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The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

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Re: The only moat left is money?

#191

Post by agentifysh »

scoofy wrote: post #184

So, 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…

This seems overly pessimistic

As scalability becomes more accessible like with coding agents

The less it becomes about money but distribution

While money can buy you the latter it may not compound to something that is sustainable

Re: The only moat left is money?

#192

Post by pier25 »

scoofy wrote: post #184

So, 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…

> if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable

I guess it also means that if you build something for a niche audience then big companies will never be interested in it.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#193

Post by zabzonk »

ericmcer wrote: post #176
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…

Seriously you can ship in a week things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago. LLMs are just glue between pieces of your code you still need to be able to plug them into a coherent architecture to do something impressive.

> things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago

such as?

Re: The only moat left is money?

#194

Post by gorjusborg »

These types of takes are getting really tiring. The game isn't over, just the metagame.

I'm not saying I have the next metagame figured out, but AI doesn't magically solve all the worlds problems by existing. It likely even creates a new classes of problems. In such an environment there's going to be opportunity.

Are the software shops and devs who were winning at churning out SaaS products going to be the best suited to this new environment? Maybe not, but adaptation wins over non-adaptation, something that has always been the case.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#195

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

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…

Buddy, my wife vibe coded an app that solves her PTO tracking problem in 1 shot.

Her payroll company was going to charge her an extra $200 a month.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#197

Post by bccdee »

mothballed wrote: post #68
exceptione wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A free market is not a zero sum game indeed. Monopolies turn it into a zero sum game. To keep a market free, you have to regulate it. Wealth concentration is dangerous for democracy, the markets and society.

I think you have it backwards. Regulation is what enables monopolies. There is no monopoly for any of the major industries like cow herding or cellular telephone service in Somalia despite almost no effective regulation. There is not even a monopoly of pirates despite them willing to use violence to try and enforce a monopoly. If you look at the history of the US, for instance, railroad regulation was brought forth l…

> Regulation is what enables monopolies

That's patently false. AT&T was a monopoly and they were broken up by antitrust regulation. The absolute most you can say is that some regulations enable monopoly. I contend that we simply should pass the good kind of regulations instead.

Monopoly is enabled by market forces such as economies of scale. Monopolization is a natural market process which happens on its own unless it is actively prevented.

> big pharma loves high regulatory barriers because it keeps competitors out

The FDA, for all the flaws of its current incarnation, is the archetype of necessary regulation. Pre-FDA, the free market did nothing whatsoever to prevent nauseating practices like the adulteration of milk with powdered plaster, lead, and cow brains. The history there is fun but quite gross.

> Somalia

What is notable about Somalia is not its lack of regulation, but the fact that it is perhaps THE least stable country on the planet. It is not the basis for any useful comparison here.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#198

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> 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.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#199

Post by sarchertech »

arrsingh wrote: post #175
showerst wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean that _all_ AI built stuff is useless, just that the number of products where 'marketing budget' is the bottleneck is dwarfed by the number of tools that aren't that special in the first place. If you have a product that: 1. Solves a real problem people would pay for 2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or competitors 3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential custom…

I think item #2 in your list is the real kicker here. Given that AI can write code the threshold for "trivially replicable" is going down. Unless your thing has strong network effects or a large capex requirement (ex: GPU infra) its easily replicated and I think that's really what makes things hard.

Most business software that was truly trivially replicable with AI, was already trivially replicable with the prototyping tools we had available.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#200

Post by rfw300 »

nickelpro wrote: post #173

> a paid, invite-only social network where every person is verified human and there's no algorithm This seems like an incredibly niche product that only a handful of people are interested in to begin with. It isn't an notable or surprising result that building it resulted in little interest from general audiences.

It also strikes me as being in competition with, you know, a group chat.
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