201–210 of 429 posts
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So you’re happy to continue forever with the system we have now - governments printing with no consequence?
No, but I'm not going to invest in a bunch of grifters and con artists holding up a technically bad solution because they want money and power.
The underlying reason is that current AI businesses and models are failing to capture any significant economic value. We're going to get there, but it will take some more work. It won't be decades, but a few more years would be helpful
I see it this way to be honest:
- companies will aggresively try to use AI in the next 2-3 years, downsizing themselves in the meantime
- the 3-5 year launch mark will show that downsizing was an awful idea and took too many hits to really be worth it. I don't know if those hits will be in profits (depends on the company) but it will clearly hit that uncanny valley.
- 6-8 year mark will have studios hiring like crazy to get the talent they bled back. They won't be as big as before, but it will grow to a more sane level of operation.
- 10-12 year mark will have the "Apple" of AI finally nail the happy medium between efficiency and profitability (hopefully without devastating the workers, but who knows?). Competitors will follow throw and properly usher the promises AI is making right now.
- 15 year mark is when AI has proper pipelining, training, college courses, legal lines, etc. established and becomes standard faire, no stranger than using an IDE.
As I see it, companies and AI tech alike are trying to pretend to be the 10 year mark all the while we're currently in legal talks and figuring out what and where to use AI to begin with. In my biased opinion, I hope there's enough red tape on generative art to make it not worth it for large studios to leverage it easily (e.g. generative art loses all copyright/trademarkability, even if using owned IPs. Likely not that extreme, but close).
Well RIP Stability AI. I love their models and I love how they have changed the entire open source AI ecosystem for the better, but the writing was always on the wall for them given how unprofitable they are. I don't think much of the AI startup scene or socials groups like e/acc would have existed if it weren't for the tech that they just gave away for free. Its interesting how Stability AI and their VC funding have…
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> This was viewed as insane in the pre-ChatGPT era, and only paid off massively in retrospect. Paid off how?
Perhaps the hundreds of millions in VC investment and company value?
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Decentralized systems, peer to peer, Blockchain, smart contracts, are all important technologies with real use cases. It is not accurate to refer to any of them as simply "crypto" especially in this context.
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Midjourney is the most popular discord channel by far with 19.5M+ members, $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees. The problem has nothing to do with commercializing image gen AI and all to do with Emad/Stability having seemingly 0 sensible business plans. Seriously this seemed to be the plan: Step 1: Release SD for free Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit The vast majority of users couldn'…
Are we sure that Midjourney is still on that trajectory? I was a heavy user since the beginning but my usage has dropped to almost 0
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As a counter-point, with no VCs there's more equity left for employees.
As a counter-counter-point that gets rarely discussed on HN, VCs aren't taking as much of the pie as people think. In a 2-founder, 4-engineer company, it wouldn't be unusual to have equity be roughly: 20% investors 70% founders 2-3% employees (1% emp1, 1% emp2, 0.5% emp3, 0.25% emp4) 7% for future employees before next funding round
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Midjourney is the most popular discord channel by far with 19.5M+ members, $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees. The problem has nothing to do with commercializing image gen AI and all to do with Emad/Stability having seemingly 0 sensible business plans. Seriously this seemed to be the plan: Step 1: Release SD for free Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit The vast majority of users couldn'…
Heres a Stable Diffusion buisness idea: sign up all the celebrities and artists who are cool with AI, and provide end users / fans with an AI image generation interface, trained on their exclusive likenesses / artwork (loras). You know, the old tried and true licensed merchandise model. Everybody gets paid.
Previous controversy involving the CEO (2023): https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-di... “ In reality, Mostaque has a bachelor’s degree, not a master’s degree from Oxford. The hedge fund’s banner year was followed by one so poor that it shut down months later. The U.N. hasn’t worked with him for years. And while Stable Diffusion was the main reason for his own startup Stability AI’s ascent to pr…
So there's that
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Not being e/acc doesn’t make one a doomer. It means being someone with a healthy relationship with technological progress, who hasn’t given up on the prospect of useful regulation where it’s helpful. The US is great but the best AI researchers aren’t gonna want to live here if it becomes a hyper libertarian hellscape. They want to raise a family without their kids being exploited by technologies in ways that e/accs t…
> if it becomes a hyper libertarian hellscape. Releasing cool open source AI tech doesn't turn the world into a libertarian hellscape. You are taking the memes way too seriously. Mostly people just joke around on twitter while are also building tech startups. e/acc isn't overthrowing the government.
Exactly. There are two groups of people: ones that defend Effective Accelerationism online with a straight face, and ones that take memes too seriously