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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

#41

Post by ryanrasti »

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…

> With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Agreed. The analogy breaks down because the car disrupted a single vertical but AI is a horizontal, general-purpose technology.

I think this also explains why we're seeing "forced" adoption everywhere (e.g., the ubiquitous chatbot) -- as a result of:

1. Massive dose of FOMO from leadership terrified of falling behind

2. A fundamental lack of core competency. Many of these companies companies (I'm talking more than just tech) can't quickly and meaningfully integrate AI, so they just bolt on a product

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

#42

Post by nailer »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #32
nailer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Yes, that's the varying value-add mentioned in the comment you're replying to. I pay 3.5% of every card transaction to Square. I don't get 3.5% cash/rewards back.

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

#43

Post by nemomarx »

johncole wrote: post #20
bluefirebrand wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree much Cynically, there's no difference from a CEO's perspective between a human employee and a horse They are both expenses that the CEO would probably prefer to do without whenever possible. A line item on a balance sheet, nothing more

I think ceos that think this way are a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. If they think of their employees as cogs that can be replaced, they get cogs that can be replaced.

Isn't this good for the CEO? if your employees aren't cogs then what do you do if they leave? the more replaceable they are the better bargaining power you have as a capitalist right

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

#44

Post by bpt3 »

nailer wrote: post #42
bryanlarsen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's the varying value-add mentioned in the comment you're replying to. I pay 3.5% of every card transaction to Square. I don't get 3.5% cash/rewards back.

Do you get a discount for paying with cash (or blockchain)? In general the answer is no, meaning you aren't paying the 3.5% transaction fee, the merchant is.

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

#45

Post by danbruc »

myrmidon wrote: post #35
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 re…

I think the main thing I want from an AI in order to call it intelligent is the ability to reason. I provide an explanation of how long multiplication works and then the AI is capable of multiplying arbitrary large numbers. And - correct me if I am wrong - large language models can not do this. And this despite probably being exposed to a lot of mathematics during training whereas in a strong version of this test I would want nothing related to long multiplication in the training data.

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

#46

Post by jorl17 »

DeepSeaTortoise wrote: post #39
jorl17 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mostly agree with all your points being issues, I just don't see them as roadblocks to the future I mentioned, nor do I find them issues without solutions or workarounds.

Unreliability and difficulty reasoning about potential failure scenarios is tough. I've been going through the rather painful process of taming LLMs to do the things we want them to, and I feel that. However, for each feature, we have been finding what we consider to be rather robust ways of dealing with this issue. The product that exists today would not be possible without LLMs and it is adding immense value. It would not be possible because of (i) a subset of the features themselves, which simply would not be possible; (ii) time to market. We are now offloading the parts of the LLM which would be possible with code to code — after we've reached the market (which we have).

> 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.

I don't see how this would necessarily happen? I mean, of course I can see problems with prompt injection, or with AIs being lead to do things they shouldn't (I find this to be a huge problem we need to work on). From a coding perspective, I can see the problem with AI producing code that looks right, but isn't exactly. I see all of these, but don't see them as roadblocks — not more than I see human error as roadblocks in many cases where these systems I'm thinking about will be going.

With regards to customers' IP, this seems again more to do with the fact some junior dev is being allowed to do this? Local LLMs exist, and are getting better. And I'm sure we will reach a point where data is at least "theoretically private". Junior devs were sharing around code using pastebin years ago. This is not an LLM problem (though certainly it is exacerbated by the perceived usefulness of LLMs and how tempting it may be to go around company policy and use them).

I'll put this another way: Just the scenario I described, of a system to which I upload a video and ask it to comment on it from multiple angles is unbelievable. Just on the back of that, nothing else, we can create rather amazing products or utilities. How is this not revolutionary?

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

#47

Post by mxfh »

The historical part completely misses the first boom of EV from 1890s to 1910s besides mentioning that they existed.

The history of those is the big untold story here.

It doesn't help if you're betting on the right tech too early.

Clearly superior in theory, but lacking significant breakthroughs in battery reasearch and general spottyness of electrification in that era.

Tons of Electric Vehicle companies existed to promote that comparably tech.

Instead the handful of combustion engine companies drove everyone else out of the market eventually, not last gasoline was marketed as more manly.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/03/lost-hist...

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

#48

Post by SoftTalker »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #32
nailer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Cash isn't really great for merchants. You have to handle it, safeguard it, count it, get it to the bank. Many hands are involved that process and theft or loss can occur by any of them or by robbery/burglary. I don't know if it's a break-even on payment card fees but I bet it is close.

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

#49

Post by SoftTalker »

mxfh wrote: post #47

The historical part completely misses the first boom of EV from 1890s to 1910s besides mentioning that they existed. The history of those is the big untold story here. It doesn't help if you're betting on the right tech too early. Clearly superior in theory, but lacking significant breakthroughs in battery reasearch and general spottyness of electrification in that era. Tons of Electric Vehicle companies existed to p…

Yep. Too early is as bad as too late. The EV was invented but the supporting technology wasn't there.

Lots of ideas that failed in the first dotcom boom in the late 1990s are popular and successful today but weren't able to find a market at the time.

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

#50

Post by baxtr »

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…

Just today I used the AI service on the amazon product page to get more information about a specific product, basically RAG on the reviews.

So maybe your analysis is outdated?

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