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The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

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Re: The only moat left is money?

#121

Post by r_lee »

cyrusradfar wrote: post #53

I appreciate the conversation the post initiates. Nevertheless, by counter-example -- OpenClaw's creator was just recruited by people with more capital than countries. If they could "re-produce" it with their capital, they would've preferred that. Whatever he has, is still a moat. What that is, is debatable. Is it brand? Is it his creativity? Is it trust/autheticity? A vision? Ownership of a repo or leadership of tha…

like another guy said, it's rhe marketing thing. the open claw thing became a hit sensation in the news etc. and now OpenAI can claim it as theirs. they have infinite money anyways, so might as well buy stuff like that I guess.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#122

Post by trashb »

elliotbnvl wrote: post #15
ossa-ma wrote: post #11

> The value of human thinking is going down. Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.

I used to agree completely, and a part of me still does. But the part of me that's scared that this isn't true is getting louder and louder. I'm a novelist and software engineer. The value of one of those skills is trending to zero. I'm not seeing much to suggest, in the face of the hockey stick of doom, that the other isn't.

If anyone can create what they want won't coming up with good ideas be the value, therefore the creativity will become more important?

I don't know what you wrote and I agree that it is very sad that the skill of writing is very undervalued at this moment. But I think that trend is not new and in reality not created by AI (just accelerated). But I think value of writing was never in the writing itself but the knowledge and ideas behind the writing. Because mechanics of writing sped up (handwritten, typewriter, word processor). But the process of writing a novel did not speed up significantly as the bottleneck is the ideas and iteration on those ideas not the delivery of the output. Similar to how programming is more then typing code.

So I think the real crisis right now is that people equate typing speed with programming speed (or writing speed) and due to advances in the former undervalue the later.

Sadly the reality is that it won't pay for the bills anymore.

Perhaps in a while people will realize how important the quality of ideas (and the iteration to arrive at them) is.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#123

Post by fullStackOasis »

elliotbnvl wrote: post #74
Rapzid wrote: post #69

> The value of human thinking is going down. You probably knew this. The corollary is rarely mentioned: the value of a human eyeball is going up, because there are only so many of them and there are now infinite things that want to be looked at. Hey, so I'm thinking about getting my car washed.. This article reads as overly hyperbolic; cashing in on the AI hysteria. AI derangement.

I am not cashing in on AI hysteria. I am AI hysterical. lol. Kinda joking but kinda not. How do you have chill while the world is crashing down? I’m young so that’s probably part of it, only ~12 years into my career and haven’t experienced too many world defining shifts.

I like the idea of you https://joinkith.com/ but I don't see how it can possibly work. These are the issues:

There are people who are sick of social media and will never be convinced to join up again. They've already left the building and aren't looking for anything else. I'm not quite there, but almost.

Other people are using established social media simply because that's where their people and orgs publish. I am eternally frustrated when my local cafe uses Insta or FB for their "web presence", but I'm not going to be the one to convince them to use something else. I hate that my local rock climbing partner finder group is located on FB, but what can I do about it? I also think it sucks that there are thousands of people in that group - I soon realized that this group simply doesn't work for me, since rock climbing requires high trust and I can't trust thousands of people.

Many people resist the idea of signing up for yet another social media account, esp when none of their people/orgs are already there. For example, I've sometimes thought of starting a Heylo group for local rock climbers to find partners - this might actually help me find more climbing partners. But I've never tried it. I just don't think people will join. The barrier to entry is (1) install app (2) create login (3) use app. SFAICT no one wants to do this if they're already on FB and already are a member of the group there. Even people that I know manage finding partners with email lists (gag). Can you imagine how much higher the barrier to entry would be if adding (4) you have to pay a monthly fee?

I do like the idea of "only allowed to invite someone that you know in meatspace" but how is this enforced? I also recognize that requiring payment could help increase the trust level, and I recognize that members have to pay in some way (ads, fees, sponsors, privacy violations) in order to support the platform.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#124

Post by georgemcbay »

elliotbnvl wrote: post #74
Rapzid wrote: post #69

> The value of human thinking is going down. You probably knew this. The corollary is rarely mentioned: the value of a human eyeball is going up, because there are only so many of them and there are now infinite things that want to be looked at. Hey, so I'm thinking about getting my car washed.. This article reads as overly hyperbolic; cashing in on the AI hysteria. AI derangement.

