Mark Cuban says AI isn't smart. I run 13 agents and I agree.
Mark Cuban went on The Diary of a CEO this week and said it flat out. AI is not smart. It just grinds. I run my whole business on AI agents, and he's right.
What he said
I watched the full episode. 91 minutes. One line stuck with me: "AI is not smart. It just grinds and grinds and grinds."
He's not an AI hater. He called himself the biggest fan of AI there is. He uses agents every day. He just won't pretend they think.
The episode in short
If you don't have 91 minutes, here's the short version. Full episode: Mark Cuban on The Diary of a CEO
Winning goes to whoever prepares. His favourite line is from coach Bobby Knight. Everybody has the will to win. Only the ones with the will to prepare actually do.
Learn new tools faster than everyone. When new software comes out, only the person who built it knows it better than you. Everybody else is tied for second. Put in the hours and you're in second place by yourself.
AI is book smart, not smart. It predicts the next word. Ask four AIs the same question and you get four answers. Change one word and you get a new one. It doesn't know what its actions cost. He'd let a seeing eye dog walk him across a busy street before he'd let an AI do it.
Agents do the grind so people can do better work. At Cost Plus Drugs his agents watch the big healthcare companies. Every lawsuit, every bid, it tells him. Then it drafts the records request. That work never got done before. Now it does, and the people he hires work on harder problems.
Smart means knowing the problem. His definition is knowing where to look, pulling the pieces together, and knowing what problem you're solving in the first place. AI doesn't do that part.
On money, he thinks the market is in a bubble where everything trades like a meme stock. He's worried about how much the big AI companies are borrowing. His advice is be patient and keep some cash. That's his view, not advice from me.
Where I agree, from running it every day
I run Obsidian AI Labs on AI agents. Sales, bookkeeping, research, my calendar, my inbox. Across my business and my clients, 13 agents went through about 10.8 billion tokens in six weeks. So I'm not guessing.
My agents grind. They don't decide what matters.
So here's how we set it up
Inside the work, the agents run on their own. They research, draft, sort, check, and fix.
Where it touches money, clients, or the public, I approve. Every client email. Every post. AI never moves money in my business.
That's not because the agents are bad. It's because Cuban is right about what smart is. Knowing the problem. Saying this part is right and this part is wrong. That's still a person's job.
Everyone has AI now. The edge is the judgment you put on top of it.
Want agents that do the grind while you keep the calls that matter? Let's talk about the work.
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