picks and shovels

noun

Etymology

From the expression “When everybody is digging for gold, it's good to be in the pick and shovel business” or a variation thereof.

Definitions

  1. The crucial tools or ingredients for a booming industry or enterprise.

    • They’re sort of a classic picks and shovels company that is making money by building the inputs to AI, but not actually training their own frontier models.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for picks and shovels. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA