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

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

#41

Post by nostrademons »

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…

I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. And for those that can't (legal, for example, or various SaaS vendors) the AI usually has a good idea of what services you'd want to engage.

Ironically though, having lots of people found startups is not good for startup founders, because it means more competition and a much harder time getting noticed. So its unclear that prosumers and startup founders will be the eventual beneficiary here either.

It would be ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity because tasks that were frequently large-dollar-value transactions now become a consumer asking their $20/month AI to do it for them.

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

#42

Post by Nevermark »

> Consumers, however, will be the biggest beneficiaries.

This looks certain. Few technologies have had as much adoption by so many individuals as quickly as AI models.

(Not saying everything people are doing has economic value. But some does, and a lot of people are already getting enough informal and personal value that language models are clearly mainstreaming.)

The biggest losers I see are successive waves of disruption to non-physical labor.

As AI capabilities accrue relatively smoothly (perhaps), labor impact will be highly unpredictable as successive non-obvious thresholds are crossed.

The clear winners are the arms dealers. The compute sellers and providers. High capex, incredible market growth.

Nobody had to spend $10 or $100 billion to start making containers.

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

#43

Post by awesome_dude »

b112 wrote: post #16
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…

You're not wrong about "change" meaning "new potential wealth streams". But not sure Facebook counts, 2004 vs 1993 shows an immense difference in network connectivity and computer ownership. No way, hands down, Facebook would be what it is, if it started in 93. It probably would have gone bankrupt, or been replaced by an upstart.

Has everyone forgotten Yahoo!

It had Geocities, chatrooms and messengers, as well as, for a while, a very strong search engine.

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

#44

Post by catlifeonmars »

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…

I have a similar problem (available assets drive/limit game dev). What is your workflow like for generative game assets?

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

#45

Post by bix6 »

amelius wrote: post #10
davidw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they actually reach AGI they will be rich enough. Maybe they can solve world happiness or hunger instead? That's what normal people might consider doing if they had a lot of money. The kind of people who actually seem to get really wealthy often have... other pursuits that are often not great for society.

Like building a rocket that can relocate us to another planet when shit hits the fan?

By us you mean a few billionaires and their staff right?

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

#46

Post by awesome_dude »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #23
lubujackson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's always a trail of competitors who almost got the magic formula right, but for some feature or luck or timing or money or something. The giant win comes from many stars aligning. Luck is a factor - it's not everything but it plays a role - luck is the description of when everything fell into place at just the right time on top of hard work and cleverness and preparedness. Google Search Facebook iPod iPhone Min…

Before iPods and iPhones, people thought that those spaces were "solved" and there was no room for "innovation"

mp3 players were commodity items, you could buy one for a couple of dollars, fill it up with your favourite music format (stolen) and off you went.

Phones too - Crackberry was the epitome of sophistication, and technological excellence.

Jobs/Apple didn't create anything "new" in those spheres, instead he added desireability, fancy UX that caught peoples' attentions

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

#47

Post by bossyTeacher »

Funny thing with people suddenly pretending we just got AI with LLMs. Arguably, AIs has been around for way longer, it just wasn't chatty. I think when people talking about AI, they are either talking about LLMs specifically or transformers. Both seem like a very reductive view of the AI field even if transformers are hottest thing around.

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

#48

Post by bossyTeacher »

nostrademons wrote: post #41
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…

I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. And for those that can't (legal, for example, or various SaaS vendors) the AI usually has a good idea of what services you…

> I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI.

You are missing the other side of the story. All those customers, those AI boosted startups want to attract also have access to AI and so, rather than engage the services of those startups, they will find that AI does a good enough job. So those startups lost most of their customers, incoming layoffs :)

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

#49

Post by catlifeonmars »

awesome_dude wrote: post #39
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. 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 s…

The weather thing doesn’t seem… realistic. Have you heard of chaotic systems?

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

#50

Post by aleph_minus_one »

hermannj314 wrote: post #34
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> it is possible AGI would probably find a different solution.

Kill all humans. :-)

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