Trends, not hot topics

Many people don’t know the difference between trends and hot topics. So they are always busy chasing hot topics. When they see someone in their circle of friends using a new AI tool, they immediately sign up to try it out. When they see a blogger saying “you must learn a certain framework this year”, they immediately sign up for a class to learn it. But within a few months, they start chasing the next hot topic.
This is not learning, this is being led by information.

If you really want to master a skill, or master something that can make you more powerful, you should pay attention to trends. Trends are not news that breaks out at a certain point in time, but a slow but certain upward curve .

Why are trends more important?

Because trends determine what you should invest in over the long term.

Hot spots are "quick money" and trends are "slow money". Quick money is usually not earned because it is too late when you hear about it . But as long as you persist in making slow money, there will be extremely high compound interest.
Looking back at the history of the Internet, we know that many people who played BBS in the early days just wanted to make friends, but they didn't expect that when the Web appeared later, they were half a beat faster than others. When the mobile Internet just emerged, no one knew that WeChat would achieve today's scale, but the trend was clear: mobile phones + the Internet, people's behavior patterns will change .
The same is true for AI.

Many people are now wondering whether GPT will be popular for another year, or whether a certain AI tool is a flash in the pan. These questions are actually meaningless. The trend is very clear: AI, as a new computing paradigm, is growing exponentially in capabilities and ecology . Models will become stronger, tools will become more sophisticated, costs will become lower, and there will be more and more usage scenarios.
This is a trend that will last for the next 10 years.

How to judge the trend?

It's simple: trends are things that are quietly moving forward even when no one is reporting on them.

You see, GPT-4o was released this year, and many people are concerned about how “multimodal it is”. In fact, the key lies in the release rhythm: in less than a year, the model capabilities have leaped again . At the same time, the Agent framework and plug-in ecosystem are also evolving rapidly. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta are all investing heavily in AI. The capital layout behind this is itself a trend signal.
At a more basic level, at the hardware level, the computing power supply chain is also accelerating reconstruction. More and more companies are using specially optimized large-model inference chips, and AI-specific cloud services are maturing rapidly.
For these things, even if no one publishes news, the trend itself will not stop.

Why is it useless to chase hot topics?

Because hot spots are the product of information noise. The essence of being a hot spot is that it is easy to spread, but it does not mean that it has high long-term value .
Many hot spots are about to be eliminated when they come out, or they are over-packaged semi-finished products. Spending time chasing them wastes your attention and interrupts the rhythm of accumulating real capabilities.

The accumulation of abilities and cognition requires "focused time blocks" . If you are constantly interrupted by hot spots, you can't get into the deep waters at all.
Instead, if you pay attention to trends, you will focus on doing a small number of correct things and slowly widen the gap with others.

Time will reward trend followers

Time is the friend of trend followers and the enemy of hot spots followers.

Every time the technological paradigm changes, those who understand the trend early and get on board early always get a disproportionate share of the dividends.
This is true for mobile Internet and AI. In the next 3-5 years, AI will not only change the form of tools, but also reshape production relations. Writing code, writing copy, doing design, and managing a company will all have new ways of playing because of AI. Investing in AI now is not to chase the hot topic of GPT-4o, but to prepare for a reshuffled world in the future .

Final Words

Trends are “futures you can bet on”, while hot topics are just “news from others” .
If you understand this difference, you will not be misled by information noise in the AI ​​era.