Why AI's payoff lands with one-person firms first: FDE roles and organizational debt
An analysis piece from the Chinese newsletter "不懂经" (republished by Huxiu) argues the hottest new AI job is the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), with OpenAI listing the role at up to $325,000 a year and both OpenAI and Anthropic competing for such hires. Citing MIT NANDA, McKinsey and S&P Global figures on weak enterprise AI returns, it draws on the book "AI and the Octopus Organization" and an essay called "Termites and Tokens" to argue that one-person firms with no legacy structure capture AI's dividends first. It also warns that a founder plus a swarm of agents can replicate bad patterns, shifting the bottleneck from approvals to attention and judgment.
It offers a framework for why enterprise AI adoption stalls and why zero-legacy micro-teams may capture the gains first.