4 ms·

I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway

• onlyrealcuzzo 5mo ago
  > If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". They don't "solve" execution. If you're willing to push them enough, and put in place the system that they can actually get working code, they can solve execution - but that IS engineering!! They are far from doing that by default now (replacing engineering). Maybe in 3 years. They're moving fast. But you can't ask them to build you a better Rust compiler, sit back and watch, and get a result today.
  • hmokiguess 5mo ago
    Totally, I meant that more in the lenses of how folks are perceiving it. They solve the execution part of the "one shot" aspect mentioned in the post. You still need to do a lot of plumbing, orchestration, supervision, etc. I think it will get cheaper and cheaper over time, though not magical enough to one shot a Rust compiler from "write a Rust compiler make no mistakes" haha.
  • tiahura 5mo ago
    Today is when ground needs to be broke on the data centers to run it in 3 years.
  • riazrizvi 5mo ago
    Execution has just moved up the conceptual stack. We once wrote assembly, and then changed to higher order languages. Same is happening with lexical work generally.
• worldthruword 5mo ago
  > I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". https://x.com/chamath/status/2033385903520129161 https://x.com/chamath/status/2033385903520129161 > I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff. What's happening there? A lot of people play with their own little universe and get tired quickly, move away from it, and only a few prolific creators stay and turn it into a "job like" environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law Sturgeon's law states, "Ninety percent of everything is crap". The adage was coined by American science fiction author and critic Theodore Sturgeon while defending the merits of the genre. Sturgeon observed that most works in any field were low quality. Therefore, science fiction was not uniquely inferior.
• xpct 5mo ago
  Could you elaborate on the AI Music tool? My impression was that it's used as a one-shot generation tool. I don't know much about music but I imagine artists need intermediary steps, track separation, instrument customization and other stuff I'm oblivious about. Without these, it's hard for me to imagine it being used for professional work.
  • hmokiguess 5mo ago
    The frontier music models, the paid/pro Opus 4.8 equivalent ones, are more capable now, and Suno has a "harness" like Claude Code on their Studio tool that lets you iterate on the generation by doing stem splitting, track separation, edits that stay within the tempo, rhythmic structure, etc.
• pigpop 5mo ago
  Suno is a good example. I've written lyrics for a lot of songs and then "produced" them with Suno, a process that involves dozens to hundreds of remix/cover/extend revisions or a lot of time in their editor to get it sounding the way I want it to. The songs are songs that I like and will listen to in my playlist but they haven't gotten much traction on Suno's algorithm. I haven't tried to promote them much elsewhere either but when I have posted them they get a few likes at best. I'm not disappointed because I was creating the music for myself and just sharing it as a side effect but what I take away from this is that getting people to pay attention to and enjoy something that you've created takes a lot of work. You have to market it, get it in front of them, get them to pay attention to it and I'm convinced you also need to give them a reason to like it by associating it with something whether that's a video, a story, a persona or some other vibe. If you want it to "stick" you need to do all of that over and over again for the same audience so that they learn it. That is what takes determination and why you have to really care about the thing you are trying to sell to people. You have to stick to it before they will stick to it.
  • polotics 5mo ago
    Same here, I vibe coded my perfect alarm & reminders & productivity app for Android, (Promptly AI link below) that does TTS and Gemini calls and other things that rapacious alarm-clock marketing masters charge dozens of bucks per month for, but at some point the day job and dislike of the marketing grind is just too much, summer is here and yeah... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sixteenam.promptly https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sixteenam....
  • yudidnmkating 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • Anamon 5mo ago
    "getting people to pay attention to and enjoy something that you've created" is a lot harder still if you didn't really create the thing. I'm not trying to be snide, but the tools that allow you to produce that kind of output being available to everyone else kind of makes the point. That's why statistics show that barely anyone on Suno listens to anything but their own stuff. And of course, especially for music, the human element is pretty much the entire point, so while a lot of people enjoy it for a while as a toy to play around, I don't think many people would seriously consider listening to AI music as being worth their time. It would be like knowingly and deliberately reading fake news.
• awill88 5mo ago
  LLMs don’t “solve” execution at all. They aid and accelerate it.
