Don't know how I feel about that, it quacks like a bubble but there is massive value that can be delivered.
Isn't that the textbook definition of a startup?
For example, Tesla vs Nikola. One set of founders had a powerful vision and technical ability to see it through (yes, even Elon, say what you want about him but he has deep technical insights, moreso for his cofounders). The other set had a good funding catchphrase "Electric cars, but with trucks!" and tried to fake their way forward using copious amounts of VC money. Many of these companies sound like "AI, but with ... !"
How do you explain that the vast majority of startups fail, then?
IMO the best a VC can do is check that the startup they invest in is not an obvious scam. But then it's impossible to predict which technologies will work and which will not. So they just diversify, counting on the fact that a few of those startups will bring significant money at some point.
Sure, they like to share their "vision" and "predictions", just like traders probably like to share their opinion on the stocks they buy. But at the end of the day, they don't know, they just diversify their investment.
Right, how many products are just shims over the CPU instruction set.
so no, i don't think that the idea is what counts.
That's what concerns most about this, is how somehow it looks like they've optimized for a bunch of "follower" founders.
How do you figure that? Given the speed that the gpt4 API returns data I feel like it's easily going to cost more than pretty pricy hardware.
I don't know for sure, but I've been in software for decades and you don't just get 10 million people to pay for something in a few months. Conversion rates are always lower than people expect.
For something like ChatGPT, the math is going to be something like this:
- something like 150M unique users have tried it[1], which is probably < 50M people (I myself would look like at least 5 users)
- most will never try it again
- of the ones who try it again, a very tiny minority will be interested enough to pay for it because it's just a novelty to the vast majority of people (the only people I know using it for work are researchers and content marketers)
- of the ones interested enough to pay for it, only a fraction will
So I'd wager they're in the territory of 20k-500k users, not 10M.
> Given the worldwide buzz and a small sample around me
People who are educated, live in the West, and pay attention to news always dramatically overestimate the number of people with a similar media diet. ChatGPT is discussed in your circles far more than elsewhere. There are literally billions of people who haven't heard of it or don't care.
Don't let your anecdata fool you. Your sample is not representative of humans at all. 60% of the world lives in Asia, after all.
1. https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-faste...
Here is the math I do, starting from the addressable market.
There are 60M professional workers in the US [1].
The number is probably similar in EU and APAC.
This yields ~200M professional workers in the world.
If 5% of them have a paid subscription, that's exactly how you get 10M paid subscribers.
Of course, the debate is around the 5%. The rate in the pure tech industry is much higher (10-20% around me), and it is probably much lower in other areas (e.g. architecture). But 5% as an average is not unrealistic.
[1] https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-professional-and-te...