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Ok, so one last question - I think folks like Ed Zitron are too much I. The bear camp, he’s “AI is useless” and I’m not there, I do think AI changes the game.

by mikgp 3mo ago

Ok, so one last question - I think folks like Ed Zitron are too much I. The bear camp, he’s “AI is useless” and I’m not there, I do think AI changes the game. But everyone has been comparing OpenAI and Anthropic to the dotcom bubble, but isn’t - The historical precedent on being able to capture value of a raw technology is not good. This is why the joke they promised us flying cars and we got ads. So everyone says “Anthropic is like Uber”. But Uber is a service with people, not an underlying technology with commodity economics. So in order for OpenAI and Anthropic to succeed (not google they have businesses to subsidize AI). LLMs would have to be the first technology where the businesses can capture value of the underlying technology itself. So while I would concede that affordability is vulnerable to multiple angles of attack, I think that profitability is as well. So what makes AI different than all previous technologies?

simianwords 3mo ago
Depends on what you mean by capture technology? The internet was "captured" by FAANG. What makes OpenAI different?
- beepbooptheory 3mo ago
  No one in FAANG was selling the internet itself.
  - simianwords 3mo ago
    If we both agree that there will be FAANG type companies out of AI, what would they look like?
    - mikgp 3mo ago
      We're a few days out here, but I don't agree that a FAANG company will come out of AI, and I think this is a fundamental error to think there will be. FAANG is rare/hard. It feels like, we've forgotten there's this whole giant middle of like normal companies. Oracle, Cisco, all the consulting companies. Boring companies with "only" a $500B market cap. I don't think any of the AI companies will synergize the like magic set of ingredients you need to be FAANG, and that's the point, they've grown so fast they "have" to to payback investors. But it's weird that we call them a failure if they don't hit this utopian ideal that only a few companies in history have ever hit.

by mikgp 3mo ago

simianwords 3mo ago

Depends on what you mean by capture technology? The internet was "captured" by FAANG. What makes OpenAI different?

beepbooptheory 3mo ago
No one in FAANG was selling the internet itself.
- simianwords 3mo ago
  If we both agree that there will be FAANG type companies out of AI, what would they look like?
  - mikgp 3mo ago
    We're a few days out here, but I don't agree that a FAANG company will come out of AI, and I think this is a fundamental error to think there will be. FAANG is rare/hard. It feels like, we've forgotten there's this whole giant middle of like normal companies. Oracle, Cisco, all the consulting companies. Boring companies with "only" a $500B market cap. I don't think any of the AI companies will synergize the like magic set of ingredients you need to be FAANG, and that's the point, they've grown so fast they "have" to to payback investors. But it's weird that we call them a failure if they don't hit this utopian ideal that only a few companies in history have ever hit.