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AI is a business model stress test

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Re: AI is a business model stress test

#71

Post by heliumtera »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #42
heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

> Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. Really? To me, Tailwind seemed like the pinnacle of how anyone here would say “open source software” should function. Provide a solid, truly open source, software and make money from consulting or helping others use it and selling custom built solutions around it. The main sin of Tailwind was assuming t…

From the developer perspective not much changes despite organization structure being completely different in this comparison (trillion dollar company vs 10 individual contributors).

Tailwind Labs revenue stream was tied to documentation visit, that was the funnel. The author's argument was this revenue stream was destroyed by a slight quality of life improvement (having llms fill in css classes). Tailwind Labs benefits from: a) documentation visit b) inability to implement desired layout using the framework (and CSS being unpleasant). It seems there is a conflict of interest between the developer expecting the best possible experience and the main revenue stream. Given that a slight accidental improvement in quality of life and autonomy for users destroyed the initiative main revenue stream, it would be fair to say it doesn't just "seems like a conflict of interest". Definitely disagree with it being the "pinnacle" of how open source should function but I also won't provide any examples because it is besides the point. I will point out that fsf is fine for many decades now, and a foundation with completely different structure like zig foundation seems to be ok with a somewhat proportional revenue (orders of magnitude less influence, adoption and users, maybe 10-20x less funding)

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#72

Post by mrtesthah »

wnjenrbr wrote: post #57
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

In my opinion, IP is dead. Strong IP died in 2022, along with the Marxist labor theory of value; of which IP derives its (hypothetical) value. It no longer matters who did what when and how. The only thing that matters is that exists, and it can be consumed, for no cost, forever. IP is the final delusion of 19th century thinking. It was crushed when we could synthesize anything, at little cost, little effort. Turns o…

This is a tone deaf take that ignores the massive imbalance in how IP law is wielded by large corporations vs individuals or small firms.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#73

Post by Culonavirus »

geoffbp wrote: post #31

> Value is shifting to operations: deployment, testing, rollbacks, observability. You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. I agree somewhat but eventually these can be automated with AI as well.

If "99.95% uptime on Black Friday", and "keeping a site secure, updated, and running" can ever be automated (by which I mean not a toy site and not relying on sheer luck), not only 99.99% of people in IT are out of a job, but humans as intelligent beings are done. This is such a doomsday scenario that there's not even a point in discussing it.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#74

Post by somebehemoth »

antirez wrote: post #39

> You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. This is completely wrong. Agents will not just be able to write code, like they do now, but will also be able to handle operations, security, continuing to check, and improve the systems, tirelessly.

And someday we will have truly autonomous driving cars, we will cure cancer, and humans will visit Mars.

You can't prompt this today, are you suggesting this might come literally tomorrow? 10 years? 30? At that unknown time will your comment become relevant?

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#75

Post by wnjenrbr »

mrtesthah wrote: post #72
wnjenrbr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, IP is dead. Strong IP died in 2022, along with the Marxist labor theory of value; of which IP derives its (hypothetical) value. It no longer matters who did what when and how. The only thing that matters is that exists, and it can be consumed, for no cost, forever. IP is the final delusion of 19th century thinking. It was crushed when we could synthesize anything, at little cost, little effort. Turns o…

This is a tone deaf take that ignores the massive imbalance in how IP law is wielded by large corporations vs individuals or small firms.

No, it’s the most empowering thing humanity has ever constructed to wrestle the beast of IP and make it an irrelevant footnote in the human story. Deckchairs on the titanic.

If one wastes their life in court, arguing 19th century myths, that’s on the players.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#76

Post by heliumtera »

asa400 wrote: post #60
heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

> Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Can you explain this one a bit? I know some folks who would absolutely increase their spend if Actions runners were better. As it stands I've seen folks trying to move off of them.

Gh actions runners had a dubious implementation of sleep that would cause runners to hang on 100% usage for weeks/months. A simple fix was proposed and neglected for 10 years. This discussion resurfaced recently with zig abandoning GitHub entirely and criticizing this specific issue. A fix was them merged following an announcement that self hosted runners will now be charged by the minute. Of course this two facts are totally independent but yeah, yeah, sure.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#77

Post by glerk »

tazjin wrote: post #11
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

Does anyone know of active work happening on such a license?

I can ask Claude to generate you one right now. It will be just a bunch of bullshit words no matter how much work you put into writing them down (like any other such license).

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#78

Post by kubanczyk »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

> imbued with a GPL style license

GPL died. Licenses died.

Exnation: LLMs were trained also on GPL code. The fact that all the previously-paranoid businesses that used to warn SWEs not to touch GPL code with a ten foot pole are now fearlessly embracing LLMs' outputs, means that de facto they consider an LLM their license-washing machine. Courts are going to rubber stamp it because billions of dollars, etc.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#79

Post by [deleted] »

antirez wrote: post #39

> You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running. This is completely wrong. Agents will not just be able to write code, like they do now, but will also be able to handle operations, security, continuing to check, and improve the systems, tirelessly.

[deleted]
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