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The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

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Re: The only moat left is money?

#311

Post by throwaway-11-1 »

ineedasername wrote: post #231
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…

That seems like reasonable advice until you realize you have no idea what will and will not scale in a few years, and there's only so many tailors/plumbers/welders/etc. What it really comes down to is these options as more work gets automated: 1) New jobs doing different things that weren't done before 2) Same jobs but shorter hours so "full time" with a salary to match starts to look more like 4 days, or 5 hours/day…

I keep hearing about the potential of "new jobs" coming from ai but can anyone actually describe one? My gut says they will be something similar to converting middle class knowledge workers to do DoorDash drivers or trained artists becoming dog groomers. What a cool future, at least my parent's can watch racist ai slop videos on their iPads.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#312

Post by mrkpdl »

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…

I used to look at my local dry cleaner and think that it had to be the most stable business going - it couldn’t be replaced by a computer. Then Covid hit, work from home took off, and the dry cleaner went out of business. Computers came for the dry cleaner, not by cleaning clothes but by eliminating the need for dress codes.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#313

Post by ddtaylor »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #302
pier25 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm sure someone else on Etsy will undercut your price if you sell more than a few.

Probably until a copyright vulture comes along and nukes it.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#314

Post by ericmcer »

zabzonk wrote: post #193
ericmcer wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mean literally anything that leverages modern APIs.

WYSIWG Site Builders, text Chat bots, audio Transcription, voice synthesis.

Yeah building from scratch would take longer, but you can slap a UI, a DB/schema around modern APIs and output something that would be science fiction 10 years ago.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#315

Post by fuzzfactor »

pier25 wrote: post #308
fuzzfactor wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like doing things for big companies that they actually could afford easily, but their costs are so high it's a better deal to have me do it. One of my favorite niches :) Some clients are good enough at math to figure it out, and you don't actually need that many of them if they are big enough.

how do you approach big companies to offer them these custom niche services?

Good question.

One early approach when starting to build a reputation is to work as a subcontractor to a less-big company who has already gone through everything to be on the approved-vendor list of the massive corporation.

Even better if the less-big company is a private company and the biggie is public.

A private company will be able to figure out the benefit from your work better than most, and hopefully profit from it.

I like it when every time I invoice a client, they are making money at the same time, whether they are making it from me is not always necessary if I am participating in an overall money-making process they are going through. Especially routinely. It's just fine to be a very small participant in lots of activity going on between the big-shots.

Big companies can have so much work and be able to pay so well that your position can be to merely absorb the overflow from the primary contractor, even if you do not yet have a unique offering.

Then it's good to build into your exclusive-but-related niche, which would be intended for a different division of the biggie and expect it to languish unless your already-established client can use that too.

Eventually after you finally get to meet the right person in the target corporate division, it will be after you have already been doing work for that same corporation through the approved primary contractor.

By this point you've already been doing critical work for that corporation exactly like they need, that you can be proud of and point to, and it can be a whole lot more likely to become an approved vendor yourself. From which position you can finally negotiate fees directly with the most well-heeled corporate source, this would be the first time if you were only working for other primary contractors until then.

Ideally you will then be invoicing a different office of the same corporation that you were subcontracting under, there will be no conflict of interest, and you can continue working for the original primary contractor too.

And your most promising niche finally gets to launch with about as much upside as it can get.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#316

Post by cryptonector »

The only real mote was and is mindshare. Build mindshare, don't screw your users, and your competition will have a hard time dethroning you. LLMs will probably force SaaS and software prices to come down, which will be a great opportunity for dethroning reigning champions.

PostgreSQL, for example, has a ton of mindshare. It will be hard to dethrone it.

OpenSolaris was Sun's attempt to recover from the loss of mindshare to Linux. The a company that had become dominant in databases due to mindshare acquired Sun then failed to understand the mindshare play, and it killed OpenSolaris. Explain that one to me.

Even mindshare might not be such a moat now.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#317

Post by salawat »

ddtaylor wrote: post #313
hn_acc1 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure someone else on Etsy will undercut your price if you sell more than a few.

Probably until a copyright vulture comes along and nukes it.

Given the success of copyright cultures in fending off the most blatant, unambiguous case of copyright violation in human history, (AI), I would not put your money there.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#318

Post by beAbU »

cryptonector wrote: post #316

The only real mote was and is mindshare. Build mindshare, don't screw your users, and your competition will have a hard time dethroning you. LLMs will probably force SaaS and software prices to come down, which will be a great opportunity for dethroning reigning champions. PostgreSQL, for example, has a ton of mindshare. It will be hard to dethrone it. OpenSolaris was Sun's attempt to recover from the loss of mindsha…

AI coding assistants make it trivial to switch between models, and developers will switch to a different model from a different provider if the new model is perceived to be better than the current one even if that perception is completely subjective.

Furthermore, the only users who will actually pay for AI are these assistant-using developers and other power users -- people who will not hesitate to switch to something better. We are already used to new model releases being neck in neck and there is no real incumbent/underdog dynamic going on here.

Yes, there is strong mindshare among the normies, who only know about "ChatGPT", but as soon as they graduate into a powe user, then the above applies to them.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#320

Post by webel0 »

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…

Welding is coming along. Ever heard of Path Robotics? That's high-mix, high-complexity welds. (There are a lot of other, less-sophisticated welding robots out there.) The biggest moat for a welder right now is special certifications to be able to do welds on submarines, etc.
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