Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future • Hacker News Board

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#141

Post by scrubs » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:48 AM UTC

jampa wrote: post #24

I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than the…

There's a qualitative difference between ok transport and better transport vs AI.

If we're going to talk cars, I think what the Japanese did to the big three in the 1980s would have been far more on point.

AI is encumbered by AGI which is further encumbered by the delta between what is claimed possible (around the corner) and what is. That's a whole different ball game with wildly different risk/reward tradeoffs.

Learning about history post buggies didn't do much for me.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#142

Post by yobbo » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 11:06 AM UTC

keeda wrote: post #103

An interesting aspect that doesn't seem captured by TFA and similar articles is that it is not a specific kind of business that is being disrupted, but rather an entire genre of labor on which they all rely to varying extents: knowledge work. Furthermore, "knowledge work" is a very broad term that encompasses an extremely broad variety of skillsets (engineering, HR, sales, legal, medical...) And knowledge workers are…

If "knowledge work" is under such threat from GenAI, it is revealing what extent it is actually a euphemism for "clerical work".

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#143

Post by scrubs » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 11:09 AM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #34

jampa wrote: post #24

I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than the…

I can strain the analogy just enough to get something useful from it. If we laboriously create software shops in the classical way, and suddenly a new shop appears that is buggy, noisy, etc but eventually outperforms all other shops, then the progenitors of those new shops are going to succeed while the progenitors of these old shops are not going to make it. It's a strain. The problem is AI is a new tech that replac…

I agree as I point out in other comments here - you said it with more detail.

AGI + robot is way beyond a mere change in product conception or implementation. It's beyond craftsmen v. modern forms of manufacturing we sometimes read about with guns.

It is a strain indeed to get from cars v.buggies to AGI. I dare say that without AGI as part and parcel to AI the internalization of AI must be necessarily quite different.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#144

Post by nailer » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 12:12 PM UTC

bpt3 wrote: post #51

nailer wrote: post #7

From the article: _____ The first cars were: - Loud and unreliable - Expensive and hard to repair - Starved for fuel in a world with no gas stations - Unsuitable for the dirt roads of rural America _____ Reminds me of Linux in the late 90s. Talking to Solaris, HPUX or NT4 advocates, many were sure Linux was not going to succeed because: - It didn't support multiple processors - There was nobody to pay for commercial…

Linux won on cost once it was "good enough". AI isn't free (by any definition of free) and is a long way away from "good enough" to be a general replacement for the status quo in a lot of domains. The areas where it does make sense to use, it's been in use for years, if not longer, without anyone screaming from the rooftops about it.

By the time Linux won it was better - by 2003 you could take a workload that took eight hours on some ridiculous Sun machine and run it in 40 minutes on a Xeon box.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#145

Post by snowwrestler » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #59

myrmidon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if popular models cheat at this, but if I ask for it (o3-mini) I get correct results/intermediate values (for 794206 * 43124, chosen randomly). I do suspect this is only achieveable because the model was specifically trained for this. But the same is true for humans; children can't really "reason themselves" into basic arithmetic-- that's a skill that requires considerable training. I do concede that thi…

I just tested it with Copilot with two random 45 digit numbers and it gets it correct by translating it into Python and running it in the background. When I asked to not use any external tools, it got the first five, the last two, and a hand full more digits in the middle correct, out of 90. It also fails to calculate the 45 intermediate products - one number times one digit from the other - including multiplying by…

When kids learn multiplication, they learn it on paper, not just in their heads. LLMs don’t have access to paper.

“Do long arithmetic entirely in your mind” is not a test most humans can pass. Maybe a few savants. This makes me suspect it is not a reliable test of reasoning.

Humans also get a training run every night. As we sleep, our brains are integrating our experiences from the day into our existing minds, so we can learn things from day to day. Kids definitely do not learn long multiplication in just one day. LLMs don’t work like this; they get only one training run and that is when they have to learn everything all at once.

LLMs for sure cannot learn and reason the same way humans do. Does that mean they cannot reason at all? Harder question IMO. You’re right that Python did the math, but the LLM wrote the Python. Maybe that is like their version of “doing it on paper.”

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#146

Post by snowwrestler » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 12:45 PM UTC

Fundamentally this article is reasoning in units of “companies,” but the story is different when reasoning in terms of people.

It turns out automobile companies need way more employees than carriage companies, so the net impact on employment was positive. Then add in all the jobs around automobiles like oil, refining, fueling, repair, road construction, etc.

Do we care if companies put each other out of business via innovation? On the whole, not really. People who study economics largely consider it a positive: “creative destruction.”

The real question of LLM AI is whether it will have a net negative impact on total employment. If so, it would be the first major human technology in history to do that. In the long run I hope it does, because the human population will soon level off. If we want to keep economic growth and standards of living, we will need major advances in productivity.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#147

Post by amadeuspagel » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

This articles assumes that a company is like an organism trying to survive. In fact the company is owned by people who want to make money and how may well decide that the easiest way to do that is to make as much money as possible in the existing business and then to shut it down.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#148

Post by Takennickname » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:18 PM UTC

Ironic to read this on a site that's unusable on mobile.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#149

Post by mcswell » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

anovikov wrote: post #133

joe_the_user wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I thought Steve's point was that the carriage makers did not see "individual transportation" as their business, and they should have--if they had, they might have pivoted like Studebaker did But all 400+ carriage maker had pivoted, would they have had a chance to survive very long? Would they have all made more money pivoting? The idea that all this is only a "lack of vision" rather than hard business choices…

This. Carmaking is not viable on small scale the way carriage making is. If they all pivoted, perhaps 10 instead of 1 would have survived through 1929, the fate of all others would be the same - except staying carriage makers till the end they at least continued to extract profits, trying to all become carmakers they'd waste that money into retooling and retraining and whatnot and never made it back.

I wonder whether the reason carriage making was viable on the small scale is that there weren't any (many? Studebaker was an exception) large carriage makers. Had Henry Ford's assembly line technology been applied earlier to making carriages, would all of those small carriage makers have been put out of business sooner?

Of course the other part of this is distribution. If you had a large carriage factory in Ohio, could you have profitably shipped your product to Kansas? Or would a small Kansas carriage maker have undercut you? Seen in this way, part of the reason for the success of a few large auto makers might have been the more or less simultaneous rise of the means of transporting large products by railroad.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#150

Post by anovikov » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

mcswell wrote: post #149

anovikov wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Carmaking is not viable on small scale the way carriage making is. If they all pivoted, perhaps 10 instead of 1 would have survived through 1929, the fate of all others would be the same - except staying carriage makers till the end they at least continued to extract profits, trying to all become carmakers they'd waste that money into retooling and retraining and whatnot and never made it back.

I wonder whether the reason carriage making was viable on the small scale is that there weren't any (many? Studebaker was an exception) large carriage makers. Had Henry Ford's assembly line technology been applied earlier to making carriages, would all of those small carriage makers have been put out of business sooner? Of course the other part of this is distribution. If you had a large carriage factory in Ohio, cou…

Railroad system in the Northeast was more or less complete by 1860 and by 1880, everywhere. Miles of railway tracks in us went in reverse from ~1917 with more dismantled than built.

I believe the reason why carriage making was viable on low scale was that advantage of scale wasn't as valuable for them simply for being simpler.