5 ms·

I think you could go back in time and s/AI/internet. But if we look at the 90’s, the lesson is not that companies wasted time on internet strategies they didn’

I think you could go back in time and s/AI/internet. But if we look at the 90’s, the lesson is not that companies wasted time on internet strategies they didn’t need. The lesson is that companies that had good internet strategies thrived (Netflix) and those that had bad internet strategies died (Blockbuster). Agree there’s a lot of FOMO, but unlike your patsies, these companies would not be better served by staying away and ignoring the temptation.

behringer 2y ago
If blockbuster had waited and then just copied Netflix, they'd still be around. They failed to do either one.
- jordanb 2y ago
  They had an opportunity to buy netflix for $50 million after the dot com bust.
chucke1992 2y ago
Well it took Netflix years and years to reach the current point though.
silverquiet 2y ago
It's still not clear to me that LLMs are actually useful, but I'm perfectly willing to accept that I'm some sort of neo-luddite (how deliciously ironic a term by the way). I wonder, do you think there are examples of companies that have good strategies now? And if so, what utility are they getting out of it?
- vertis 2y ago
  But are you actually a luddite objecting to the impact that technology (AI in this case) is going to have or just a skeptic?
- ReptileMan 2y ago
  LLMs are tremendous force multipliers. They don't replace humans but increase the productivity of people quite a bit
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Motte: "AI will make humans more efficient and help scale small businesses and creators" Bailey:" AI can replace your entire human labor (the most expensive cost of business) by scraping the content made by laborers on the internet without compensation" Unfortunately, businesses are being sold the Bailey. And the sad part is that some companies aren't even pretending to hide behind the motte. I'm sure some, many businesses won't fall for the hype, but many others will and it will take a huge toll on the workers as a result.
  - bugbuddy 2y ago
    That’s not a certainty but an AI salesman’s pitch.
    - brookst 2y ago
      Lived experience for me.
  - jordanb 2y ago
    I've seen that claim made but I've not seen it in reality. There are examples of where LLMs are useful for information retrieval in that they can take vague queries and produce good summaries, but they're just as likely to produce reasonable-sounding nonsense that needs to be carefully verified. I've also seen examples where LLMs can produce code that implements well-defined toy problems but when used on a real software system with millions of lines of context they do not produce code that can remain coherent with the system. From what I've seen LLMs have yet to graduate from "impressive demo" and everyone characterizing them as being a revolution are still describing some potential future state with no real evidence that we'll get there with this technology or any time soon.
    - ianbutler 2y ago
- llm_trw 2y ago
  I'm in finance and we're using LLMs to summarize a ton of soft data on company performance. We're making a killing and beating the market substantially. Within the next five years I don't think there will be anyone left standing who isn't worth a trillion dollars or doesn't have all their quants augmented by LLMs. Before this I was building a matching engine for online retail which used (then) state of the art multimodal models to decide which products would match your query to the lowest priced item. The dirty secret here is that we've solved search, it just costs too much to provide it for free. I think we'll soon see an online Costco show up which can provide this service to members and filter all the bullshit dropshippers.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    >I'm in finance and we're using LLMs to summarize a ton of soft data on company performance. We're making a killing and beating the market substantially. so are you saying that you are okay with LLM hallucinations causing your company to make possible huge losses, even if rarely ? I should mention that I am an LLM newbie, or rather a zerobie. all I have is a very high level sketchy overview of the field. but I am a dev with many years background in many areas, though not AI at all, except for reading a little bit now and then about it. feel free to blast me, but preferably with data-backed statements.
  - quanto 2y ago
