Nearly a decade ago, a product manager told me about the phrase "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." It's a military motto that refers to how elite forces traverse ground and infiltrate enemy lines. The premise is that a deliberate and highly coordinated series of interconnected movements is significantly more effective and fast than an all-out storm the battlefield approach. While the former seems to move at a relatively slow clip, it is actually meaningfully faster than any alternative because of its meticulous movement.

This concept can be applied to doing things inside a company. Working with other people and being highly aligned and moving as one is a smooth way to do things. The coordination costs may be high, but the motion is smooth, and when you look back at the end of the day it's a hell of a lot faster than people flailing independently at warp speed.

Stylistically, it's also applicable at the individual level. My son is dyslexic, and he has a tendency to read through text as quickly as possible. This sometimes results in him reading a word like "turn" as "run" which can completely change the meaning of a sentence to the point it is nonsensical. The thing I tell him is that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. It's easier, more effective, and leads to better comprehension if you just take a beat as you flow through things. It's a really hard thing to do when we are wired to run.

Yesterday, I read an incredible article called AI 2027. I highly recommend taking your time and reading it. It goes through a variety of different scenarios about how the development and integration of AI into our world can and will unfold over the next several years. It reads like science fiction, and any prognostication of this sort has a tinge of fantasy, but it certainly feels quite real (Josh Wolfe likes to say sci-fi is becoming sci-fact and I believe that to be true at an accelerating rate). The outcomes range from utopian to armageddon, and the thing that determines where on that spectrum we end up is how deliberate we are along the way.

Every incentive right now encourages foundational AI companies to move fast. There are a slew of domestic competitors that are vying for AI supremacy and raising tens of billions of dollars to build the latest and greatest models. They range from incumbents to extraordinarily important startups filled with the world's best researchers. There is also a geopolitical force where China is moving at an alarmingly fast clip, too. The country with the most advanced AI is the country with the most influence and ability to align the rest of the world to its goals and values. The stakes could not be higher, so the incentive is to rush and "win the race."

But AI is non-deterministic. Nobody really knows what's going to come out of it when we put something into it. So alignment of AI with our goals as human beings is priority number one. Being right can mean a beautiful future where everyone is happy and prosperous and being off by one degree can mean sayonara human civilization. While every external force from capitalism to international relations to the innate human need to pioneer the frontier is pushing us to go, go, go, it is very much in our interest to take our time and do this right. In the long run, that will get us to where we want to go because slow is smooth and smooth is fast.