181–190 of 215 posts
Pets.com→Chewy Webvan → Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh Kozmo.com → Postmates, Uber Eats, Gopuff Boo.com (fashion) → Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, ASOS Broadcast.com → YouTube, Netflix, Twitch The dot-com bubble didn’t prove the internet was a fad — it proved the internet was inevitable, but the valuations assumed adoption would happen in 2 years instead of 15–20. To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much qui…
Pets.com→Chewy Webvan → Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh Kozmo.com → Postmates, Uber Eats, Gopuff Boo.com (fashion) → Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, ASOS Broadcast.com → YouTube, Netflix, Twitch The dot-com bubble didn’t prove the internet was a fad — it proved the internet was inevitable, but the valuations assumed adoption would happen in 2 years instead of 15–20. To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much qui…
A lot of those early .com companies could have been profitable. They chose to go for rapid growth instead. Some people here probably remember discussion of users mattering more than revenue. You see that same pattern with AI now. Products are being provided for free or nearly free, and plenty is being spent on marketing.
That the key to success is developing a brand and user base faster than the next person can.
And that’s where AI makes things so hard. Creating a protective moat.
I think I'm asking for the impossible here... But is anyone trying to hedge risk in their personal finances? I'm not a real "investor" (index funds only) but I am feeling more willing to forgo gains to be more risk averse just based on my own neuroses. Maybe I cash out and buy T-bills? Gold? Bullets? What's the non-crazy person equivalent?
Particularly as it seems contagion is more AB’s more likely. That the implosion won’t be limited to the mag 7.
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> To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much quicker. Based on what? We're only seeing linear improvements for increasing spending. There's no new algorithm ideas on the horizon, just more and more hardware, in the hopes that if we throw enough RAM and CPU at the problem, it will suddenly become "AGI." No one has their eye on power budgets or sustainability or durability of the system. The human brain has…
>no new algorithm ideas on the horizon The LLM algorithms seem pretty clunky to me, like a hack designed for text translation that surprised everyone by getting quite smart. The reason the human brain is so much more energy efficient is quite likely better design/algorithms. I was watching some video comparing brain and LLM function and almost tempted to try building something myself ( https://youtu.be/3SUqBUGlyh8 ).…
I'm not too bullish on architectural gains. There are efficiencies to be had, but far closer to "+5% a year" than "+5000% in a single breakthrough".
You can try to build a novel AI architecture, at a small scale. Just be ready. This field will kick your teeth in. ML doesn't like grand ideas and isn't kind to high aspirations.
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>no new algorithm ideas on the horizon The LLM algorithms seem pretty clunky to me, like a hack designed for text translation that surprised everyone by getting quite smart. The reason the human brain is so much more energy efficient is quite likely better design/algorithms. I was watching some video comparing brain and LLM function and almost tempted to try building something myself ( https://youtu.be/3SUqBUGlyh8 ).…
Everyone says "those autoregressive transformer LLMs are obviously flawed", and then fails to come up with anything that outperforms them. I'm not too bullish on architectural gains. There are efficiencies to be had, but far closer to "+5% a year" than "+5000% in a single breakthrough". You can try to build a novel AI architecture, at a small scale. Just be ready. This field will kick your teeth in. ML doesn't like g…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone says "those autoregressive transformer LLMs are obviously flawed", and then fails to come up with anything that outperforms them. I'm not too bullish on architectural gains. There are efficiencies to be had, but far closer to "+5% a year" than "+5000% in a single breakthrough". You can try to build a novel AI architecture, at a small scale. Just be ready. This field will kick your teeth in. ML doesn't like g…
Physics is obviously incomplete and yet nobody can solve quantum gravity. Being obviously flawed doesn't mean the solution is obvious. That's the whole problem.
