I personally called it within my circle that when Friar was hired she was going to commit a tremendous blunder. It may have been innocent, but the trend is now reversing in regards to its mantlehold of mindshare of consumers.
Someone I know who has been an absolute staunch advocate of chatgpt,and has been for the best part of the past 1.5 years suddenly changed their tune earlier this week. That is my signal that things are turning south.
There will be a reprieve for some time, with increasing revenue. But eventually that will jam to a halt and all the doubts will intensify.
The VCs and bloggers have also shifted tone and are hedging to save themselves from embarrassment. It used to be “AGI is just around the corner” and now it’s “Just because we haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean we never will” (Andreesen) or “Actually bubbles are good” (Stratechery).
Gary called it a long time ago but I think the Dwarkesh and Karpathy podcast is when the shift started.
The Ben Thompson take attempting to find a lemonade in the lemons is the most terrifying: the bubble will pop and leave us with… excess electric generation capacity? (And bankrupt power producers?)
I’d also add these lessons I’ve personally learned:
- Greed is blinding even to intelligent people, especially greedy people in groups
- Society is incredibly vulnerable to lying, we mostly rely on the disincentive that people usually feel bad about it, but the ones who don’t can get away with anything.
- There’s really only a subtle difference between many successful startups and Ponzi schemes. Sam Altman’s grift is only one level more sophisticated than SBF or Elizabeth Holmes
I don’t think that’s the case. The relatively small cabal of people driving this stuff are all pretty weird people who live atypical lives and are hella smart, aware, and unconstrained.
They don’t care about the wake of destruction, and likely believe that it is virtuous to bring it on.
So many goons on here who keep flagging submissions like these, or trying to discredit them with superficial criticism ("he keeps saying the same thing!"). It's sad this behavior doesn't get modded.
Edit: lol at the downvotes. You're just proving my point, goons.
Someone I know who has been an absolute staunch advocate of chatgpt,and has been for the best part of the past 1.5 years suddenly changed their tune earlier this week. That is my signal that things are turning south.
There will be a reprieve for some time, with increasing revenue. But eventually that will jam to a halt and all the doubts will intensify.