The Tech Gold Rush Is Over. Where's the Next One?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
So long as that is the case, there'll always be pile of VC cash looking to jump into tech.
And at big cos it's harder to jump around as a means of increasing compensation than it used to be.
It says in 7.No Idea: > We're going to let people apply with no idea at all. If you want, you can answer the question on the application form that asks what you're going to do with "We have no idea." If you seem really good we'll accept you anyway. We're confident we can sit down with you and cook up some promising project.
And we all know this is never gonna happen these days.
So I think the claims of this article are not valid in 2023 right? Or at least most of it, especially something like "If you don't have an idea just apply and we will give you one!”.
I'm sorry to tell you that "CatGPT" is already a crowded field with many parody entrants.
Seems like a stretch, why would high tech salaries and another bubble not get created yet again? Already happened with dotcom and then up to now.
Not sure where the next revolution may come from (no, 'AI' is not it).
It may be that tech will be like banking is today, still lucrative but not revolutionary/in the public eye as it was (as I understand it, banking went through it's boom in the 80s, hence Wolf of Wall Street, but I'm ready to be corrected on that).
Can you expand on this? The pace of improvement is insane. And we've barely started training on video but that is clearly imminent with big implications for robotics and entertainment.
A couple years ago I would have guessed that it would take us decades to get where we are now. The new Copilot integration into Office 365 (I can't believe I'm saying this!) looks fantastic, and even though a lot of my coworkers are skeptical, I really like using AI to help me with dev work. It doesn't do tasks for me, but it definitely helps speeds things along.
I think there's going to be a huge demand for engineers who can help integrate AI into software, regardless of the field its used in.
That seems premature. Maybe decoder transformer models aren’t it, but AI is almost absurdly broad as a field hence requires near omniscience to write off wholesale.
Not sure why you say this; are you sure AI can or should be so easily dismissed out of hand without further thoughts?
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The assertion that "AI is not it" when considering the next revolution is a point of debate. While it's true that AI hasn't yet led to a socio-economic transformation on the scale of the internet or mobile technology, it is still in the early stages of its potential impact. AI and machine learning are already influencing many industries, from healthcare with predictive diagnostics to transportation with autonomous vehicles, and their capabilities are rapidly advancing.
The part below "---" above was written by ChatGPT, to help underscore my point.
Perhaps LLMs' biggest contribution to social progress will be wrecking social media, as you have kindly demonstrated. Nobody wants to talk to a machine.
"ChatGPT has 180.5 million users, generates $80 million/month revenue, and crossed over 10 billion all-time visits (1.43B visits in August 2023)"
If you can't understand why normal people like having a human like chat interface to a machine then you're a bit out of touch.
(I am amazed that "what is the luminosity of the sun?" is finally answered not with "1 solar luminosity", which it was for a while. Now, if we can get "what is my ipv4 address" to 1-box, Goog.)
The sensor under the sink can't reliably suss out "hands" vs. "not hands", though I grant its probably a fair bit simpler in its construction … but that's sort of the point, too.
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What I would call basic, simple problems in health tech that we don't need AI to fix:
… my own healthcare provider doesn't know who my GP with them is.
My insurance doesn't know if the bill has been paid or not.
My provider can't reliably determine that I am insured, or by who.
Providers & insurers can't agree on what the bill is, or what is being billed, and are not capable of figuring it out.
My insurer doesn't know what providers are in their network.
We still transfer health information over god-awful protocols like HL7v2 that just destroy my time as a dev supporting them.
… but yes, let's just keep trying to jam AI in somewhere, anywhere.
Automotive is the same: see the self-driving car that crushed a woman recently resulting in the suspension of the parent company's license. Car prices are through the roof, to the point where it's not economically practical to purchase at the moment, and so the end result is … I'm still driving, by hand.
They're advancing, I'll give them that, but I could feel far more meaningful impact in many places in my life from just the most basic of software engineering … or even just the most basic procedural changes (many of the problems above aren't even tech problems, but administrative ones).
As for direct neural communication, see how text replaced voice as soon as mobile devices could do it properly - nobody phones anybody nowadays. People have a tendency to take what they want from tech, and discard the rest.
I, for one, would be all over a permanent HUD, even just for messages and biometric data (as long as I have reasonable control over what pops up). I suspect the broader market would too if the tech gets there and the glasses don't look dorky. My point isn't that we're there yet, it's that AR is more useful and has less fundamental hurdles to wide-spread adoption than AR. I can think of many practical applications that could be made possible or enhanced with AR capabilities, but I struggle to think of any for VR that aren't just games and entertainment until we figure out strong haptic feedback systems.
