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Commoditize as an alternative?
by 8note 5y ago
Commoditize as an alternative?
- rahimnathwani 5y agoA commodity is a product that's not differentiated between suppliers (think silver, pork bellies, robusta coffee beans). Examples of things that are democratized (accessible to virtually anyone) but not commoditized (not the same as what you can get from other providers): - Coca cola - iPhones - Teslas - Google search - HN If you're going to make money by creating an NLP service for wide adoption, you'd hope to create some competitive moat. Otherwise there's no way for you to earn profits to amortize your R&D.
- NhanH 5y agoSo from your definition and example, it means that Coke want to democratize soda, Apple want to democratize iPhone and Tesla want to democratize EV. I don't think those sentence would have your expected meaning when someone else read them.
- drdeca 5y agoWell, no, because the current state of affairs isn’t that very few people have access to smartphones / soda .
- barbecue_sauce 5y agoSo Coke pioneered the democratization of soda.
- ben_w 5y agoLots of people have access to natural language AI — Google search, voice assistants, WolframAlpha, AI dungeon, GPT-J — so if you agree that Coke doesn’t get to say they’re “democratising” soda because that’s a misuse of terminology, you should also agree that commercial deployment of a natural language AI API doesn’t get to say they’re “democratising” AI because that’s also a misuse of terminology.
- drdeca 5y agoYes. (I mean, like coke, they could say it, but it wouldn’t make sense.) Possibly one could claim something is democratizing access to some specific aspect? I do think it probably best to tend away from using the term unless it is a particularly good fit though. (“Best” as in “what I would prefer”, not as in “most profitable”)