Can you frame your question in a single sentence? Even after reading everything you wrote above, I’m not clear what the essence of your question really is.
Why is there not an AI hiring spree in tech?
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#12Two hypotheses: 1) LLMs just aren't good enough 2) Making a billion dollar company is too expensive. Netflix lost money for years. Amazon lost money for years. Tesla lost money for a decade. Spotify took 18 years to become profitable. The AI companies are losing billions of dollars each month.
Agree LLMs are more like a calculator than the person who uses it. You actually still need the person to use it! And you want that anyway for accountability and ownership. That's one of the big reasons I think companies should be hoarding AI talent right now.
And 2 - yeah I really mean "product focused" companies, not these YC AI wrapper replicas you see everywhere (no offense to YC but hey, they know what they are doing lol). Those companies must be only there to drive usage to the model providers they wrap.
The disruptive potential is not limited to those who use AI, or those who offer it in their product to end users. The potential is here regardless. Because of the fact workers use it in their workflows - in Adobe software, in their IDE, and so-on, it's effectively here.
The company does not need to do anything special - just hire.
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#13AI is just not that good.
Exactly - meaning it doesn't replace employees.
But here's another thought: Code and pixels are still cheaper than ever before.
Another one: The earning potential from code and pixels is the same or greater than it was before AI.
Put it together. If it was real estate where land was cheap but selling at the same rate as before, then investors would be all over it.
Innovation is something you have to believe in - I get that - but from a purely finance perspective why is there not a massive movement to obtain swaths of low cost, high potential IP? Data, engagement, emails and cards on file. Series A-F growth, greater fools and IPOs - either way it's massively generative of productive wealth, and you'll get a few game changers here and there.
I fail to see why it's not a great opportunity for, say, a $1B+ fund in just about any category.
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#14It's simple: AI can't really write software. AI is good in generating garbage code averaged from millions of repos. Here is an example of software that can scale with a single person assuming AI can write software: a web-based alternative to Photoshop built on wasm. Figma is analogous to that and it's worth $10Bn.
The world runs on garbage code from millions of repos.
I agree with you that it doesn't replace a person, but it certainly makes code a lot cheaper.
If code is cheaper than ever, and the earning potential is the same. Why aren't investors all over it?
And I'll 1-up your Photoshop example with https://photopea.com
Made by 1 person, I use it literally every day.
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#15AI is not just disrupting companies and contributing for layoffs but it's also changing the buyers and customers. Why build a new Google when the potential Google customers now just get their results from LLMs instead of SERPs? How to be the next Jobs when there's no actual new product, just essentially an assistant tool? How to create the next Disney, Netflix, Blizzard or Pixar when LLM's are still not good enough t…
There are opportunities to build a new Google without AI. In that case AI creates an opportunity in an unexpected way. If Google goes all-in on AI, the opportunity is wide open for someone else.
And we do see that (Proton, DuckDuckGo, even iCloud is becoming very Google-like in recent years).
As for "AI is not good enough" I remain unconvinced - I've seen production quality work, granted not 1-shot from a model but produced by a talented artist.
I never said AGI, (I believe that's only a marketing term from OpenAI). The other stuff at the end of your comment has nothing to do with what I'm talking about here! I really am focused on the low cost of code, video, and other media compared to the massive opportunity to serve content to people worldwide and how much money and disruptive potential is being left on table.
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#16AI doesn’t solve the real problems. It’s surface level pseudo productivity.
The only new things or features I’ve really seen are related to AI. So it’s just AI adding AI to stuff. I’m still waiting for this big renaissance of innovation.
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#17It's simple: AI can't really write software. AI is good in generating garbage code averaged from millions of repos. Here is an example of software that can scale with a single person assuming AI can write software: a web-based alternative to Photoshop built on wasm. Figma is analogous to that and it's worth $10Bn.
The world runs on garbage code from millions of repos. I agree with you that it doesn't replace a person, but it certainly makes code a lot cheaper. If code is cheaper than ever, and the earning potential is the same. Why aren't investors all over it? And I'll 1-up your Photoshop example with https://photopea.com Made by 1 person, I use it literally every day.
Assume for a moment that the code of cost is zero, and the barrier to entry for coding is gone. Furthermore, let's say you don't want to do anything innovative, you just want to clone, so a huge part of your product management burden goes away.
The playing field is now completely level with any and all comers who want to attack Adobe. You now not only have one huge competitor, but the potential for hundreds of other competitors.
How are you going to convince someone that your execution is the one that's going to displace Adobe and steal market share? Why would I invest in your variant rather than one of your competitors?
The logical conclusion of this is that even if Adobe released its source and the theoretical price drops to zero, you're finding yourself at best in the same situation as Linux distro companies in 1999.
Assuming perfect LLM code generation (a huge assumption that is nowhere close to reality), a company built on this is going to replay the same open source dynamics, with additional steps/expense.
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#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world runs on garbage code from millions of repos. I agree with you that it doesn't replace a person, but it certainly makes code a lot cheaper. If code is cheaper than ever, and the earning potential is the same. Why aren't investors all over it? And I'll 1-up your Photoshop example with https://photopea.com Made by 1 person, I use it literally every day.
Assume for a moment that the code of cost is zero, and the barrier to entry for coding is gone. Furthermore, let's say you don't want to do anything innovative, you just want to clone, so a huge part of your product management burden goes away. The playing field is now completely level with any and all comers who want to attack Adobe. You now not only have one huge competitor, but the potential for hundreds of other…
"Photopea: A free Photoshop alternative making millions" –https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33334521
"How Photopea Quietly Beat Adobe into a $2.8M Business" – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/team-budget-problem-how-photo...
I wouldn't bet against him yet.
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#19AI can help you write code, but it still can't help you get customers, or attention. In fact, it makes it worse . AI helps with introducing more noise, more content, and more people clamoring for attention. It's a lemon market.
Mainly am asking why those with attention (or VCs who can get it) are not introducing more noise, more content, and more clamoring - as you put it. I thought that was the whole idea? Lemon market - maybe - but it remains to be seen IMO. The market seems almost entirely unrealized. There are only a few major AI companies in the media, and it seems like innovation is largely directionless or stalled. I haven't really s…
'those with attention' is a unicorn. Look at Facebook + Google - they own attention. Yet a huge % of products they make are duds. It is much much harder than you think to get lots of people to use your product.
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#20AI doesn’t solve the real problems. It’s surface level pseudo productivity. The only new things or features I’ve really seen are related to AI. So it’s just AI adding AI to stuff. I’m still waiting for this big renaissance of innovation.
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