I am not cashing in on AI hysteria. I am AI hysterical. lol. Kinda joking but kinda not. How do you have chill while the world is crashing down? I’m young so that’s probably part of it, only ~12 years into my career and haven’t experienced too many world defining shifts.

> I’m young so that’s probably part of it, only ~12 years into my career and haven’t experienced too many world defining shifts.

I'm old (52) and a bit AI hysterical despite being well aware of the reasons I supposedly shouldn't be (variations of Jevon's Paradox, the fact that we've had similar disruptions before, etc).

I can't help but think that both the speed and massive breadth of the AI disruption across so many industries all at once makes this a very different risk than anything we've experienced before, in my lifetime or before it.

It also doesn't help that at least here in the US this is all occurring when our government is both openly corrupt and particularly dysfunctional at solving any of the real-world problems facing its own citizens.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#125

Post by steveBK123 »

clickety_clack wrote: post #85
showerst wrote: post #3

This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem. The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving…

This seems to me like the few booms I’ve seen before. Absolutely crazy valuations with very little behind them, massive hype, everyone’s unemployed uncle suddenly becoming a shallow expert. It’s probably going to end the same way too, once the upward momentum dissipates and things start to retreat to “fundamentals”, we’ll find out that there were a lot fewer solid points in the market than we were all told to expect,…

We are well on our way to the popping of inflated expectations.

Currently people are taking AI hype too seriously and extrapolating its success out in such a way as to discount the value of other businesses.

Example - last week a bunch of trucking stocks crashed 10-20% because a $6M company that pivoted from Karaoke to AI demoed something.

This is just insane. Sure, if say Waymo is pivoting into commercial trucking.. maybe. But people are basically shorting minutemaid lemonade because their neighbors kids opened up a lemonade stand. Demos are easy, products are hard.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#126

Post by tensor »

autoconfig wrote: post #63

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…

> Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.

Only for developers. Outside of software creation is still hard. Global markets giving access to excellent manufacturing sure does help, but software is a bubble.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#127

Post by 999900000999 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #18

"The value of human thinking is going down." No! I fundamentally reject this. The value of unoriginal thinking has gone down. Thinking which is quotidian and pedestrian has become even more worthless than it already was. The value of true, original human thinking has gone up even higher than it ever has been. Do we think no new companies will ever succeed now? Of course not. Who, then, will succeed? It will be innova…

You need money to explore ideas.

Or an absurd amount of skill.

Say Amy is a great NodeJS and front end programer.

She can work on her own projects , but her kids can't eat hope and dreams.

Or she can get a job at SoulCrusher Solutions trying to maximum advertising revenue.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#128

Post by tencentshill »

plagiarist wrote: post #86
cyrusradfar wrote: post #53

I appreciate the conversation the post initiates. Nevertheless, by counter-example -- OpenClaw's creator was just recruited by people with more capital than countries. If they could "re-produce" it with their capital, they would've preferred that. Whatever he has, is still a moat. What that is, is debatable. Is it brand? Is it his creativity? Is it trust/autheticity? A vision? Ownership of a repo or leadership of tha…

It was 100% the brand. The creativity may be a bonus for OpenAI. They saw a shitload of people buying Mac Minis specifically for this software. I don't find a single counter-example compelling. I guess as evidence that "only moat" is somewhat hyperbolic? But to counter the counter-example, what would have happened if he did not join? OpenAI can just write and release their own version. They can then do the typical lo…

He was competition. They can't have people running their own self-hosted LLMs on their own hardware, and realizing it AI be useful without a subscription!

Re: The only moat left is money?

#129

Post by carlosjobim »

Is the purpose of space exploration to build rockets? Or is the purpose to deliver things and people into orbit and to other worlds?

Is the purpose of a computer program to use processing, network and memory? Or is it to handle and manipulate information to give results which are useful to people?

Now the moat of having memorized intentionally convoluted and complicated programming languages has been taken away. Exactly like the printing press removed the monopoly on information which was held exclusively by priests and monks.

When tools make a job easier, they open up new markets for people to do and sell things which were too costly to offer before. AI translation alone means that small businesses can open up several markets they didn't have any access to, broadening the number of potential customers immensely.

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