“Damn, I’m not using this well enough.” Amateo Kaplan hears some version of that line every time he shows another business owner what he has built. Amateo, CMO of COTI and a decade on the AI and crypto frontier, has a name for the moment it comes out: the fork. About six months ago, he says, the road split. On one side, the people still using AI to prompt and get a response, maybe a little more creatively each time. On the other, the people who took off with it, building agents and workflows they own, some with code but most without. The chasm between them is growing fast, and which side you are on has nothing to do with how many hours you log.
The real divide is cognition. Amateo says he feels sharper today than he did a month ago, that his thinking at a systems level improves every day he builds. That is the actual fork: one side asks AI for answers, the other uses it to think at a level they could not reach a year ago. Mike and Ted push on why so many people stall out right before the breakthrough, the ten-hour tinkering wall most people quit before they clear, and the language problem underneath it all. It is one thing to be told what AI can do. It is another to watch one of your own problems dissolve in front of you, and after that, nobody goes back.
When a friend asked Amateo where the AI jobs are, his answer was that every job is an AI job now. Accountant, marketer, copywriter, executive: every white-collar role has an AI layer waiting to be built. And the builder side is not just faster, it is producing genuine novelty. Amateo brought the receipts: over a hundred AI-discovered drugs already in clinical trials, two million new materials designed by Google DeepMind with 700 already headed for production, a decades-old math record broken. He calls it artificial general novelty, intelligence inventing at a pace no human field can match.
Threaded through the rest of the hour: the $14,000 of real compute hiding inside a $200 monthly plan, the one rule for your AI’s memory that most people set up backwards, and the closer nobody at the table saw coming. Asked how replaceable he is, Amateo did not flinch.
To replace me, you’re going to need a couple people. Not a person. A couple.
That is the real answer to the fork, and the reason it is not as scary as it sounds. The far side is not a coder. It is an owner. You do not have to become the operator. You have to own one, even when the operator is the AI.
Watch the full episode on YouTube: The Fork Diverged 6 Months Ago
Now find out which side of the fork your business is on. Run the Check >_
Or get the writing, once a week.
New essays on ownership and the AI shift.