technology and humanities, people keep coming up with new and increasingly implausible intersections. Is this one of those?
He was looking at me expectantly, so I said oh cool, what does that mean? Words started streaming out his face: “We are creating the layer that allows companies better serve customers on their health journey.” I must have looked off, so he continued “we are disrupting the industry with AI agents. AI improves operational and payment journeys that caused inefficiencies on the business layer.”
I nodded, having little to say.
His voice was smooth,like someone who says habibi a lot, at parties only mentioned in hushed tones full of amazement and a pinch of haram. He called himself a founder, but it was never entirely clear what he did find. I remember speaking with him for a hour, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out that part. His activities seem to have involved ‘offices of’ and various ‘entities’.
I have this weird tendency of trying to understand things:“payments and agents and health.. so you run an insurance brokerage?”
- “No no habibi, this is AI. We are funded by very imbortant people”he said quickly.
- “Isn’t that everyone these days? I never understood why everything needs to be about the current cool thing. This intersection thing makes it difficult to understand what you do. Of course, you don’t have to be clear about how you are valuable either. Or what you do. Does it make sense? You can be anything,but also,potentially,everything. A layer between the intersection of whatever, busy disrupting, and surely, AI feels like a lot of theatre. Is this what your investors are buying?”
- “You don’t understand,habibi”,he said. About that, he was not wrong.
- “This is imbortant. I work with very imbortant people on imbortant things” his voice trailed off ”your phone is ringing”
I looked at my phone for a second, but I didn’t have a missed call. When I looked up again, he was not there, just a small heap of ash where he stood five seconds ago.
Spontaneous combustion is extremely rare,but not unheard of, especially when it’s as hot outside as in Dubai. The little ‘poof’ I heard is even more rare, reserved for the truly exceptional cases, at least according to the few observations we have. The most grim cases, I heard, happened a few years ago, right after people mentioned ‘using blockchain in the metaverse’.