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Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

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Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#31

Post by takklz »

I've listened to so many CEOs in various industries (not just tech) salivating at the potential ability to cutout the software engineering middle man to make their ideas come to life (from PMs, to Engineers, to Managers, etc.). They truly believe the AI revolution is going to make them god's gift to the world.

I on the other hand, see the exact opposite happening. AI is going to make people even more useful, with significant productivity gains, in actuality creating MORE WORK for humans and machines alike to do.

Leaders who embrace this approach are going to be the winners. Leaders who continue to follow the hype will be the losers, although there will probably be some scam artists who are winners in the short term who are riding the hype cycle just like crypto.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#32

Post by bryanlarsen »

nailer wrote: post #10
1oooqooq wrote: post #4

nice article, but then end with the brain dead "jump on [current fad]". If this was published a few months ago, it would be telling everyone to jump into web3.

[flagged]

Merchants aren't the customer target for credit cards, consumers are. Credit card payments are reversible and provide a reward. There are lots of options available that are better for merchants than credit cards (cash, debit cards, transfers, etc). But they all lose because the consumer prefers credit cards.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#33

Post by jayd16 »

Davidzheng wrote: post #23
danbruc wrote: post #15

Let us see how this will age. The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. I have no doubt that AI will eventually fundamentally change a lot of things, but it will not be large language models [1]. And I think there is no path of gradual improvement, we still need some fundamental new ideas. Integration with external tools will help but not overcome fundamental limitations. Once th…

Sorry but to say current LLMs are a "dead end" is kind of insane if you compare with the previous records at general AI before LLMs. The earlier language models would be happy to be SOTA in 5 random benchmarks (like sentiment or some types of multiple choice questions) and SOTA otherwise consisted of some AIs that could play like 50 Atari games. And out of nowhere we have AI models that can do tasks which are not in…

Something can be much better than before but still be a dead end. Literally a dead end road can take you closer but never get you there.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#34

Post by jvanderbot »

jampa wrote: post #24

I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than the…

I can strain the analogy just enough to get something useful from it.

If we laboriously create software shops in the classical way, and suddenly a new shop appears that is buggy, noisy, etc but eventually outperforms all other shops, then the progenitors of those new shops are going to succeed while the progenitors of these old shops are not going to make it.

It's a strain. The problem is AI is a new tech that replaces an entire process, not a product. Only when the process is the product (eg the process of moving people) does the analogy even come close to working.

I'd like to see analysis of what happened to the employees, blacksmiths, machinists, etc. Surely there are transferrable skills and many went on to work on automobiles?

This SE q implies there was some transition rather than chaos.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46866/did-any-ca...

Stretching just a bit further, there might be a grain of truth to the "craftsman to assembly line worker" when AI becomes a much more mechanical way to produce, vs employing opinionated experts.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#35

Post by myrmidon »

danbruc wrote: post #15

Let us see how this will age. The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. I have no doubt that AI will eventually fundamentally change a lot of things, but it will not be large language models [1]. And I think there is no path of gradual improvement, we still need some fundamental new ideas. Integration with external tools will help but not overcome fundamental limitations. Once th…

> The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end.

It seems a matter of perspective to me whether you call it "dead end" or "stepping stone".

To give some pause before dismissing the current state of the art prematurely:

I would already consider LLM based current systems more "intelligent" than a housecat. And a pets intelligence is enough to have ethical implications, so we arguably reached a very important milestone already.

I would argue that the biggest limitation on current "AI" is that it is architected to not have agency; if you had GPT-3 level intelligence in an easily anthropomorphizeable package (furby-style, capable of emoting/communicating by itself) public outlook might shift drastically without even any real technical progress.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#36

Post by scottLobster »

nofriend wrote: post #9
kylecazar wrote: post #6

I like the historical part of this article, but the current problem is the reverse. Everyone is jumping on the AI train and forgetting the fundamentals.

AI will plausibly disrupt everything

So would a universal cancer vaccine, but no one is acting like it's just around the corner.

I'm old enough to remember when "big data" and later "deep data" was going to enable us to find insane multi-variable correlations in data and unlock entire new levels of knowledge and efficiency.

AI as currently marketed is just that with an LLM chatbot.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#37

Post by jayd16 »

sz4kerto wrote: post #11
kylecazar wrote: post #6

I like the historical part of this article, but the current problem is the reverse. Everyone is jumping on the AI train and forgetting the fundamentals.

I definitely don't think so. You're seeing companies who have a lot of publicity on the internet. There are tons of very successful SMBs who have no real idea of what to do with AI, and they're not jumping on it at all. They're at risk.

It's only a risk if there's a moat. What's the moat for jumping in early?

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#38

Post by baggachipz »

goalieca wrote: post #21

History is full of examples of execs hedging on the wrong technology, arriving too early, etc.

"We're all in on Blockchain! We're all in on VR! We're all in on self-driving! We're all in on NoSQL! We're all in on 3D printing!" The Gardner Hype Cycle is alive and well.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#39

Post by DeepSeaTortoise »

jorl17 wrote: post #19
nofriend wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will plausibly disrupt everything

We have a system to which I can upload a generic video, and which captures eveeeeeerything in it, from audio, to subtitles onscreen, to skewed text on a mug, to what is going on in a scene. It can reproduce it, reason about it, and produce average-quality essays about it (and good-quality essays if prompted properly), and, still, there are so many people who seem to believe that this won't revolutionize most fields?…

People dislike the unreliability and not being able to reason about potential failure scenarios.

Then there's the question whether a highly advanced AI is better at hiding unwanted "features" in your products than you are at finding them.

And lastly, you've went to great lengths of completely air gapping the systems holding your customers' IP. Do you really want some Junior dev vibing that data into the Alibaba cloud? How about aging your CFO by 20 years with a quote on an inference cluster?

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#40

Post by bryanlarsen »

dmbche wrote: post #27

Great read! I wonder if there is something noteworthy about Studebacker - yes, they were the only carriage maker out of 4000 to start making cars, and therefore the CEO "knew better" than the other ones. But then again, Studebacker was the single largest carriage maker and a military contractor for the Union - in other words they were big and "wealthy" enough to consider the "painful transformation" as the article pu…

Agreed. The autombile was two innovations, not one. If Ford had created a carriage assembly line in an alternate history without automobiles, how many carriage makers would he have put out of business? The United States certainly couldn't have supported 4000 carriage assembly lines. Most of those carriage makers did not have the capacity or volume to finance and support an assembly line.
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