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Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

joincolossus.com

71–80 of 377 posts

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#71
post #30

You can't make such generalized statements about anything in computing/business. The AI revolution has only just got started. We've barely worked out basic uses for it. No-one has yet worked out revolutionary new things that are made possible only by AI - mostly we are just shoveling in our existing world view.

The point though is AI wont make you rich. It is about value capture. They compare it to shipping containers. I think AI value will mostly be spread. Open AI will be more like Godaddy than Apple. Trying to reduce prices and advertise (with a nice bit of dark patterns). It will make billions, but ultimately by competing its ass off rather than enjoying a moat. The real moats might be in mineral mining, fabrication of…

That's 100% not the case. OpenAI is wedged between the unstoppable juggernaut that is Google at the high end and the state sponsored Chinese labs at the low end, they're going to mostly get squeezed out of the utility inference market. They basically HAVE to pivot to consumer stuff and go head to head with Apple with AI first devices, that's the only way they're going to justify their valuation. This is actually not a crazy plan, as Apple has been resting on their laurels with their OS/software, and their AI strategy has been scattershot and bad.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We always think things are unsolveable, and impossible to decipher, right up until we do, in fact, solve them and decipher them. Anything is possible, well, except for getting the next season of Firefly Edit: FTR I think that weather prediction is, indeed, solveable. We just don't have the computing power/algorithms that fully model and calculate the state.. yet

Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Sure, anything is possible, but some things are much more likely than others, and small changes in weather months away is very very far down on the list of things that are likely to be solvable. I’d even hold out hope for another season firefly <3

Your response is, that you don't understand, so nobody else should.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Sure, anything is possible, but some things are much more likely than others, and small changes in weather months away is very very far down on the list of things that are likely to be solvable. I’d even hold out hope for another season firefly <3

I worked in weather for a while and the forecasters might as well have been betting on the horse races, the interpretation of the charts was very much the same psychology. The model did its thing but there was still an aspect of interpretation that was needed to convert data to a story for a few minutes on TV. For longer range forecasting the task was quite easy for the meteorologists, at least for the UK. Storm syst…

Thanks for your anecdote, it's valuable when discussing the possibilities to start by saying that it's impossible because you don't know anyone that did it

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except.. people do know exactly how these things work. They know because they are creating them. They know because they are improving them. What nonsense to say we do not know how these things work. Engineers building Qwen for example not only know how things work but they put all the work out there for people to reproduce (if they had the means) that work.

Ok, so how does general anesthesia work? How does ketamine work for depression? The recipes for those are well-known.

[deleted]

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#75

And Dropbox will never take off

people also said the juicero and the smart condom would never take off. this isnt a very useful gotcha

The dig on Dropbox is that it was easy to build, not that it wasn’t useful. Juicero was neither easy to build (relatively) nor useful.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Sure, anything is possible, but some things are much more likely than others, and small changes in weather months away is very very far down on the list of things that are likely to be solvable. I’d even hold out hope for another season firefly <3

Your response is, that you don't understand, so nobody else should.

That’s not what I said. But ok.

Weather systems exhibit chaotic behavior which means that small changes to initial conditions have far reaching effects. This is why even the best weather models are only effective at most a few weeks out. It’s not because we don’t understand how weather works, it’s because the system fundamentally behaves in a way that requires keeping track of many more measurements than is physically possible. It’s precisely because we do understand this phenomenon that we can say with certainty that prediction at those time scales with that accuracy is not possible. There is not some magic formula waiting to be discovered. This isn’t to say that weather prediction can’t improve (e.g I don’t claim we have the best possible weather models now), but that predictions reach an asymptotic limit due to chaos.

There are a handful of extremely simple and well understood systems (I would not call weather simple) that also exhibit this kind of behavior: a common example is some sets of initial conditions of a double-jointed pendulum. The physics are very well understood. Another perhaps more famous one is the three body problem. These two both show that even if you have the exact equations of motion, chaotic systems still cannot be perfectly modeled.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. And for those that can't (legal, for example, or various SaaS vendors) the AI usually has a good idea of what services you…

> I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. You are missing the other side of the story. All those customers, those AI boosted startups want to attract also have ac…

Then there's the 3rd leg of the triangle. If a startup built with AI does end up going past the rest of the pack, they will have no technical moat since the AI provider or someone else can just use the same AI to build it.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#78
post #30

You can't make such generalized statements about anything in computing/business. The AI revolution has only just got started. We've barely worked out basic uses for it. No-one has yet worked out revolutionary new things that are made possible only by AI - mostly we are just shoveling in our existing world view.

The point though is AI wont make you rich. It is about value capture. They compare it to shipping containers. I think AI value will mostly be spread. Open AI will be more like Godaddy than Apple. Trying to reduce prices and advertise (with a nice bit of dark patterns). It will make billions, but ultimately by competing its ass off rather than enjoying a moat. The real moats might be in mineral mining, fabrication of…

Interesting thought. Once digital assets become devalued enough, things will revert and people/countries will start to keep their physical resources even tighter than before.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#80
post #32

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

Yep this is a huge enabler - previously having someone "do art" could easily cost you thousands for a small game, a month even, and this heavily constrained what you could make and locked you into what you had planned and how much you had planned. With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art, audio etc it's an incremental cost if any, you can explore ideas, you can throw art out, pivot in new directions.

The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time.
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