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Comment by avi_vallarapu | Hacker News Reader

It is probably an observation and a forecast at the right time. I remember my days at one of the Top Home and Enterprise PC manufacturing companies over 15 years ago, when there was criticism around Smart phones.

People laughed assuming that a smart phone is of no use and people prefer a PC or a laptop. Everything else is history.

What is important at all times is the timing and Identifying something that can change the world at the right time.

This is where the Top Leadership roles come into play. Identify the gaps and introduce the immediate action plan to make the best of the best.

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Sure and not to discredit your observation, but what other observations have you made in the last 5 years that didn’t pan out? Regarding politics, sports, stock market, covid, or other tech trends? The evaluation can’t be looking back, and if you’re right about 1/10 things, would that warrant a $1b investment in each?

Parent comment doesn’t claim to have predicted the rise of smartphones.

If you truly had a bankable 10% success rate, $1B on each spin would be a steal.

This should be the perfect forum to ask this question considering the whole mission of Y combinator.

The thing is that we had small notebooks/agenda/notepad, then we moved on to PDAs when things turn digital, it's not a big stretch to imagine how smart phones should work if the hardware is there (what I read is that manufacturers was cheaping out and locking things down). I still believe that what LLM does best is analyzing natural languages and producing coherent (not necessarily true) output. And there are maybe business needs for that, but still have not seen a truly individual tool, like personal computing is (you can go on a desert island with a laptop and compute). I agree that executives is to predict and plan strategical responses. But so far, it seems to be only useful for those that like quick answers, even if it maybe untrue.

I remember reading about Xerox people forecasting the smartphones and tablets. We have a picture of their brainstorming and they used small pages to model a handheld computer. Science fiction was and still is full of more and more integrated computer with human. Technology is driven by imagination more often than not.

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