Hacker News Reader

Comment by boh | Hacker News Reader

Despite the novelty and excitement, the profit potential for AI generated applications and content isn't particularly strong. If you can make something using AI, so can everyone else. You work at a company to make money. Using AI doesn't magically allow you to do that. If you have the ability to make a profitable company, AI may help, but it's not a business plan.

View on HN

> If you can make something using AI, so can everyone else

The idea / creativity is hence the key. Novel ideas don't occur to everyone.

Not really. Ideas have always been cheap. They occur to everyone. Most of them aren't great, let alone good.

But good ideas, even great ones, rarely mean much on their own. It's always been execution.

Well you need both, a great idea and great execution. I agree with your sentiment though that execution (and timing) are the differentiation.

A decent idea and great execution is often enough.

And a deep or wide, or preferably both, market. Without this last ingredient, all you have is a hobby project.

fair, but I was considering that part of "decent" in "decent idea".

With AI making execution bit easier, the idea will become relatively less cheap.

Technically, you are necessarily speculating....an idea that does not occur to many people during real time cognition.

If it's trivial to implement someone else can just take your idea and easily spin up a competitor, devaluing your idea.

This is the ultimate fate of any interesting or useful idea. What matters - if you're doing it for fame or profit - is the delay between you and your competitors executing on the idea.

(The delay may sometimes be negative. I'm reminded of a few cases where someone made a successful Kickstarter, only to discover mid-way through fundraising that factories in China are already busy manufacturing their product for someone else.)

As always, you still have to bring your own ideas and hustle to the table. The difference is that GPT flattens the learning curve on a lot of things that would previously prevent you from executing on your ideas and it helps keep the momentum up when you hit the hard part of the grind.

It’s amazing for prototypes and writing utility functions, but for fully scalable and supportable architecture it’s a long ways off.

Likewise, it often generates very complex and confusing code - specifically regex in my experience where I can get the job done in a much more readable way.

Don’t get me wrong, I use it all day as a little coding helper, but while it can say, advise you on how to set up a distributed system, it’s not rolling out VMs and DB clusters.

Being amazing at prototypes is exactly what a one dev operation needs. You can worry about scaling after you know whether people will pay for it or not.

100% agree and that’s what I use it for. My point is more it’s a time saver, but not a replacement for higher order operations. Yet.

Yeah people haven’t used GPT enough if they think it can do all these things. Same with AutoGPT - it’s a total joke that got hyped up to high heavens. Go try to make it actually do anything of value and watch it struggle to parse Google results and get stuck in an infinite loop every time. LangChain has the right idea because you must break down the task to small parts and program the thing to do the correct thing after each step

It’s a really good intern.

What's the fundamental difference between generating Terraform to a spec and "rolling out VMs and DB clusters"?

And it does so for everyone else. The landscape is as flat as ever, the winning party is whoever you pay for running GPT.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com