I think you're wrong, in the same way that folks on HN were wrong about Dropbox–HN: why would I pay for something that provides so little value, it's just slightly more convenient file storage?
Just because open source models are almost as good, doesn't mean you can underestimate the convenience factor.
Both can be true: we're in an AI bubble, and the large incumbents will capture most of the value/be difficult to unseat.
On the other hand, no one has figured out how to make money providing AI yet, and everyone's operating at a loss. At some point they're going to need to monetize, and the cost/convenience compared to alternatives may not be worth it for a lot of people.
At one point you could get a Netflix subscription and it was convenient enough that people were pirating less. Now there's so many subscription services, we're basically back to cable packages, paying ever increasing amounts and potentially still seeing ads. I know I'm pirating a lot more again.
Uber vs cabs, Airbnb vs hotels - We've seen it time and time again, once the VC cashflow/infinite stonk growth dries up and they need to figure out how to monetize, the service becomes worse and people start looking for alternatives again.
Yeah, but not just that. I don't expect my mum to go find some high end consumer GPU and install it on a home server in order to run her own local LLM. I expect that people will be throwing chat interfaces running remixed versions of open weight models out on the internet so fast that it's impossible for anyone to monitise it in a reasonable way.
I also wonder whether, similar to bitcoin mining, these things end up on specialist ASICS and before we know it a medium tier mobile phone is running your own local models.
I don't have a newer iphone to run it on, so I don’t have a specific one to recommend but searching for local LLM in the App Store gives plenty of options so you’re not limited to Apple Intelligence models.
Well seeing how Dropbox is doing now, Steve Jobs was right - it isn’t a product, it’s a feature. For the same price of 2TB of storage on Dropbox you can get the same amount on Google or OneDrive with a full office suite.
People love to quote Dropbox ignoring all of the YC companies that are zombies or outright failed. Just looking at the ones that have gone public.
I am not saying the companies in aggregate don’t lead to successful outcomes for VCs. I am saying claiming Dropbox is a shining example of a “successful” company that HN was wrong about long term doesn’t jibe with reality.
They also didn’t have the massive fixed cost outlays nor did they have negative unit economics that OpenAI has.
I don't get this comparison. The non-Dropbox version was magnitudes less convenient to 99.99% of the population. A non-OpenAI chat interface is, at best, a fracfion less convenient.
A good number of people used to pay for email. Now a tiny fraction does. It all hangs on wbether OpenAI can figure out how to get ad revenue without people moving to a free competitor without them - and there will be plenty of those.
Of course, as that's where the money and power is, the only things SamA is in it for.
There will be equivalent models that are free. Likely, there will even be free ones without ads.
Free+ads can beat free without ads on pure incumbency, marketing and convenience. Most people don't use an adblocker, even though it's trivially easy to install.
Paid, however, can't beat free+ads. Too much friction.
> folks on HN were wrong about Dropbox–HN: why would I pay for something that provides so little value, it's just slightly more convenient file storage?
From https://nshipster.com/uncertainty/ recently: "Working in software, the most annoying part of reaching Senior level is having to say “it depends” all the time. Much more fun getting to say “let’s ship it and iterate” as Staff or “that won’t scale” as a Principal."
IIUC, author is a Staff SWE, so this tracks.
See also "Worse is better" which has been debated a million times by now.
I wonder how many of those "sour grapes" commenters have actually read the thing–my guess, not many.
Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.
Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).
Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.
IME people are actually quite bad at thoroughly reading and absorbing onboarding material. Adding incentives so that they actually do it is probably pretty valuable.
I think there's at least some of the cliched HN behavior of "I read the title and used it as a prompt to write about my opinions on one of the nouns it contained".
I don't really care for Mr Beast (but don't think about him much either) and I don't think this is especially revelatory stuff, but I think most of it is pretty sound advice for how to be effective.
If you think this is some genius business advice, find the nearest 20 year old marketing major on stimulants and your mind will be blown.
Props to this guy for producing popular content and piecing together some management concepts, but this is so far from anything corporate leaders “need” to read.
You've articulated the exact sentiment that I have to others before.
What can we do about it? Is trying to out-lobby i.e. regulate the CC companies the only way? I noticed that other countries don't seem to have this problem.
Just because open source models are almost as good, doesn't mean you can underestimate the convenience factor.
Both can be true: we're in an AI bubble, and the large incumbents will capture most of the value/be difficult to unseat.