  • stevenhuang 5mo ago
    Don't kid yourself. The high watermark of what can be "solved" (read: one shotted) is rising, and will continue to rise. Look at the gig economy (Fiver etc) for simple programming/design tasks, LLMs have taken over completely with their execution.
• fantasizr 5mo ago
  suno produces 7m "professional" songs per day. Can't think of a better example of a slop generator. Many songs that will never get more than a handful of listens if it all.
  • bonoboTP 5mo ago
    True of human-made things as well. Most video essays don't get more than a dozen views, most gameplay streams similarly. People playing their guitar and uploading, same. SoundCloud, YouTube, twitch. Human-made app store apps is the same story. Most are not downloaded by even 100 people. Most Github repos don't even get a handful of stars.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5mo ago
    I've made songs on Suno that I actually like and have listened to tons of times, not to mention just having fun in general making music, seeing what comes out of the box. The future is going to be different. Right now, people effectively spend ~0% of their time entertaining themselves with their own music, art, writing, film, etc. In the future, it's going to be >0%. Will it be >10%? Who knows.
    • spacechild1 5mo ago
      > Right now, people effectively spend ~0% of their time entertaining themselves with their own music, art, writing, film, etc. First, the 0% figure is not true. People do write stories, play instruments or draw pictures. Second, everybody who really feels a desire to express themselves creatively has akready been able to do so. Nothing was stopping you from writing poems, drawing pictures or picking up an instrument. Recording music has never been so easy. The "problem" is, of course, that it takes some effort. LLMs seem to provide a convenient shortcut, but you effectively skip the whole artistic process. IMO it's better to either engage with existing great art or make an honest and humble attempt at creating your own art. You will learn so much more about music by trying to learn the piano or guitar than by prompting Suno.
      • onlyrealcuzzo 5mo ago
• larodi 5mo ago
  Sumo produces plausible cheesy stuff that is otherwise sonically awful, ringing alongside the full spectrum due to how it works. As a musician I would not use it - I like to keep some creative power. Some people use it around me for samples… and then their tracks ring. But it works for them as they be advertising producers. Mind u - I’ve used paid version and I know one or two about music production. As an information architect I find it amazing it works so good, but is useless to me except being a great think to play with… a toy really. I’m much more fascinated by Strudel.cc and LLMs do a great job to educate me into it, myself being mostly an autodidact. As a dev I struggle to maintain coherence with Claude Code even though I’ve piped more than 10b tokens since Jan. Certain trivial stuff is easily remedied but even more devil lives in abundance of details now. So the task moves one level above in terms of abstraction, but is not solved. If guys were good at typing one and the same thing in one and the same lang, which is nothing wrong about given how crafts went for ages, then they will be struggling to compete with the GPTs. But if they are in the architectural and operational perspective … well - work and demand just increased, so please stop whining.
• GuB-42 5mo ago
  > Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff I played with it a bit, and no, it doesn't! And I am talking as someone with limited music culture, musicians are likely to be even more critical. For the first few tries, it sounds impressive and the tunes are catchy. It used to sound wrong in the background but they mostly (but not completely) fixed that. However, after a few dozen songs, it starts to always sound the same. It is all generic stuff, the songs tell no story, it is a bit like the kind of music that accompany corporate advertisement. You can try to be more precise in your prompt, but I never had any success, it will just ignore most of the details that could make your song interesting. The most interesting result I had was actually when I managed to get it off rails, a bug more or less. I asked it to mix two very different genres together, and it made something unsettling in a way I don't remember hearing before. But as always, further working on it proved extremely difficult, as it always tried to go back to making generic stuff, ignoring the details you give it. Suno can do remixes though. And it is a bit like with code. LLMs are very good at porting, when you already have something that works, it can make it work in another language. But if you just have an idea, it will screw up at anything original. If you want a LLM to implement your idea properly, you have to give it so much guidance that it amounts to writing the code yourself, while struggling with the ambiguousness of natural languages.
  • causal 5mo ago
    Yeah I have played with Suno a lot and I find that no matter how I change the genre, lyrics, etc. there's some underlying quality I can't quite name that my brain recognizes and quickly gets tired of. It's fun in a novelty sense, for now.
