641–650 of 678 posts
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It's naive for anyone to think that Elon won't use his influence in government to empower his companies and weaken his competitors.
He spent $250m+ on helping get Trump elected. Of course he is going to try and recoup some of that money back.
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Can you expand on your spreadsheet analogy? I think Joel Spolsky explained the main Office moat well here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros... > ... it might take you weeks to change your page layout algorithm to accommodate it. If you don’t, customers will open their Word files in your clone and all the pages will be messed up. Basically, people who use Office have extremely specific expe…
"Basically, people who use Office have extremely specific expectations." Interesting point, but to OP's point- This wasn't true when Office was first introduced and Office still created a domineering market share. In fact, I'd argue these moat-by-idiosyncracy features are a result of that market share. There is nothing stopping OpenAI from developing their own over time.
I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…
I'm always blown away when I see comments like this.
It just makes me think the people that say this either work for a competitor or simply haven't used their products.
The things that OpenAI and similar companies have created are literally revolutionary. It's insane. Pretending it's "little return" is a very strange opinion.
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I remember seeing OpenAI like 10 years ago in GiveWell's list of charities along with water.org, deworm the world 80.000 hours and that kind of things. It's a wild take to say that they have gotten nowhere and that they haven't found product-market fit.
Anyone familiar with the past 10 years of "unicorn" startups or Sam Altman's business history is perfectly content saying that OpenAI has gone nowhere and cannot find a market fit for their paid products.
Also, 123 million Daily users. I'd say the found a market.
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I remember seeing OpenAI like 10 years ago in GiveWell's list of charities along with water.org, deworm the world 80.000 hours and that kind of things. It's a wild take to say that they have gotten nowhere and that they haven't found product-market fit.
Are you sure? Good Ventures / Open Philanthropy (Dustin Moskovitz) funded GiveWell and OpenAI, and GiveWell's leadership floated to OpenAI, but I'm not convinced that GiveWell funded OpenAI. https://www.givewell.org/about/gw-op-relationship They are certainly both entangled with the Effective Altruism community, but GiveWell came from the "humanities/finance" side, not the tech bro technoutopia side.
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But nothing will be happening on the planet, except a few rovers, because there is nothing of value whatsoever on Mars that is not literally a thousand times cheaper to find/do on Earth.
Except Mars. Tourism can make a lot of money.
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Branding is a very weak moat outside fashion industry and similar places - outside visible status symbols. It's a relatively strong moat for clothes, watches, even things like the iPhone. But for things you do alone at home, this quickly goes away. Uber is a strong brand, everyone associated non-taxi taxis with Uber. When Bolt came around in much of Europe, and offered the same service with better wait times (they we…
> Branding is a very weak moat outside fashion industry and similar places - outside visible status symbols. Have you tried getting someone to switch from Chrome to Firefox? UI is basically the same, the product is more performant (faster load, easy to disable all ads, etc). But the moat is how resistant a normal user is to switch from the thing they've used without having to think about it, to the new thing. I can d…
Second of all, people have switched browsers en masse before, it just requires a good enough reason to do so. People switched from IE6 to Firefox in a relatively large number, and then they all switched to Chrome. Even today, people on Windows tend to install Chrome, while people on Macs tend to stick to Safari, so some browser choice is happening.
Third of all, and perhaps most importantly really, Chrome is free, so the only reason to switch away would be finding some major features you want in another browser. ChatGPT is not free, and it's losing money fast at its current price point. But if they make it more expensive, as they need to unless they can significantly reduce their costs, people will look for alternatives. Other than fashion brands, I don't think you'll find almost any example of people in general using a more expensive service when a cheaper equivalent one exists and is being actively marketed.
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Most of those existed before llms. Also still like a microwave, not very essential.
Farming existed before the combine harvester, and like the combine harvester LLMs are very useful tools in these tasks. You can't get a useful response from German for Dummies if you ask it to rate the email you're writing in German and let you know what needs improvement, human teachers who can are expensive, and friends may not wish to be constantly bothered by a 40 year old asking the kinds of questions a native s…
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Self-driving won't take over by just being available in the new cars people are buying anyway. It'll take over when people find it cheaper to ride robotaxis than to own a vehicle at all. That's potentially a much quicker transition, requiring significantly fewer new vehicles.
Nobody is going to sit and wait for a robo uber in the suburbs for ten minutes to go to the grocery store ten miles down the road. This is the main problem, America has suburbanised itself to hell and no amount of robo taxis will create the world you are suggesting. And elsewhere in the world there’s no need because most places have adequate public transit which solves the problem way more efficiently than robo taxis…
I absolutely would do that. Sometimes I already do wait that kind of time for a taxi or bus. Having the robo taxi turn up in ten minutes from when I decided I wanted to go to the shop would be fantastic.