    > Within the next five years I don't think there will be anyone left standing who isn't worth a trillion dollars or doesn't have all their quants augmented by LLMs. What an interesting comment. So, your thesis is that a few players that come out ahead will be worth substantially more than the biggest players now and they will all be using LLMs? What's driving the consolidation? High barrier to entry for making a foundation model for finance?
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    I see that as a continuation of a long arc of using machines to read things in finance (not just on the buy side, btw.), don't think it will change the competitive dynamics between the more dominant players. (There might be some more concentration in some areas, but the dynamics for that pre-date LLMs or even AI/ML in some cases.)
- brookst 2y ago
  I honestly don’t know. AI is so young; it’s like asking who had good internet strategies in 1994; in hindsight we know some did, but nobody really knew at the time (I would argue those who say otherwise are speaking from survivorship bias). But take a look at GitHub’s Copilot Workspaces for ideas of how transformative AI will be. I don’t have all the pieces (if I did, I’d be rich, right?), but I think AI will deliver mass customization of goods, software, and content by reducing up front costs to near zero. So if I were looking for good strategies, I’d start with companies that currently spend a lot of money on software or content creation and who are investing in automating that.
- HenryBemis 2y ago
  From own experience with ChatGPT, I asked it some months ago to go through an EU regulation, and create a checklist/audit programme for IT Security. Work that would have taken me a couple of weeks, it took 'it' a few seconds. I had to go through the text to make sure it's clean and doesn't contain hallucinations. Total work effort 1-2 hours max. This doesn't mean that the human is no longer required, but for certain tasks a company can save a lot of time/money. So I don't know if they dream to drop a dept of 50 people and replace it with a single machine, but there are some tasks that cannot be outsourced to machines (e.g. decisions impacting the lives cannot be made by automation) "the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, referred to in Article 22(1) and (4) and, at least in those cases, meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject." So good luck 'convincing' the regulator that an LLM can replace mortgage-decisions makers (it is considered a significant activity in a person's life).
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    If the regulations are so extensive that you would have needed a couple of weeks to create a checklist, how did you manage to see if the list was complete and correct within a couple of hours?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - milesvp 2y ago
      This was my first thought? The amount of effort I have to go through verifying what I get from gpt makes me wonder. On the other hand, there I’ve been thinking about how it might help me read datasheets. There are details that are easy to miss when skimming, that may be easy to verify through simple text searches. That said, I know someone who almost took a job writing the actual text of laws, and they were excited about it because, while they didn’t control the laws in general, comma placement allowed them to subtly change the law’s meaning. I currently would‘t trust an LLM to understand subtle comma placement.
  - 2y ago
- jack_pp 2y ago
  I think customer support will be replaced or severely downsized within the next 5 years and that's a pretty big number of jobs.
Mistletoe 2y ago
It’s so different though, I don’t see why we even compare the internet and AI. The internet connected people, of course there would be money in that. AI cuts out people, how will that make money, except for the very few people at the very top controlling the marionette strings? And now all the people without a job have no money to buy products or services? That doesn’t bode well for any market.
- brookst 2y ago
  You’re saying they’re different because good is not like bad. But companies don’t business plan from moral judgments. AI will transform production , distribution, and consumption at least as much as the Internet did.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > And now all the people without a job have no money to buy products or services? AI isn't at that level yet, and I don't know when it will be. When it does get that good, the meaning of wealth changes at least as much as it did in the Industrial Revolution when land took a second seat to capital, and I have no idea what our societies will do any more than Adam Smith could have imagined Communism.
