Earlier quoted context omitted.
automation makes every job scalable, no?
Do you expect we’ll have AGA, artificial general automation?
I do. But it will take some time to get there.
The only moat left is money?
211–220 of 398 posts
Re: The only moat left is money?
#212Re: The only moat left is money?
#213Coding agents are good, but once the complexity is high they're not good enough. Eventually your agent won't be able to make changes to your code base without introducing bugs with every change. In my experience, the agents aren't very good with abstractions yet, and no amount of testing can completely paper over that problem. So yes, the industry is changing dramatically and at a breathtaking rate, but I don't think…
Not just complexity, but also anything requiring any actual ingenuity. It's impressive how "junior" it can be, with its (current) statistical shackles. Worse, if you flat tell it what to do, if your approach is too far into the statistical weeds, it'll flounder like crazy.
what is an example?
Re: The only moat left is money?
#214The OP should read up on business strategy, probably starting with Porter's Five Forces.
Hint: Money is a nice thing to have but it is very definitely not a moat.
If a company is making above market returns and the only thing stopping a potential competitor from competing with them (aka the company's so-called "moat") is that "it takes money", that company does NOT have a moat.
It's very easy for a potential competitor to calculate that, after x-months or y-years, they will have made enough profits to pay for the cost of building the competing product. As long as that amount of time is finite, there is excess profit for a competitor to take, and the company will find it's so called "moat" wasn't a moat at all.
This isn't a new thing. It's been a fact for centuries or millenia. It's one of the many things that makes success in business hard.
Porter's Five Forces is one distillation of the foundational principles on which moats can be built (and yes, this is a non-trivial subject, so success in this area generally does take more effort than just reading or skimming the Wikipedia page, but if you had to distill it down to one sentence, it's probably "try to build something that has network effects").
Re: The only moat left is money?
#215Kith looks interesting, but the main problem there is verifiability. How would it keep bad actors out? How does it verify posts by invitees aren't AI generated?
It does sound interesting and I signed up for the wait list. But I actually don't like pure chronological order. It feels like I have to look at everything to find the good stuff. Here I probably won't miss out too much if I check the front page once a day.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#216This is certainly one conclusion that could be drawn. Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software. Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money. We still live in a world where most ind…
> as building software gets easier [...] new entrants to displace Bad Old Software This didn't happen for music. It is much easier to create/record music today than in the 70s and 80s, but the music created today is mostly boring AI music and not new exiting/inventing music.
> the music created today is mostly boring
One thing hasn't changed: people get older and hate on music that the youth like.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#217> The value of human thinking is going down. Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.
> Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.
How do you define value?
I mean, if the demand remains the same and the supply goes stratospheric, the value has to go down.
After all, purchasers don't very well care that your product has creativity, etc and that that other identical product was just an AI cloning your product.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#218So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago. He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to comp…
automation makes every job scalable, no?
That is the ultimate goal. We are very far from it for many jobs.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#219This 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…
> 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 well. This is a very naive take. Any good idea you have can now be cloned trivial in no time at all. The clones just need to out spend you on marketing even though it is your idea that the LLM cloned.
So where are the AI clones of MS Office, JetBrains IDEs, Whatsapp, Obsidian, etc. so far?
Re: The only moat left is money?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
can you automate a tailor?
Isn't tailors by and large already outcompeted by cheap new clothes?
cheap new clothes
Uh.. I don't mean to be that guy, but tailors aren't even operating in that market.
People who use tailors aren't interested in off the rack items.
Even when they do purchase off the rack or even secondhand items..
they'll go have some of those items tailored.