That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, excerpt:

An AI maniac is someone who is obsessed with working with the latest AI models. They try out new models as soon as they can, they spend hours and hours trying to master them, and they use them to regulate both their workflows and their personal lives. I know one person who has his AI agent text him if he is not drinking enough water, for which he’s placed cameras around his house. One online anecdote tells of a man who canceled a date to spend more time playing around with Claude Fable 5 after Anthropic (where I am a member of the economic advisory board) extended the model’s availability for a few days.

Many AI maniacs are using AI tools to start companies of smaller size, and thus of smaller expense, than ever before. For those companies, the humans must set in motion and then monitor a large number of AI tools and agents. Those individuals then stand to reap outsize profits as their companies grow and succeed. Stripe, the payments company, recently issued customer data showing that the number of single-person companies earning $10 million or more has doubled in the past two years. There is no firm estimate how much of that improvement is due to AI, but it stands to reason that AI is a main driver of the trend…

Anecdotally, I observe that AI maniacs tend to be young, as with participants in so many other cultural trends. They tend to lack standard manners and graces, as they just want to “get right to it.” They are able to imagine a future that is very different from our present. Many of them also are kind, as they see the potential for new AI services, in areas such as biomedicine, to help other people. Their obsessiveness is a small price to pay for all of those virtues, and it is usually part of their charm and vibe.

The AI maniacs also are skeptical of credentials, as they should be. If you wish to learn how to manipulate AI tools, Harvard and Yale are not the places to go. You need to teach yourself, with assistance from other AI maniacs and also with help from the AI tools themselves. There are some AI maniacs in the Ivy League, but too often those individuals have invested their energies into other, more established ways to succeed.

I also believe that immigrants are especially likely to be AI maniacs. Immigrants have fewer channels to rise through credentials, family connections, and establishment modes of thinking and doing. They are more willing to try something new, they tend to be younger than average, and, because they were willing to switch countries, they tend to have higher levels of energy, courage, and ambition.

Worth a ponder.