The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
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Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
#2What's the warning exactly? I'm pretty sure absolutely everyone involved in running that company made loads and loads of money all along the way.
Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
#3Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
#4Damn, I'm going to have to actually go to a doctor now.
Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
#5What's the warning exactly? I'm pretty sure absolutely everyone involved in running that company made loads and loads of money all along the way.
Someone should see if GPT can summarize the main points but it's the usual startup problems, growing too fast and failing to deliver on the company's main value proposition because of employee turnover and bad hiring practices.
Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
#6”Maybe Enki knew that also," Hiro says. "Maybe the nam-shub of Enki wasn't such
a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us.”
Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
#7There's a difference between a company that overextends itself and fails to live up to its own promises, and the current explosion of LLMs. Are there some snake-oily VC pitches that over-promise what LLMs can do? For sure. The big distinction is that LLMs already have a whole bunch of things they're great at while Babylon was never really able to perform even one of it's promised features very well.
Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
#8I'd like a word for what is now the ritualized 'weirdo CEO anecdote' as a hook into why a company failed trope. Make no mistake: if Babylon were currently worth $20bn, Antigua standups and calling employees Babylonians would be the subject of business-school case studies.
That said, this is a puff piece in Wired for so many reasons, not least of which is the question of whether or not app-based diagnosis and triage is a good idea. It seems to me almost certainly the future, and while Wired notes that a UK physician thinks Babylon sucked at this, it makes no effort to review any recent literature on AI capabilities. My limited understanding is that AI capabilities for triage and diagnosis are pretty hopeful right now.
I guess: "IPOed too early, didn't preserve cash, got caught in the end of zero interest rate investing" is too short to deserve a full article.
Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
#9What's the warning exactly? I'm pretty sure absolutely everyone involved in running that company made loads and loads of money all along the way.
Someone should see if GPT can summarize the main points but it's the usual startup problems, growing too fast and failing to deliver on the company's main value proposition because of employee turnover and bad hiring practices.
Yeah I guess ultimately I'm just saying even "failed" startups are generally a huge financial/career boon to everyone involved, so long as it was just a business failure. The only real loser here is the VC.
Re: The Fall of Babylon is a warning to AI unicorns
#10There's a difference between a company that overextends itself and fails to live up to its own promises, and the current explosion of LLMs. Are there some snake-oily VC pitches that over-promise what LLMs can do? For sure. The big distinction is that LLMs already have a whole bunch of things they're great at while Babylon was never really able to perform even one of it's promised features very well.
> The big distinction is that LLMs already have a whole bunch of things they're great at
I would say mediocre not great, and it is up to market to decide if quality threshold is crossed. So far there is no reliable data that some LLM startup started making good money and clients didn't leave after 1 year of mediocre results.