  • atomicnumber3 5mo ago
    Suno is completely incapable of producing heavy metal. I can't speak for other genres bc I don't listen to them, but what it produces is completely hollow and devoid of what makes metal metal. I also think most metal fans will categorically reject AI-made metal on principle.
    • lc9er 5mo ago
• cautiouscat 5mo ago
  > I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff. Does it? It produces passable stuff that is fine. However the lack of passion and care completely disinterests me.
  • 28304283409234 5mo ago
    Passable and fine is the Hallmark of capitalism.
• UlisesAC4 5mo ago
  Code has never been the execution of the ideas is cheap mantra. It is the whole business flow chain of value to the end user what is valuable.
• matkoniecz 5mo ago
  > I don't know if y'all have tried it No. I assumed that at best it will be not better than average human-made music available to listeners. > but it now produces really good stuff. Does it? Do you have examples? (note: I actually do not care about all "hand-made" and have no preference for once-off over serially made products)
• wallstop 5mo ago
  I guess we have very different ideas around what makes good music. Every single Suno produced song sounds like a 60kbps extremely compressed mp3 while also having extremely generic, uninspiring structures and complete lack of interesting sonic/instrumental layers. It's great that people find joy in it, but as someone that is critical of both music production and fidelity, the current offerings fall incredibly short of anything I would ever want to listen to.
• caymanjim 5mo ago
  This starts from a false premise. Ideas aren't cheap. Good ideas are expensive. They're expensive because you have to weed through all the bad ones to identify them, find a market, and turn them into a product. You don't know that from the start, which is why the landscape is littered with millions of dead projects from thousands of dead companies. Even if the execution were cheap and implementation were perfect, if the starting idea was bad, it's all been a waste. Ideas aren't cheap, because bad ideas are expensive and good ideas cost money to vet.
• barrell 5mo ago
  To continue paraphrasing Steve Jobs, focus is the most important thing. When the cost to produce new features/implementations goes down, focus is even harder (and even more important).
• squidsoup 5mo ago
  > I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff. Suno doesn't make music, it makes simulacra of music. Music is only made by humans.
• lqstuart 5mo ago
  I really like your core point. I don't know anything about Suno and that's what people are picking at, but I'll offer a supporting example from pre-LLM days: the number of people who were actually willing to dig through source code was nonexistent. I've worked in ML/AI since forever and I would say roughly 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 developers I've worked alongside were actually willing to just go to Github and look up why code might be failing and get to the bottom of it. The same is true for LLMs. You can get Claude to spew 2,000 lines of garbage in 15 minutes, but the number of developers actually willing to sit there and reason over the output and make the tweaks--often very minimal tweaks--that make it go from 90% correct to 100% correct are vanishingly few. And it's typically just laziness and a lack of any kind of genuine interest in the field.
• adi_kurian 5mo ago
  Yes. This is good insight.
• brikym 5mo ago
  LLMs don't solve _all_ of the execution. Having distribution and clout is even more important to execution now. To win people must take you seriously when you ask for business partnerships or to give your product a try. The winners have a lot of clout with plenty of followers willing to try the product or integrate.
• bryceneal 5mo ago
  One thing that occurs to me about music which makes it different from software or film is that it's a very impulsive art form. A human with semi-modern equipment can write, produce, mix, and master a song in less than a day. They can do this in a way that gives them full creative control over the thousands of tiny conscious and unconscious decisions that ultimately feed into what it is you like (but are probably unable to accurately articulate with words) about a song. In this case, it's difficult for me to see what exactly is gained by offloading all of those decisions to a mean regression algorithm. I agree it's a fun toy, but I can't imagine actually listening to or deeply enjoying any song made with these music models. I could imagine it being used successfully in some targeted part of the process. For example, manipulating drums or changing the timbre of some previously recorded instrument. In that case it's not much different than traditional music creation tools like sampling.
• treszkai 5mo ago
  > If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution Steve Jobs didn't mean "writing good code" as "execution", he meant "making things that align with how people want to use the product". Frontier LLMs are not solving Steve Jobs-level execution (even in the near future) because what that would mean understanding human nature – something that Steve Jobs or Henry Ford were much better than most in the industry today, so at best we're going to see LLMs making things that are as good as the majority of products. Because AI does not see whether something is perfect-according-to-Steve-Jobs or merely good-code-according-to-engineering-practices.