6 ms·

The way I look at this question is: Is there somehow a glaring vulnerability/missed opportunity in modern capitalism that billions of people somehow haven't dis

by kg 1y ago

The way I look at this question is: Is there somehow a glaring vulnerability/missed opportunity in modern capitalism that billions of people somehow haven't discovered yet? And if so, is AI going to discover it? And if so, is a random startup founder or 'little guy' going to be the one to discover and exploit it somehow? If so, why wouldn't OpenAI or Anthropic etc get there first given their resources and early access to leading technology? IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich. I can't really buy into the idea that his team is going to fail at this but a bunch of random smaller companies will manage to succeed somehow. And if modern AI turns into a cash cow for you, unless you're self-hosting your own models, the cloud provider running your AI can hike prices or cut off your access and knock your business over at the drop of a hat. If you're successful enough, it'll be a no-brainer to do it and then offer their own competitor.

wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
>> Is there somehow a glaring vulnerability/missed opportunity in modern capitalism that billions of people somehow haven't discovered yet? Absolutely with 150% certainty yes, and probably many. The www started April 30, 1993, facebook started February 4, 2004 - more than ten years until someone really worked out how to use the web as a social connection machine - an idea now so obvious in hindsight that everyone probably assumes we always knew it. That idea was simply left lying around for anyone to pick up and implement rally fropm day one of the WWW. Innovation isn't obvious until it arrives. So yes absolutely the are many glaring opportunities in modern capitalism upon which great fortunes are yet to be made, and in many cases by little people, not big companies. >> if so, is a random startup founder or 'little guy' going to be the one to discover and exploit it somehow? If so, why wouldn't OpenAI or Anthropic etc get there first given their resources and early access to leading technology? I don't agree with your suggestion that the existing big guys always make the innovations and collect the treasure. Why did Zuckerberg make facebook, not Microsoft or Google? Why did Gates make Microsoft, not IBM? Why did Steve and Steve make Apple, not Hewlett Packard? Why did Brin and Page make Google - the worlds biggest advertising machine, not Murdoch?
- b112 1y ago
  You're not wrong about "change" meaning "new potential wealth streams". But not sure Facebook counts, 2004 vs 1993 shows an immense difference in network connectivity and computer ownership. No way, hands down, Facebook would be what it is, if it started in 93. It probably would have gone bankrupt, or been replaced by an upstart.
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    Has everyone forgotten Yahoo! It had Geocities, chatrooms and messengers, as well as, for a while, a very strong search engine.
- lubujackson 1y ago
  There's a lot that goes into it. Before Facebook was Friendster. Which failed spectacularly because they tried to have some sort of n-squared graph of friends that took thw whole thing down. What FB got right in the early days was it didn't crash. We take that for granted now in the age of cloud everything. Also, there was Classmates.com. A way for people to connect with old friends from high school. But it was a subscription service and few people were desperate enough to pay. So it's wasn't just the idea waiting around but idea with the right combination of factors, user-growth on the Internet, etc. And don't forget Facebook's greatest innovation - requiring a .edu email to register. This happened at a time when people were hesitant to tie their real world personas with the scary Internet, and it was a huge advantage: a great marketing angle, a guarantee of 1-to-1 accounts to people, and a natural rate limiter of adoption.
  - wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
