Size is also a disadvantage in a market, growing by 2% when you are a $1M company is easy, growing by 2% when you are a $100B company is hard. Corporate managers have an embedded growth obligation to maintain both their position and the company's position. This is part of the reason they are vulnerable to new market entrants.
You are making a joke but reasonably speaking there are a ton of software companies where they kept reinvesting where they should have taken out profit, especially when they are peaking.
Sure. There are times to pull money out and there are times to reinvest money. It's not always clear what the better choice is, except in hindsight. But parent poster was treating it completely implausible that someone would choose to reinvest profits back into a profitable business.
I've said this a lot but I'm going to say it again AGI has no technical definition. One day Sam Altman, Elon Musk, or some other business guy trying to meet their obligation for next quarter will declare they have built AGI and that will be that. We'll argue and debate, but eventually it will be just another marketing term, just like AI was.
Seems to be similar to my experience. I used to go to track and follow interesting individuals - scientists, engineers, artists... then it all got washed away with flamebait. Bluesky doesn't feel like its there yet, but I'm hopeful
pretty sure we've already had products in the market that can do the things you are thinking of, the problem with products like baxter (or boston dynamics products) wasn't/isn't the capabilities it was/is the price point. the unit economics for robotics have always been the problem. Sure you can buy a robot for $45K but you can have a hell of a whole lot of days of cleaning with a cleaning service for that same money... the downstream effect of this is that it is very hard to get economies of scale so they never drop to the point where these things are normalized.
Sure, but they still need to know what calls to make for new things. For old things someone can likely reproduce the things that they have built for less money, with less overhead now.
Maybe but at this time it doesn't appear to be a "winner take all" market, its actually looking more and more like a commodity or utility market... There doesn't appear to be a moat or proprietary advantage to any providers (except at the hardware level) or anyone at the application layer. I've never once heard that someone would only use ChatGpt and could never use Claude. The improvements between model versions are minor at this point. How would someone win this market? I think its also a foregone conclusion that the only way to profitably monetize this market will be ads or to raise the price for inference in the future.
It's not like they will make money by selling their services. They will make money by being everything else. Like, "replace newspapers and news sites by AI content they generate, putting everyone in the news and media out of jobs".
It sounds scary as fuck, but let's see how it plays out.
Just a recommendation, switch to the 37 signals model: do consulting and find a thing people keep asking for that isn't out there in the market. That is get paid to research your product, and have a prototype ready to go when you feel its in a good place
I hear what you are saying: consumables and normal luxury items are hard to spend a lot of money on (houses, cars, boats, planes, clothes, food, etc)... if you however were to choose to spend a lot of money on the R&D required to reducing human suffering you'll find that the money will go like its on fire. Build a new drug, create novel ai tech, driverless cars... $1B would feel like you need to clip coupons for the grocery store.
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