The discussion today is about Ben Thompson's Stratechery article, which features a chart of Prominence on one axis and the value of OpenAI's ChatGPT Deap Research tool on the other.
When a topic or bit of information is widely known and discussed, the value of the tool is low, both because you don't need the tool to quickly find digestable information on the subject and because the tool will be just as swamped by slop as you are. (I go back and forth on the latter point...)
When a topic is not widely known, then the value of the tool maximizes. The tool will find those tidbits of information buried in various reports, articles, or charts and surface the salient bits for you.
When a topic is virtually absent from any public sources of information (the internet, books, etc.), i.e. if the info is a secret, then the tool is no longer able to find the information, so the tool is useless.
Ben discusses how he's already marked a trend that information, once public, is not easily monetizable. He suggests that now more than ever that secret info is king.
I have some doubts about some aspects of the framing. For example, the facts about "calories in, calories out", and the variables pertaining to weight, energy expenditure (active, passive, metabolic, thermostatic), consumption, and how these factors influence each other in sometimes non-trivial ways, ... all of this is highly publicly available knowledge. It is everywhere on the Internet for free. And yet... as noted yesterday, even I may be tempted to purchase a book on the subject, follow some relevant influencers and content creators, and subscribe to their apps or newsletters. The "fitness" industry is gigantic even though it primarily comprises of telling people to eat less chips, do more pushups, and go on more walks, all of which is information everyone already "knows" in some sense. The packaging and presentation of public information is still of economic value.
Highly discussed public information still avails economic value to presenting it engagingly and doesn't require a tool to find. Rarely discussed public information draws too small of an audience to profitable present in engaging ways, and is best found with a tool. Secret information is in superposition: If made public, it may raise to high discussion, in which case you can move early to present engagingly. If made public, it may remain niche, in which case the tool may find it and you'll be ignored. If kept secret, it may be wielded, by you, and no other.
So my adjustment to Ben's conclusion about the value of secrecy is: If it's gonna be huge, present it well and cash in on the attention. If it would be niche, keep it and leverage it some other way.
There is very little value remaining to people who generate and share niche information. Keep it secret and use it! There is very little value to generating and sharing widely discussable information without leading in presentation. Hold it until you've honed your presentation, or sell it as a secret to someone equipped to do so.
My framing seems to suggest that you should be either:
Which raises the question: How do you sell a secret?
Or harder: How do you create one worth buying?