    There's always a trail of competitors who almost got the magic formula right, but for some feature or luck or timing or money or something. The giant win comes from many stars aligning. Luck is a factor - it's not everything but it plays a role - luck is the description of when everything fell into place at just the right time on top of hard work and cleverness and preparedness. Google Search <-- AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo Facebook <-- MySpace, Friendster iPod <-- MP3 players (Rio, Creative) iPhone <-- BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile Minecraft <-- Infiniminer Amazon Web Services <-- traditional hosting Windows (<-- Mac OS (1984), Xerox PARC Android <-- Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm YouTube <-- Vimeo, DailyMotion Zoom <-- WebEx, Skype, GoToMeeting
Retric 1y ago
People aren’t getting rich with AI products, they are getting rich selling AI companies.
- autoexec 1y ago
  nvidia is getting rich selling AI products.
  - Retric 1y ago
    They sell products to AI companies not AI products. Electric utilities are also making bank, but it’s boring old electricity not some new AI electricity product.
sandworm101 1y ago
Thats why i just biult my own tiny AI rig in a home server. I dont want to grow even more addicted to cloud services, nor do i want to keep providing them free human-made data. Ok, so i dont have access to mystical hardware, but im here to learn rather than produce a service.
bix6 1y ago
> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich If they actually reach AGI they will be rich enough. Maybe they can solve world happiness or hunger instead?
- davidw 1y ago
  > If they actually reach AGI they will be rich enough. Maybe they can solve world happiness or hunger instead? That's what normal people might consider doing if they had a lot of money. The kind of people who actually seem to get really wealthy often have... other pursuits that are often not great for society.
  - amelius 1y ago
    Like building a rocket that can relocate us to another planet when shit hits the fan?
    - amelius 1y ago
      Note to self: playing devil's advocate is not without risk of downvotes.
      - davidw 1y ago
        I think in this case you're actually advocating for "the devil" - that man is not using his money or voice for a better society, to put it mildly. I mean just a few days ago, we got "the left is the party of murder" - super helpful in terms of turning down the heat in the US. And of course that was without knowing what we now know about that situation...
    - fsflover 1y ago
      Like adjusting the algorithms of a social network such that far-right posts are shown to users more frequently.
    - palata 1y ago
Ologn 1y ago
> If so, why wouldn't OpenAI or Anthropic etc get there first given their resources and early access to leading technology? innovator's dilemma
awesome_dude 1y ago
> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich. There are still lots of currently known problems that could be solved with the help of AI that could make a lot of money - what is the weather going to be when I want to fly to <destination> in n weeks/months time, currently we can only say "the destination will be in <season> which is typically <wet/dry/hot/cold/etc>" What crops yield the best return next season? (This is a weather as well as a supply and demand problem) How can we best identify pathways for people whose lifestyles/behaviours are in a context that is causing them and/or society harm (I'm a firm believer that there's no such thing as good/bad, and the real trick to life is figuring out what context is where a certain behaviour belongs, and identifying which context a person is in at any given point in time - we know that psycopathic behaviour is rewarded in business contexts, but punished in social contexts, for example)
- catlifeonmars 1y ago
  The weather thing doesn’t seem… realistic. Have you heard of chaotic systems?
  - smileysteve 1y ago
    It sounds a lot like a farmer's almanac... Which are reasonably accurate (ignoring chaos) and practically free (passion work)
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    We always think things are unsolveable, and impossible to decipher, right up until we do, in fact, solve them and decipher them. Anything is possible, well, except for getting the next season of Firefly Edit: FTR I think that weather prediction is, indeed, solveable. We just don't have the computing power/algorithms that fully model and calculate the state.. yet
    - catlifeonmars 1y ago
      Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Sure, anything is possible, but some things are much more likely than others, and small changes in weather months away is very very far down on the list of things that are likely to be solvable. I’d even hold out hope for another season firefly <3