Clubber 2y ago
>I think you could go back in time and s/AI/internet. That's a great example. You could also include systemic events like the introduction of the microcomputer, smartphone, and even "Web 2.0." AI looks like it will be a systemic change, we just don't know what that change is yet. Companies that find the winning formula will have a competitive advantage. Companies that ignore it will start a downward spiral that will be difficult to survive.
az09mugen 2y ago
Kinda agree with you. But not all the techs that get hype live long, just take a look at NFTs.
- brookst 2y ago
  NFTs are (dumb) products, not tech. AI is more foundational, like transistors or internet or GUI.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    s/NFTs/blockchain/ People said the same things about blockchain—that it would be the foundational tech that would power a new iteration of the Internet, a web3. Not that LLMs are in the same category, they certainly seem to have more utility in certain contexts than I ever saw in blockchain, but OP is correct that not every hyped technology turns into the next internet.
    - BoiledCabbage 2y ago
      And everyone with any sense said blockchains were stupid tech. So many people have been following the hype of foolish tech trends that they can no longer differentiate them from actual ground shifting technology. It's sad what blockchain hype has done to a supposed tech audience. To this day all nobody can describe an actual large impactuf use for blockchains other than get rich quick. Even with the tech there it does nothing for day to day life. Duplicating portions of human intelligence has tremendous practical use in every facet of society. The tech just needs to get there. It's pet rocks vs electricity.
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        > And everyone with any sense said blockchains were stupid tech. And yet practically every big company was falling over itself to have a ‘blockchain strategy’ (remember IBM’s thing?) Sound familiar? > Duplicating portions of human intelligence has tremendous practical use in every facet of society. The tech just needs to get there. Trouble is, that’s a _huge_ ‘just’.
candiddevmike 2y ago
> these companies would not be better served by staying away and ignoring the temptation. There is a finite number of hours, dollars, and willpower within an org. Companies are pivoting into becoming AI companies without any understanding of what that means.
paganel 2y ago
Lots of companies that "chose" the internet first and foremost died, I mean, that's what the Dot-com bubble was all about. There was also a lot, a lot of money spent on networking/fiber around that same time, with the "winners" not being the people that actually had put in the money, but companies like Google, Facebook and the same Netflix about a decade later.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
chongli 2y ago
No, the internet was always obviously useful. It's the best communication tool since the written word and people were using it as such from the beginning. Of course not many people had access in the 1980s but those who did (college students) were using it constantly to communicate with people around the country (and soon the world). AI (in the general sense) is also obviously useful, but the jury's still out on whether LLMs are the way to get there. Right now their best use-case seems to be cannibalizing the search market. It's not clear whether they can fully displace search engines though, given their stubborn propensity for confabulation.
lolinder 2y ago
For every Netflix there were many Pets.coms and for every Blockbuster there were a lot of Petcos, whose website at the time of the collapse of Pets.com was still just a basic marketing page [0]. It's not that companies shouldn't be wondering if and how LLMs will change their industry, but there's a very real possibility that the answer for the next 20 years is "A bit, but not enough for us to need to drop everything yet. Let's keep watching and see how this pans out." [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20001109045300/http://www.petco.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20001109045300/http://www.petco.c...

