The End of the Beginning
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The End of the Beginning
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Re: The End of the Beginning
#2His graph conveniently stops in the 1980s. Since then, there have been many new US car companies, mostly in the electric of self-driving spaces. Lots of little city cars, new imports from China, too.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#3Thats a very bold claim, that goes against Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis tech is accelerating. Maybe (unlikely) that cloud/mobiles is the end game for silicon. But what about quantum? What about biological? What about Nano? What about AI? Literally there are a ton of potential generational changes in the making that could turn everything on its head again
Re: The End of the Beginning
#4Thats a very bold claim, that goes against Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis tech is accelerating. Maybe (unlikely) that cloud/mobiles is the end game for silicon. But what about quantum? What about biological? What about Nano? What about AI? Literally there are a ton of potential generational changes in the making that could turn everything on its head again
I don't think the claim is technology in general, but non quantum based computing.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#5Thats a very bold claim, that goes against Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis tech is accelerating. Maybe (unlikely) that cloud/mobiles is the end game for silicon. But what about quantum? What about biological? What about Nano? What about AI? Literally there are a ton of potential generational changes in the making that could turn everything on its head again
I don't think the claim is technology in general, but non quantum based computing.
It's a substitute computing product though - kind of like electric cars for combustion cars.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#6This is wrong on merit, and I am not sure why it is presented this way.
The difference between a car company and a software company is economy of scale. I.e. economy of scale dominate the physical world but does not exist in the software world since I can replicate software at zero cost.
In addition, new tools and new processes for software has increased the productivity times fold, which means that you need fewer developers for new software.
I predict two shifts in the tech world:
1) Move to the edge. Specially for AI, there is really no need for a central public cloud due to latency, privacy, and dedicated hardware chips. I.e. most of AI traffic is inference traffic which should be done on the edge.
2) Kubernetes operators for replacing cloud services. The value add of the public cloud is managing complexity.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#7Thats a very bold claim, that goes against Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis tech is accelerating. Maybe (unlikely) that cloud/mobiles is the end game for silicon. But what about quantum? What about biological? What about Nano? What about AI? Literally there are a ton of potential generational changes in the making that could turn everything on its head again
Why is Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis particularly important to contrast other hypotheses against? What sets it apart in relevance and/or authority?
Re: The End of the Beginning
#8This is wrong on merit, and I am not sure why it is presented this way. The difference between a car company and a software company is economy of scale. I.e. economy of scale dominate the physical world but does not exist in the software world since I can replicate software at zero cost. In addition, new tools and new processes for software has increased the productivity times fold, which means that you need fewer de…
If you read more of Ben's writing, he talks extensively about how software companies dominate market share through network effects and vertical integration.
You don't hear him talk about economies of scale because marginal costs are negligible for software companies. Besides, network effects and vertical integration are sufficiently powerful to control the market.
> In addition, new tools and new processes for software has increased the productivity times fold, which means that you need fewer developers for new software.
There are other barriers to entry besides the cost of writing software, like product, sales, operations, and most importantly, network.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#9His graph conveniently stops in the 1980s. Since then, there have been many new US car companies, mostly in the electric of self-driving spaces. Lots of little city cars, new imports from China, too.
He specifically mentions excluding imports. Outside of Tesla, what are the new American car companies that made any kind of mark?
Re: The End of the Beginning
#10This is wrong on merit, and I am not sure why it is presented this way. The difference between a car company and a software company is economy of scale. I.e. economy of scale dominate the physical world but does not exist in the software world since I can replicate software at zero cost. In addition, new tools and new processes for software has increased the productivity times fold, which means that you need fewer de…
If you read more of Ben's writing, he talks extensively about how software companies dominate market share through network effects and vertical integration. You don't hear him talk about economies of scale because marginal costs are negligible for software companies. Besides, network effects and vertical integration are sufficiently powerful to control the market. > In addition, new tools and new processes for softwa…
However, the network effect in tech can be leapfrogged due to the zero marginal cost (as shown in this post). I.e. what network effect do you get from doing ML inference in the cloud?
The case for big tech today is still the economy of scale and not network effects (maybe facebook have those, but it exists only if the interface to facebook does not change).
The big tech players have economy of scale, due to their ability to use automation and offload the risk of managing complexity (I.e. one AWS engineer can manager 1000's of machines with AWS software).
No wonder, that the software that manages the public cloud is still closed source.
However, with Kubernetes operators, there is a way to move those capabilities into any Kubernetes cluser.