by kg 1y ago

wewewedxfgdf 1y ago

>> Is there somehow a glaring vulnerability/missed opportunity in modern capitalism that billions of people somehow haven't discovered yet? Absolutely with 150% certainty yes, and probably many. The www started April 30, 1993, facebook started February 4, 2004 - more than ten years until someone really worked out how to use the web as a social connection machine - an idea now so obvious in hindsight that everyone probably assumes we always knew it. That idea was simply left lying around for anyone to pick up and implement rally fropm day one of the WWW. Innovation isn't obvious until it arrives. So yes absolutely the are many glaring opportunities in modern capitalism upon which great fortunes are yet to be made, and in many cases by little people, not big companies. >> if so, is a random startup founder or 'little guy' going to be the one to discover and exploit it somehow? If so, why wouldn't OpenAI or Anthropic etc get there first given their resources and early access to leading technology? I don't agree with your suggestion that the existing big guys always make the innovations and collect the treasure. Why did Zuckerberg make facebook, not Microsoft or Google? Why did Gates make Microsoft, not IBM? Why did Steve and Steve make Apple, not Hewlett Packard? Why did Brin and Page make Google - the worlds biggest advertising machine, not Murdoch?

b112 1y ago
You're not wrong about "change" meaning "new potential wealth streams". But not sure Facebook counts, 2004 vs 1993 shows an immense difference in network connectivity and computer ownership. No way, hands down, Facebook would be what it is, if it started in 93. It probably would have gone bankrupt, or been replaced by an upstart.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  Has everyone forgotten Yahoo! It had Geocities, chatrooms and messengers, as well as, for a while, a very strong search engine.
lubujackson 1y ago
There's a lot that goes into it. Before Facebook was Friendster. Which failed spectacularly because they tried to have some sort of n-squared graph of friends that took thw whole thing down. What FB got right in the early days was it didn't crash. We take that for granted now in the age of cloud everything. Also, there was Classmates.com. A way for people to connect with old friends from high school. But it was a subscription service and few people were desperate enough to pay. So it's wasn't just the idea waiting around but idea with the right combination of factors, user-growth on the Internet, etc. And don't forget Facebook's greatest innovation - requiring a .edu email to register. This happened at a time when people were hesitant to tie their real world personas with the scary Internet, and it was a huge advantage: a great marketing angle, a guarantee of 1-to-1 accounts to people, and a natural rate limiter of adoption.
- wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
  There's always a trail of competitors who almost got the magic formula right, but for some feature or luck or timing or money or something. The giant win comes from many stars aligning. Luck is a factor - it's not everything but it plays a role - luck is the description of when everything fell into place at just the right time on top of hard work and cleverness and preparedness. Google Search <-- AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo Facebook <-- MySpace, Friendster iPod <-- MP3 players (Rio, Creative) iPhone <-- BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile Minecraft <-- Infiniminer Amazon Web Services <-- traditional hosting Windows (<-- Mac OS (1984), Xerox PARC Android <-- Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm YouTube <-- Vimeo, DailyMotion Zoom <-- WebEx, Skype, GoToMeeting

Retric 1y ago

People aren’t getting rich with AI products, they are getting rich selling AI companies.

autoexec 1y ago
nvidia is getting rich selling AI products.
- Retric 1y ago
  They sell products to AI companies not AI products. Electric utilities are also making bank, but it’s boring old electricity not some new AI electricity product.

sandworm101 1y ago

Thats why i just biult my own tiny AI rig in a home server. I dont want to grow even more addicted to cloud services, nor do i want to keep providing them free human-made data. Ok, so i dont have access to mystical hardware, but im here to learn rather than produce a service.

bix6 1y ago

> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich If they actually reach AGI they will be rich enough. Maybe they can solve world happiness or hunger instead?

davidw 1y ago
> If they actually reach AGI they will be rich enough. Maybe they can solve world happiness or hunger instead? That's what normal people might consider doing if they had a lot of money. The kind of people who actually seem to get really wealthy often have... other pursuits that are often not great for society.
- amelius 1y ago
  Like building a rocket that can relocate us to another planet when shit hits the fan?
  - amelius 1y ago
    Note to self: playing devil's advocate is not without risk of downvotes.
    - davidw 1y ago
      I think in this case you're actually advocating for "the devil" - that man is not using his money or voice for a better society, to put it mildly. I mean just a few days ago, we got "the left is the party of murder" - super helpful in terms of turning down the heat in the US. And of course that was without knowing what we now know about that situation...
  - fsflover 1y ago
    Like adjusting the algorithms of a social network such that far-right posts are shown to users more frequently.
  - palata 1y ago

Ologn 1y ago

> If so, why wouldn't OpenAI or Anthropic etc get there first given their resources and early access to leading technology? innovator's dilemma

awesome_dude 1y ago

> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich. There are still lots of currently known problems that could be solved with the help of AI that could make a lot of money - what is the weather going to be when I want to fly to <destination> in n weeks/months time, currently we can only say "the destination will be in <season> which is typically <wet/dry/hot/cold/etc>" What crops yield the best return next season? (This is a weather as well as a supply and demand problem) How can we best identify pathways for people whose lifestyles/behaviours are in a context that is causing them and/or society harm (I'm a firm believer that there's no such thing as good/bad, and the real trick to life is figuring out what context is where a certain behaviour belongs, and identifying which context a person is in at any given point in time - we know that psycopathic behaviour is rewarded in business contexts, but punished in social contexts, for example)

catlifeonmars 1y ago
The weather thing doesn’t seem… realistic. Have you heard of chaotic systems?
- smileysteve 1y ago
  It sounds a lot like a farmer's almanac... Which are reasonably accurate (ignoring chaos) and practically free (passion work)
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  We always think things are unsolveable, and impossible to decipher, right up until we do, in fact, solve them and decipher them. Anything is possible, well, except for getting the next season of Firefly Edit: FTR I think that weather prediction is, indeed, solveable. We just don't have the computing power/algorithms that fully model and calculate the state.. yet
  - catlifeonmars 1y ago
    Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Sure, anything is possible, but some things are much more likely than others, and small changes in weather months away is very very far down on the list of things that are likely to be solvable. I’d even hold out hope for another season firefly <3