behringer 2y ago

If blockbuster had waited and then just copied Netflix, they'd still be around. They failed to do either one.

jordanb 2y ago
They had an opportunity to buy netflix for $50 million after the dot com bust.

chucke1992 2y ago

Well it took Netflix years and years to reach the current point though.

silverquiet 2y ago

It's still not clear to me that LLMs are actually useful, but I'm perfectly willing to accept that I'm some sort of neo-luddite (how deliciously ironic a term by the way). I wonder, do you think there are examples of companies that have good strategies now? And if so, what utility are they getting out of it?

vertis 2y ago
But are you actually a luddite objecting to the impact that technology (AI in this case) is going to have or just a skeptic?
ReptileMan 2y ago
LLMs are tremendous force multipliers. They don't replace humans but increase the productivity of people quite a bit
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Motte: "AI will make humans more efficient and help scale small businesses and creators" Bailey:" AI can replace your entire human labor (the most expensive cost of business) by scraping the content made by laborers on the internet without compensation" Unfortunately, businesses are being sold the Bailey. And the sad part is that some companies aren't even pretending to hide behind the motte. I'm sure some, many businesses won't fall for the hype, but many others will and it will take a huge toll on the workers as a result.
- bugbuddy 2y ago
  That’s not a certainty but an AI salesman’s pitch.
  - brookst 2y ago
    Lived experience for me.
- jordanb 2y ago
  I've seen that claim made but I've not seen it in reality. There are examples of where LLMs are useful for information retrieval in that they can take vague queries and produce good summaries, but they're just as likely to produce reasonable-sounding nonsense that needs to be carefully verified. I've also seen examples where LLMs can produce code that implements well-defined toy problems but when used on a real software system with millions of lines of context they do not produce code that can remain coherent with the system. From what I've seen LLMs have yet to graduate from "impressive demo" and everyone characterizing them as being a revolution are still describing some potential future state with no real evidence that we'll get there with this technology or any time soon.
  - ianbutler 2y ago
llm_trw 2y ago
I'm in finance and we're using LLMs to summarize a ton of soft data on company performance. We're making a killing and beating the market substantially. Within the next five years I don't think there will be anyone left standing who isn't worth a trillion dollars or doesn't have all their quants augmented by LLMs. Before this I was building a matching engine for online retail which used (then) state of the art multimodal models to decide which products would match your query to the lowest priced item. The dirty secret here is that we've solved search, it just costs too much to provide it for free. I think we'll soon see an online Costco show up which can provide this service to members and filter all the bullshit dropshippers.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  >I'm in finance and we're using LLMs to summarize a ton of soft data on company performance. We're making a killing and beating the market substantially. so are you saying that you are okay with LLM hallucinations causing your company to make possible huge losses, even if rarely ? I should mention that I am an LLM newbie, or rather a zerobie. all I have is a very high level sketchy overview of the field. but I am a dev with many years background in many areas, though not AI at all, except for reading a little bit now and then about it. feel free to blast me, but preferably with data-backed statements.
- quanto 2y ago
  > Within the next five years I don't think there will be anyone left standing who isn't worth a trillion dollars or doesn't have all their quants augmented by LLMs. What an interesting comment. So, your thesis is that a few players that come out ahead will be worth substantially more than the biggest players now and they will all be using LLMs? What's driving the consolidation? High barrier to entry for making a foundation model for finance?
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  I see that as a continuation of a long arc of using machines to read things in finance (not just on the buy side, btw.), don't think it will change the competitive dynamics between the more dominant players. (There might be some more concentration in some areas, but the dynamics for that pre-date LLMs or even AI/ML in some cases.)
brookst 2y ago
I honestly don’t know. AI is so young; it’s like asking who had good internet strategies in 1994; in hindsight we know some did, but nobody really knew at the time (I would argue those who say otherwise are speaking from survivorship bias). But take a look at GitHub’s Copilot Workspaces for ideas of how transformative AI will be. I don’t have all the pieces (if I did, I’d be rich, right?), but I think AI will deliver mass customization of goods, software, and content by reducing up front costs to near zero. So if I were looking for good strategies, I’d start with companies that currently spend a lot of money on software or content creation and who are investing in automating that.
HenryBemis 2y ago
From own experience with ChatGPT, I asked it some months ago to go through an EU regulation, and create a checklist/audit programme for IT Security. Work that would have taken me a couple of weeks, it took 'it' a few seconds. I had to go through the text to make sure it's clean and doesn't contain hallucinations. Total work effort 1-2 hours max. This doesn't mean that the human is no longer required, but for certain tasks a company can save a lot of time/money. So I don't know if they dream to drop a dept of 50 people and replace it with a single machine, but there are some tasks that cannot be outsourced to machines (e.g. decisions impacting the lives cannot be made by automation) "the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, referred to in Article 22(1) and (4) and, at least in those cases, meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject." So good luck 'convincing' the regulator that an LLM can replace mortgage-decisions makers (it is considered a significant activity in a person's life).
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  If the regulations are so extensive that you would have needed a couple of weeks to create a checklist, how did you manage to see if the list was complete and correct within a couple of hours?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - milesvp 2y ago
    This was my first thought? The amount of effort I have to go through verifying what I get from gpt makes me wonder. On the other hand, there I’ve been thinking about how it might help me read datasheets. There are details that are easy to miss when skimming, that may be easy to verify through simple text searches. That said, I know someone who almost took a job writing the actual text of laws, and they were excited about it because, while they didn’t control the laws in general, comma placement allowed them to subtly change the law’s meaning. I currently would‘t trust an LLM to understand subtle comma placement.
- 2y ago
jack_pp 2y ago
I think customer support will be replaced or severely downsized within the next 5 years and that's a pretty big number of jobs.

