4 ms·

You’re totally right, a few $B is not something any of us are bootstrapping. But there is no secret sauce (at least none that stays secret for long), no meaning

You’re totally right, a few $B is not something any of us are bootstrapping. But there is no secret sauce (at least none that stays secret for long), no meaningful patents, no network/platform effect, and virtually no ability to lock in customers. Compare to other traditional tech companies… think Uber/AirBnB/Databricks/etc. Their product isn’t an algorithm that a competitor can spin up in 6 months. These companies create real moats, for better or worse, which significantly reduce the ability for competitors to enter, even with tranches of cash. In contrast, essentially every product we’ve seen in the AI space is very replicable, and any differentiation is largely marginal, under the hood, and the details of which are obscured from customers.

zurfer 3y ago
Every big tech in the beginning looked fragile/no moats. I think we'll see that data, knowledge and intelligence compound and at some point it will be as hard to penetrate as Meta's network effects.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  Maybe consolidate as well as compound. There's a tendency for any mature industry (which may initially have been bustling with competitors) to eventually consolidate into three players, and while we're currently at the point where it seems a well-funded new entrant can catch up with the leaders, that will likely become much harder in the future as tech advances. Never say never though - look at Tesla coming out of nowhere to push the big three automakers around! Eventually the established players become too complacent and set in their ways, creating an opening for a smaller more nimble competitor with a better idea. I don't think LLMs are the ultimate form of AI/AGI though. Eventually we'll figure out a better brain-inspired approach that learns continually from it's own experimentation and experience. Perhaps this change of approach will be when some much smaller competitor (someone like John Carmack, perhaps) rapidly come from nowhere and catch the big three flat footed as they tend to their ginormous LLM training sets, infrastructure and entrenched products.
  - lanstin 3y ago
    Also worth keeping in mind the lock in for the big tech firms is due to business decisions not the technology per se. If we had say micropaynents in http1 headers in 1998 we might have a much more decentralized system supported by distributed subscriptions rather than ads. To this day I cannot put up $50 to mastodon and have it split amongst the posts I like or boost or whatever. Instead we have all the top content authors trying to get me to subscribe to their email subscriptions which Isa vastly inferior interface and too expensive to get money to all the good writers out there.

zurfer 3y ago

Every big tech in the beginning looked fragile/no moats. I think we'll see that data, knowledge and intelligence compound and at some point it will be as hard to penetrate as Meta's network effects.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Maybe consolidate as well as compound. There's a tendency for any mature industry (which may initially have been bustling with competitors) to eventually consolidate into three players, and while we're currently at the point where it seems a well-funded new entrant can catch up with the leaders, that will likely become much harder in the future as tech advances. Never say never though - look at Tesla coming out of nowhere to push the big three automakers around! Eventually the established players become too complacent and set in their ways, creating an opening for a smaller more nimble competitor with a better idea. I don't think LLMs are the ultimate form of AI/AGI though. Eventually we'll figure out a better brain-inspired approach that learns continually from it's own experimentation and experience. Perhaps this change of approach will be when some much smaller competitor (someone like John Carmack, perhaps) rapidly come from nowhere and catch the big three flat footed as they tend to their ginormous LLM training sets, infrastructure and entrenched products.
- lanstin 3y ago
  Also worth keeping in mind the lock in for the big tech firms is due to business decisions not the technology per se. If we had say micropaynents in http1 headers in 1998 we might have a much more decentralized system supported by distributed subscriptions rather than ads. To this day I cannot put up $50 to mastodon and have it split amongst the posts I like or boost or whatever. Instead we have all the top content authors trying to get me to subscribe to their email subscriptions which Isa vastly inferior interface and too expensive to get money to all the good writers out there.