Regarding AI/ML - the insanely valuable step was the spreadsheet.
I however am looking forward to citing this comment in 5 years just like the "Dropbox is just rsync" comment.
Much of that reaction at the political levels comes from the fact that LLMs are good at the stuff Ivy League graduates are taught. The value of grammatically correct, well-referenced blithering has dropped considerably in the last two years.
We are in the "boring, reliable" hardware stage where nothing is very exciting in addition to the rate hikes, so there isn't as much willingness to invest in anything risky. Pushing entrenched businesses to raise rates and enshitify is much easier to do than getting them to actually invent something new or worthwhile.
Of course, we couldn't have conceived of today's technology 100 years ago, so in 100 years we may have discovered some novel material that allows for tighter circuitry OR we'll move to biological computers or something similar.
The end of the gold rush doesn't require us to run out of ways to innovate - all it requires is that enough market power is consolidated in one place that competition from non-billionaires can be squashed like a bug. Then there's no point for anybody to innovate any more.
Remember the auto industry used to have garage-started startups too. A long time ago.
Start an innovative new tire company now and you'll either be bought for a pittance or copied by one of the big 3. They are also your main customers. It isn't a hopeful play. There aren't too many VCs looking for small auto industry startups to fund. There aren't too many auto startups in detroit.
How many things can you build for customers these days in tech that don't end up living on one of 4 megalithic platforms? It's not like the auto industry yet but it is headed in that direction.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that's true, and then I have a question.
The "tech" field is full of people who went into it for the relatively easy high-paying jobs and/or the dotcom/startup lottery tickets.
The field changed dramatically in the process, from the quality of the work we do, to our goals in doing it, to how we do it, to how and for what we hire.
Is there any chance the field can suddenly improve now, due to this and other factors (e.g., let's say an interest in genuinely responsible infosec materializes someday)?
Or is slow decay from the current state more likely (as current practices remain, but less money to go around)?
It's a temporary issue, rates being what they are means money goes to easier profits. Just like the dotcom bust, it'll eventually make a comeback but good luck figuring out if your company will survive it.
You've just nailed an aspect of the software industry that I've never understood; if it's so easy to cheaply scale a product, then what's preventing a competitor from charging a bit less and beating your high price?
Problem for many companies is that they are in the middle of a constantly changing tech landscape and become obsoleted fairly quickly or try and use their size to artificially increase margins too much and allow for competitors to eat their market.
There's a fair amount of big stuff that's clearly on the path to success. Solar power. Wind power. Electric cars. But that involves real work and big companies are already doing it.
There's stuff that's working well in prototype but costs too much. Self-driving cars (Waymo, not Tesla). Robotic farm machines. Takes large amounts of capital for marginal payoffs.
There's stuff that works in prototype but hasn't scaled yet. Flying cars of the big electric drone type. Solid state batteries. Major technical problems lie ahead. Slow growth.
There's natural resource stuff. Cobalt, lithium, rare earths. Hard work and boring, but profitable.
alright, it's Friday - I'll bite.
Really? Human nature to chase fortune?
In actuality I've seen internet communists regularly call clearcut examples of feudalism, mercantilism, and several other economic systems "capitalist." It often feels like they're not aware of any possible economic systems outside of capitalism and communism.
At one point in time, a pencil was considered tech, so when pens were invented, would the same people have said "tech is dead, people aren't interested in making pencils anymore!"
Prior to the computer age, tech was aerospace, plastics. Sure the computer age brought a new large kind of tech, and that has been mined, but we are also entering a new phase where sensors are driving new capabilities in health[tech], space[tech] is no longer the domain of a few governments, transportation is being revolutionized [by tech].
With tech everywhere, nobody is going into "tech" they are going to work for companies making things, and those things either are tech or rely on tech.
Also, with the value, or lack thereof, that universities are bringing to their students, do we care what industry's those students are going into? And the article doesn't say where they are going, just where they aren't going, so didn't add value.
there has never been this many opportunities in tech with the recent ai boom
For example for food. Let's imagine Catalan crème brûlée. Have sliders where you can adjust the sweetness of the curd, the darkness of the caramel, and so on.
Okay, perhaps food is not such a good example. But perhaps there are industries where people really need this and are willing to decide on a lot of details. Or perhaps for food, have a default setting for the majority.
I don't know.
But if the world’s most type A people stopped coming here and distorting my local job market with 60-80 hour weeks that would be great news.