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The arc of this story seems very strange to me. It seems to me that you used to have to work for years to create a product and prove it’s worth in the market p

by dkrich 3y ago

The arc of this story seems very strange to me. It seems to me that you used to have to work for years to create a product and prove it’s worth in the market place and only then could you convince some wealthy person to back you to make it into a product and eventually a valuable company because the commercial viability was so glaringly obvious. Thomas Edison, Chester Carlson, etc. But now it seems that has been turned on its head. Assemble a group of brilliant people, back them with a giant company with a highly respected CEO, and wait for success and product market fit to inevitably arrive. I hate to sound like a downer but it just seems very odd for so many people to talk about how transformative a company is without much evidence that the products are really being used at scale. And the way opportunists like Benioff have piled on to enhance the perceived value of their own products with their own spins feels off. In fact many have openly discussed that Nvidia’s future growth relies on GPT finding product market fit at scale or they will end up with massive supply overhang which would actually cause costs of AI research to plummet, opening the door for many others to work on it. So many are already seemingly aware that commercial viability is still TBD. I believe all this is likely a product of a period of a string of successful products starting with the iPhone, then Amazon’s transformation of shipping then AWS, etc. Whereas everyone used to be skeptical by nature, it seems now we’re in an age of extreme credulity. Everyone wants to believe in every new storyline. And I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that there aren’t some useful applications of GPT. But the value of products should be self evident and consumption of them should flow naturally from demand. This all just feels backwards to me. Success is assumed straight away and historically that tends to coincide with bubbles and precede a pretty nasty crash in sentiment. I’d love to be proven wrong.

eightnoteight 3y ago
I think its about efficiency. thats why you may not be seeing "new problems" being solved. like people used to be able to travel before cars as well, cars didn't solve a new problem and the world didn't have any demand for them too. but once they became available, regardless of whether someone knows it or not, the whole world needed cars. now the car builders control the demand because they can't instantly scale up the supply AI is similar to that but people can scale it pretty quickly to the whole world, there are a number of efficiency problems being solved in the world using AI. a couple of years ago I had to research and read atleast 1 hour worth of content to find out the information that I needed, google was good but still it required 1 hour. now its hardly a couple of minutes with chatgpt in many cases. efficiency problems usually don't manifest in demand, people adapt to the status quo
- dkrich 3y ago
  I’d question the car analogy. For instance if tomorrow someone introduced a new method of transportation that would be quasi affordable and available to a middle class family and transport you distances in 1/100th the time required by a car there would almost certainly be instant adoption even regardless of economic conditions. Today, though, I see companies like Tesla and OpenAI and cryptocurrencies gain gigantic enthusiastic followings without a whole lot of evidence of massive adoption and product/market fit. It’s pretty clear that underlying the enthusiasm is an economic interest in their success. That doesn’t alone negate the validity but without the adoption being self evident it’s very difficult to set aside my skepticism. I remember walking down the magnificent mile in Chicago and going into an Apple Store for the first time and seeing and touching an early iPod nano. I knew right away that the device was an amazing leap forward. I of course didn’t predict the iPhone and Apple becoming today’s apple but I remember the “wow” factor that so many of these newer products lack. Again, I sincerely hope to be proven wrong here as I want better products!
runlaszlorun 3y ago
Agreed. Suppose we’ll just have to see how it all plays out…

by dkrich 3y ago

eightnoteight 3y ago

I think its about efficiency. thats why you may not be seeing "new problems" being solved. like people used to be able to travel before cars as well, cars didn't solve a new problem and the world didn't have any demand for them too. but once they became available, regardless of whether someone knows it or not, the whole world needed cars. now the car builders control the demand because they can't instantly scale up the supply AI is similar to that but people can scale it pretty quickly to the whole world, there are a number of efficiency problems being solved in the world using AI. a couple of years ago I had to research and read atleast 1 hour worth of content to find out the information that I needed, google was good but still it required 1 hour. now its hardly a couple of minutes with chatgpt in many cases. efficiency problems usually don't manifest in demand, people adapt to the status quo

dkrich 3y ago
I’d question the car analogy. For instance if tomorrow someone introduced a new method of transportation that would be quasi affordable and available to a middle class family and transport you distances in 1/100th the time required by a car there would almost certainly be instant adoption even regardless of economic conditions. Today, though, I see companies like Tesla and OpenAI and cryptocurrencies gain gigantic enthusiastic followings without a whole lot of evidence of massive adoption and product/market fit. It’s pretty clear that underlying the enthusiasm is an economic interest in their success. That doesn’t alone negate the validity but without the adoption being self evident it’s very difficult to set aside my skepticism. I remember walking down the magnificent mile in Chicago and going into an Apple Store for the first time and seeing and touching an early iPod nano. I knew right away that the device was an amazing leap forward. I of course didn’t predict the iPhone and Apple becoming today’s apple but I remember the “wow” factor that so many of these newer products lack. Again, I sincerely hope to be proven wrong here as I want better products!

runlaszlorun 3y ago

Agreed. Suppose we’ll just have to see how it all plays out…