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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

#91

Post by majormajor »

hedgehog wrote: post #85
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…

Viewed from a different angle I think he's probably close. A service provider changing the back end while leaving the front end UI similar is not dissimilar to early cars being built like carriages. But when the product can shift from "give me an app that makes it easier to do my taxes" to "keep me current on my taxes and send me status updates" that's a pretty radical difference in what the customer sees.

> But when the product can shift from "give me an app that makes it easier to do my taxes" to "keep me current on my taxes and send me status updates" that's a pretty radical difference in what the customer sees.

For a bunch of stuff - banks, online shopping, booking a taxi, etc - this shift already happened with non-LLM-based "send me notifications of unusual account activity" or even the dead-simple "send me an email about every transaction on my bank account." Phone notifications moved it from email to built-into-the-OS even.

The "LLM hype cycle" tweak becomes something like "have an LLM summarize the email instead of just listing the three transactions" which is of dubious use to the average user.

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

#92

Post by bluefirebrand »

andsoitis wrote: post #81
bluefirebrand wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter The median CEO salary is in the millions, they do not have to ever worry about money again if they can just stick around for one CEO gig for a couple of years Granted, people who become CEOs are not likely to think this way But the fact is that when people have so much money they could retire immediately with no consequences, they are basically impossible for a business to hold accountable outside of a…

> they are basically impossible for a business to hold accountable outside of actual illegal activity False. CEOs are held accountable all the time. At the extreme end, research shows that 1 in 3 CEOs are fired within 18 months.

Being fired is not being held accountable, it is being terminated

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

#93

Post by analog31 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #40
dmbche wrote: post #27

Great read! I wonder if there is something noteworthy about Studebacker - yes, they were the only carriage maker out of 4000 to start making cars, and therefore the CEO "knew better" than the other ones. But then again, Studebacker was the single largest carriage maker and a military contractor for the Union - in other words they were big and "wealthy" enough to consider the "painful transformation" as the article pu…

Agreed. The autombile was two innovations, not one. If Ford had created a carriage assembly line in an alternate history without automobiles, how many carriage makers would he have put out of business? The United States certainly couldn't have supported 4000 carriage assembly lines. Most of those carriage makers did not have the capacity or volume to finance and support an assembly line.

Also, the auto built on some technologies that were either invented or refined by the bicycle industry: Pneumatic tires, ball bearings, improved steel alloys, and a gradual move to factory production. Many of the first paved roads were the result of demand from bicyclists.

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

#94

Post by orangecat »

johncole wrote: post #3

> Even with evidence staring them in the face, carriage companies still did not pivot, assuming cars were a fad. I like this quote. But this analogy doesn’t exactly work. Withe this hype cycle, CEOs are getting out and saying that AI will replace humans, not horses. Unlike previous artisans making carriages, the CEOs saying these things have very clear motivations to make you believe the hype.

the CEOs saying these things have very clear motivations to make you believe the hype

And conversely, people who fear that they might be replaced have very clear motivations to claim that AI is useless.

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

#95

Post by mcswell »

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."

I'm missing something here. First, I thought Steve's point was that the carriage makers did not see "individual transportation" as their business, and they should have--if they had, they might have pivoted like Studebaker did.

So if "most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence", that could mean that they ought to be.

However, I draw a somewhat different conclusion: the business that companies ranging from Newsweek to accountants to universities to companies' HR departments should see themselves in is intelligence, regardless of whether that's artificial or otherwise. The question then becomes which supplies that intelligence better: humans or LLM-type AI (or some combination thereof)? I'm not at all sure that the answer at present is LLM-AI, but it is a different question, and the answer may well be different in the near future.

There are of course other kinds of AI, as you (jampa) mention. In other words, AI is not (for now) one thing; LLMs are just one kind of AI.

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

#96

Post by mcswell »

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…

It may be that LLM-AI is a dead end on the path to General AI (although I suspect it will instead turn out to be one component). But that doesn't mean that LLMs aren't good for some things. From what I've seen, they represent a huge improvement in (machine) translation, for example. And reportedly they're pretty good at spiffing up human-written text, and maybe even generating text--provided the human is on the lookout for hallucinations (and knows how to watch for that).

You might even say LLMs are good with text in the same way that early automobiles were good for transportation, provided you watched out for the potholes and stream crossings and didn't try to cross the river on the railroad bridge. (DeLoreans are said to be good at that, though :).)

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

#97

Post by mcswell »

flomo wrote: post #74
bryanlarsen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The autombile was two innovations, not one. If Ford had created a carriage assembly line in an alternate history without automobiles, how many carriage makers would he have put out of business? The United States certainly couldn't have supported 4000 carriage assembly lines. Most of those carriage makers did not have the capacity or volume to finance and support an assembly line.

That's the part missing from TFA, there were thousands of auto 'startups', but only a handful survived the depression.

I might be a wealthy person if "my" company had survived the Depression.

Which company is that, you ask? My last name is Maxwell.

(But afaik, none of my ancestors owned or even worked for that car company.)

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

#98

Post by worik »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #92
andsoitis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are basically impossible for a business to hold accountable outside of actual illegal activity False. CEOs are held accountable all the time. At the extreme end, research shows that 1 in 3 CEOs are fired within 18 months.

Being fired is not being held accountable, it is being terminated

> Being fired is not being held accountable, it is being terminated

Termination is the end result of a process

It is not unreasonable to think that is an accountability process of some sort...

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

#99

Post by southernplaces7 »

andsoitis wrote: post #81
bluefirebrand wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter The median CEO salary is in the millions, they do not have to ever worry about money again if they can just stick around for one CEO gig for a couple of years Granted, people who become CEOs are not likely to think this way But the fact is that when people have so much money they could retire immediately with no consequences, they are basically impossible for a business to hold accountable outside of a…

> they are basically impossible for a business to hold accountable outside of actual illegal activity False. CEOs are held accountable all the time. At the extreme end, research shows that 1 in 3 CEOs are fired within 18 months.

>At the extreme end, research shows that 1 in 3 CEOs are fired within 18 months.

And the size of the parachute they get when they're tossed from the plane? I know that there are many small companies with someone in a "CEO" position who might not be hugely compensated, but speaking of CEOs at major corporate ventures here, as is commonly understood when one talks about questions of executive responsibility (or lack thereof), let's be real on some actual severance figure averages for a clearer picture of consequences and "punishment".

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