Steve Jobs once said “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” That’s true, but its darker side is just as unsettling: if you keep chasing what the crowd is demanding, you’ll build what they want today—not what they need long term.
I realized this while working on products. There was a time when, every time a KOL criticized a feature, the whole team would rush to fix it the next day. A few months later, looking back, the product had become a patchwork shaped by whoever spoke the loudest, while the original roadmap disappeared somewhere along the way.
@OpenGradient is in a pretty unusual position: building an AI network while it grows amid the attention economy. The part I find trickier is this—are influencers inadvertently redrawing its roadmap faster than the team and builders?
With a system like @OpenGradient , the roadmap isn’t just a list of features. It determines where compute flows, what builders build, how users learn to use AI, and finally which layer $OPG absorbs value from. If every growth wave comes from short-term narratives, the team is very likely to optimize for producing quick reactions: add campaigns, add deployments, add pretty metrics. Builders, on the other hand, need something almost opposite—stable APIs, real demand, and time for applications to mature.
What’s strange is that influencers don’t even need to write a single line of code to steer the whole system. They only need to shift the crowd’s expectations. It’s a way of taking today’s attention and using it to price tomorrow’s product.
So the role of $OPG , in my view, shouldn’t stop at just driving traffic.
It should reward something much harder to fake: retention, repeat usage, true inference value, and whether builders can keep users after the hype has cooled.
#opg #web3nh
#opg $OPG
I realized this while working on products. There was a time when, every time a KOL criticized a feature, the whole team would rush to fix it the next day. A few months later, looking back, the product had become a patchwork shaped by whoever spoke the loudest, while the original roadmap disappeared somewhere along the way.
@OpenGradient is in a pretty unusual position: building an AI network while it grows amid the attention economy. The part I find trickier is this—are influencers inadvertently redrawing its roadmap faster than the team and builders?
With a system like @OpenGradient , the roadmap isn’t just a list of features. It determines where compute flows, what builders build, how users learn to use AI, and finally which layer $OPG absorbs value from. If every growth wave comes from short-term narratives, the team is very likely to optimize for producing quick reactions: add campaigns, add deployments, add pretty metrics. Builders, on the other hand, need something almost opposite—stable APIs, real demand, and time for applications to mature.
What’s strange is that influencers don’t even need to write a single line of code to steer the whole system. They only need to shift the crowd’s expectations. It’s a way of taking today’s attention and using it to price tomorrow’s product.
So the role of $OPG , in my view, shouldn’t stop at just driving traffic.
It should reward something much harder to fake: retention, repeat usage, true inference value, and whether builders can keep users after the hype has cooled.
#opg #web3nh
#opg $OPG