Mistletoe 2y ago

It’s so different though, I don’t see why we even compare the internet and AI. The internet connected people, of course there would be money in that. AI cuts out people, how will that make money, except for the very few people at the very top controlling the marionette strings? And now all the people without a job have no money to buy products or services? That doesn’t bode well for any market.

brookst 2y ago
You’re saying they’re different because good is not like bad. But companies don’t business plan from moral judgments. AI will transform production , distribution, and consumption at least as much as the Internet did.
ben_w 2y ago
> And now all the people without a job have no money to buy products or services? AI isn't at that level yet, and I don't know when it will be. When it does get that good, the meaning of wealth changes at least as much as it did in the Industrial Revolution when land took a second seat to capital, and I have no idea what our societies will do any more than Adam Smith could have imagined Communism.

Clubber 2y ago

>I think you could go back in time and s/AI/internet. That's a great example. You could also include systemic events like the introduction of the microcomputer, smartphone, and even "Web 2.0." AI looks like it will be a systemic change, we just don't know what that change is yet. Companies that find the winning formula will have a competitive advantage. Companies that ignore it will start a downward spiral that will be difficult to survive.

az09mugen 2y ago

Kinda agree with you. But not all the techs that get hype live long, just take a look at NFTs.

brookst 2y ago
NFTs are (dumb) products, not tech. AI is more foundational, like transistors or internet or GUI.
- lolinder 2y ago
  s/NFTs/blockchain/ People said the same things about blockchain—that it would be the foundational tech that would power a new iteration of the Internet, a web3. Not that LLMs are in the same category, they certainly seem to have more utility in certain contexts than I ever saw in blockchain, but OP is correct that not every hyped technology turns into the next internet.
  - BoiledCabbage 2y ago
    And everyone with any sense said blockchains were stupid tech. So many people have been following the hype of foolish tech trends that they can no longer differentiate them from actual ground shifting technology. It's sad what blockchain hype has done to a supposed tech audience. To this day all nobody can describe an actual large impactuf use for blockchains other than get rich quick. Even with the tech there it does nothing for day to day life. Duplicating portions of human intelligence has tremendous practical use in every facet of society. The tech just needs to get there. It's pet rocks vs electricity.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      > And everyone with any sense said blockchains were stupid tech. And yet practically every big company was falling over itself to have a ‘blockchain strategy’ (remember IBM’s thing?) Sound familiar? > Duplicating portions of human intelligence has tremendous practical use in every facet of society. The tech just needs to get there. Trouble is, that’s a _huge_ ‘just’.

candiddevmike 2y ago

> these companies would not be better served by staying away and ignoring the temptation. There is a finite number of hours, dollars, and willpower within an org. Companies are pivoting into becoming AI companies without any understanding of what that means.

paganel 2y ago

Lots of companies that "chose" the internet first and foremost died, I mean, that's what the Dot-com bubble was all about. There was also a lot, a lot of money spent on networking/fiber around that same time, with the "winners" not being the people that actually had put in the money, but companies like Google, Facebook and the same Netflix about a decade later.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

chongli 2y ago

No, the internet was always obviously useful. It's the best communication tool since the written word and people were using it as such from the beginning. Of course not many people had access in the 1980s but those who did (college students) were using it constantly to communicate with people around the country (and soon the world). AI (in the general sense) is also obviously useful, but the jury's still out on whether LLMs are the way to get there. Right now their best use-case seems to be cannibalizing the search market. It's not clear whether they can fully displace search engines though, given their stubborn propensity for confabulation.

lolinder 2y ago

For every Netflix there were many Pets.coms and for every Blockbuster there were a lot of Petcos, whose website at the time of the collapse of Pets.com was still just a basic marketing page [0]. It's not that companies shouldn't be wondering if and how LLMs will change their industry, but there's a very real possibility that the answer for the next 20 years is "A bit, but not enough for us to need to drop everything yet. Let's keep watching and see how this pans out." [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20001109045300/http://www.petco.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20001109045300/http://www.petco.c...