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Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

joincolossus.com

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Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#31

Post by c22 »

lubujackson wrote: post #20
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 pro…

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 sub…

Not a guarantee. I used to find abandoned .edu mailing lists so I could create accounts at arbitrary schools.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#32

Post by benoau »

Waterluvian wrote: post #17

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

Yep this is a huge enabler - previously having someone "do art" could easily cost you thousands for a small game, a month even, and this heavily constrained what you could make and locked you into what you had planned and how much you had planned. With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art, audio etc it's an incremental cost if any, you can explore ideas, you can throw art out, pivot in new directions.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#34

Post by hermannj314 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #12
bix6 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Maybe they can solve world happiness or hunger instead? Kill all people who are unhappy or hungry.

That's been the human solution to those problems, it is possible AGI would probably find a different solution.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#35

Post by giveita »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #4
kg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acces…

>> 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 pro…

Many Facebooks existed before Facebook. What you were waiting for is not social connections but modern startup strategies. Not sure if Zuck was intentional, but like a bacteria it incubated in a warm Petri dish at 50 degrees C (university dorms as an electronic face book) and then spread from there.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#36

Post by kristianc »

> Yet some technological innovations, though societally transformative, generate little in the way of new wealth; instead, they reinforce the status quo. Fifteen years before the microprocessor, another revolutionary idea, shipping containerization, arrived at a less propitious time, when technological advancement was a Red Queen’s race, and inventors and investors were left no better off for non-stop running.

This collapses an important distinction. The containerization pioneers weren’t made rich - that’s correct, Malcolm McLean, the shipping magnate who pioneered containerization didn’t die a billionaire. It did however generate enormous wealth through downstream effects by underpinning the rise of East Asian export economies, offshoring, and the retail models of Walmart, Amazon and the like. Most of us are much more likely to benefit from downstream structural shifts of AI rather than owning actual AI infrastructure.

This matters because building the models, training infrastructure, and data centres is capital-intensive, brutally competitive, and may yield thin margins in the long run. The real fortunes are likely to flow to those who can reconfigure industries around the new cost curve.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#37

Post by blibble »

bix6 wrote: post #7
kg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acces…

> 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?

> If they actually reach AGI they will be rich enough. Maybe they can solve world happiness or hunger instead?

we could have solved world hunger with the amount of money and effort spent on shitty AI

likely decarbonisation of the grid too, with plenty left over

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#39

Post by awesome_dude »

kg wrote: post #3
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #2

You can't make such generalized statements about anything in computing/business. The AI revolution has only just got started. We've barely worked out basic uses for it. No-one has yet worked out revolutionary new things that are made possible only by AI - mostly we are just shoveling in our existing world view.

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 acces…

> 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 in n weeks/months time, currently we can only say "the destination will be in which is typically "

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)

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#40

Post by bix6 »

blibble wrote: post #37
bix6 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> If they actually reach AGI they will be rich enough. Maybe they can solve world happiness or hunger instead? we could have solved world hunger with the amount of money and effort spent on shitty AI likely decarbonisation of the grid too, with plenty left over

I think the issue is that world hunger hasn’t been SaaS’d yet.
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