Pets.com→Chewy Webvan → Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh Kozmo.com → Postmates, Uber Eats, Gopuff Boo.com (fashion) → Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, ASOS Broadcast.com → YouTube, Netflix, Twitch The dot-com bubble didn’t prove the internet was a fad — it proved the internet was inevitable, but the valuations assumed adoption would happen in 2 years instead of 15–20. To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much qui…
"The dot-com bubble didn't prove the internet was a fad -" The internet is a medium, an interconnection of autonomous computer networks A "web" of hyperlinked HTML pages is one use of an internet However this internet is more than a handful of popular websites incorporated as companies Perhaps that's why it was called the "dot-com" bubble and not the "internet" bubble
Pets.com→Chewy Webvan → Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh Kozmo.com → Postmates, Uber Eats, Gopuff Boo.com (fashion) → Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, ASOS Broadcast.com → YouTube, Netflix, Twitch The dot-com bubble didn’t prove the internet was a fad — it proved the internet was inevitable, but the valuations assumed adoption would happen in 2 years instead of 15–20. To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much qui…
Blockchain --> ?
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The value was obvious almost immediately, but it was obscured by flashy get rich quick attempts. Google chose not to make money at first but that was a business decision, not a necessity: people were paying tons of money for ads and referrals years before they were founded. That’s part of the difference with AI now: the internet immediately generated significant value almost instantly for relatively modest investment…
> The value was obvious almost immediately, but it was obscured by flashy get rich quick attempts. Google chose not to make money at first but that was a business decision, not a necessity: people were paying tons of money for ads and referrals years before they were founded. All I can say is, that was the opposite of what I've heard. Did you participate? Also, Google was many years after Netscape's IPO, seen as the…
In Google's case, the key thing was that they were out-competing in what was already an established market. Search companies were making money from ads and sales referrals, so the questions were things like marketshare and efficiency rather than the ability to make revenue at all, whereas Netscape struggled with that once Microsoft used their Windows monopoly to set the price for browsers at $0. They tried to sell server software but that was a different market with limited synergy for browsers and there was a ton of competition even if they'd been better at writing software.
I mention all of that because one thing to remember is that the dotcoms weren't the only game in town. A lot of people focused on them because the IPOs and market valuations were wild by traditional standards but most of the real money and energy was in established businesses moving online since there were clear and immediate benefits from doing so. When the bubble popped, that stuff didn't really change and a ton of people moved from dotcom jobs to traditional companies.
I worked for a web development company at the time and we were turning away business for years because there were so many companies looking to add a web presence to their existing business. It made quite an interesting contrast to our startup clients who tended to be a lot more focused on stock prices rather than business fundamentals. I remember being on a call with pets.com people who were basically openly stating that they were basically frittering time away waiting for the IPO to make them rich, whereas our customers who were in manufacturing, banking, insurance, etc. were a lot more realistic about working within a budget to do something they would actually turn a profit from.
Re: Windows 95, the web drove a lot of its success. That was around the time normal people could see a lot of immediate personal benefit from being online–shopping, recipes, stock trading, research, forums, games, dating, porn—and Win95 was the first version of Windows to ship with built-in TCP/IP and a web browser, not to mention being a lot closer to the competition on usability. For a lot of PC users, especially in business, the web was what sold them on the need to pay more to have a GUI, mouse, etc. and while that was possible with Windows 3.1 it really went mainstream around the time Windows 95 came out (Windows NT was too demanding on hardware for most budgets outside of engineering/development).
The internet was monumental and valuable, offering instant conveyance of media and data. AI is monumental, allowing instant access to near infinite data; but whether instant access is as valuable as instant conveyance yet alone five times the value, appears to be the question Honestly anyone who thinks AI has intrinsic value to rival the GDP of nations is a bagholder in denial and I'll be happy to buy your puts.
AI if it gets better will be thinking / intellectual work which is a different category.
I remember in the 90s people would say the internet will bring instant conveyance of media including video and people were like yeah right I can just about get one page of crappy text in a minute over the unreliable dial up modem. It's like that now with AI thinking.