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AI is a business model stress test

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Re: AI is a business model stress test

#41

Post by eddd-ddde »

blibble wrote: post #28
hk__2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I have to publish my book for free because I got inspiration from 100's of other books I read during my life?

false equivalence because machines are not human beings a lossy compression algorithm is not "inspired" when it is fed copyrighted input

> lossy compression algorithm is not "inspired" when it is fed copyrighted input

That's exactly what happens when you read. Copyrighted input fed straight into your brain, a lossy storage and processing machine.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#42

Post by eddythompson80 »

heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

> Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework.

Really? To me, Tailwind seemed like the pinnacle of how anyone here would say “open source software” should function. Provide a solid, truly open source, software and make money from consulting or helping others use it and selling custom built solutions around it. The main sin of Tailwind was assuming that type of business could scale to a “large business” structure as opposed to “a single dev”-type project. By a “single dev”-type I don’t mean literally one guy, but more a very lean and non-corporate or company-like structure.

Vercel (and redislabs, mongo, etc) are different because they are in the “we can run it for you” business. Which is another “open source” model I have dabbled in for a while in my career. Thinking that the honest and ethical position is to provide open source software, then offer to host it for people who don’t want to selfhost and charge for that.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#43

Post by appplication »

heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use

Not being sarcastic, but this will never be. CSS is a perfectly functional interface, but the only way it becomes less annoying is when you abstract it behind something more user friendly like tailwind or AI (or you spend years building up knowledge and intuition for its quirks and foibles).

We have decades of data at this point that fairly conclusively shows that many people find CSS as an interface inherently confusing.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#44

Post by Brybry »

theropost wrote: post #24
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

I think there is a real issue here, but I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books. The bigger problem is incentives. We built a system where writing docs, tutorials, and open technical content paid off indirectly through traffic, subscriptions, or services. LLMs get a lot of value from that work, but they also break the loop that used to send value back to the people and comp…

> We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way

The same thing happened (and is still happening) with news media and aggregation/embedding like Google News or Facebook.

I don't know if anyone has found a working solution yet. There have been some laws passed and licensing deals [1]. But they don't really seem to be working out [2].

[1] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/canada_australia_platfor...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-02/media-bargaining-code...

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#45

Post by mikojan »

heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

GPT is the middleman.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#46

Post by johnpaulkiser »

theropost wrote: post #24
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

I think there is a real issue here, but I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books. The bigger problem is incentives. We built a system where writing docs, tutorials, and open technical content paid off indirectly through traffic, subscriptions, or services. LLMs get a lot of value from that work, but they also break the loop that used to send value back to the people and comp…

There will be no royalties, simply make all the models that trained on the public internet also be required to be public.

This won't help tailwind in this case, but it'll change the answer to "Should I publish this thing free online?" from "No, because a few AI companies are going to exclusively benefit from it" to "Yes, I want to contribute to the corpus of human knowledge."

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#47

Post by iterateoften »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

I stopped writing open source projects on github because why put a bunch of work into something for others to train off of without any regard for the original projects

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#48

Post by troupo »

hk__2 wrote: post #25
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

Do I have to publish my book for free because I got inspiration from 100's of other books I read during my life?

If your book reproduces something 95% verbatim, you won't even be able to publish it.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#49

Post by reb »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #42
heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

> Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. Really? To me, Tailwind seemed like the pinnacle of how anyone here would say “open source software” should function. Provide a solid, truly open source, software and make money from consulting or helping others use it and selling custom built solutions around it. The main sin of Tailwind was assuming t…

Wasn't the tailwind team just a few people? Might be misremembering but my impression was a team under 10 people, which is tiny

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#50

Post by jamesshelley »

Framing it as a "conduit" disruption might make a lot of assumptions about the fundamental economic value of software in the future. In a world (whether near term or long term) where you can just ask the computer to make whatever software you want, what are the economics of retailing/licensing any software at all? Open source or otherwise?
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