"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing."
My favorite quote from the excellent show halt and catch fire. Maybe applicable to AI too?
My favorite quote from the excellent show halt and catch fire. Maybe applicable to AI too?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=1m54s
> You’ve go to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
If those LLM addicts could read, they'd be very upset!
That sort of comprehensive innovation (hardware, software, UX - Apple invented everything), while entering an unfamilar and established market, I'd argue would've been impossible to do in a startup.
The Internet begs to differ. AI is more akin to the Internet than to any Mac product. We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve. And this stage of AI is also very very close to the consumer. What took dedicated teams of specialised ML engineers to trial ~5-10 years ago, can be achieved by domain experts / plain users, today.
We've always had that.
In olden times the companies who peddled such solutions were called "a business without a market", or simply "a failing business." These days they're "pre-revenue."
Maybe it will be different this time, maybe it will be exactly the same but a lot more expensive. Time will tell.
The internet is an entirely different beast and does not at all support your point. What we have on the web is hacks on top of hacks. It was not built to do all the things we push it to do, and if you understand where to look, it shows.
The dot com bubble crashed. Many websites like pets.com ended up closing up.
It wouldn’t be until much later that those ideas succeeded…when companies were able to work from the customer experience backward to the technology.
They were able to bootstrap a mobile platform because they could convince themselves they had control of the user experience.
I'm not so sure where AI would land in the turn of the millennium Apple culture.
Instead of doing almost correct email summaries Jobs would have a LLM choose color of the send button with an opaque relationship with the emotional mood of the mail you write.
Remember when our job was to hide the ugly techniques we had to use from end users?
I found it very caricature, too saturated with romance - which is untypical for tech environment, much like "big bang theory".
Everything is period correct and then the clothes and cars too: it's all very well done.
Is there a bit too much romance? Maybe. But it's still worth a watch.
But when they changed the characters to be passionate stubborn people eventually started to cling to each other as they together rode the whirlwind of change the show really found its footing for me. And they did so without throwing away the events of season 1, instead having the 'takers' go on redemption arcs.
My only real complaint after re-watching really was it needed maybe another half season. I think the show should have ended with the .com bust and I didn't like that Joe sort of ran away when it was clear he'd attached himself to the group as his family by the end of the show.
(MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW)
For example, in the first season, the characters we follow are not inventing the PC - that has been done already. They're one of many companies making an IBM clone, and they are modestly successful but not remarkably so. At the end of the season, one of the characters sees the Apple Macintosh and realizes that everything he had done was a waste of time (from his perspective, he wanted to change the history of computers, not just make a bundle of cash), he wasn't actually inventing the future, he just thought he was. They also don't really start from being underfunded unknowns in each season - the characters find themselves in new situations based on their past experiences in ways that feel reasonable to real life.
Sophie Wilson cameos when they have a fight.