How can I invest in DDG?
1,250 karma · joined October 25, 2009
They aren't innovators or change agents, they are a calcified heard of pandas that can't hunt. Yes they can do interesting research, but they can't successfully productize that research and take it market. The graveyard of google products is the evidence.
Examples Whispering pines, Blue Heron Bay, OpenAI
Of course it's not flawless, Google isn't and people aren't... and those are the two targets for this tech. People lie, make mistakes and mislead and Google directs to plenty of problematic content.
The thing to watch isn't the position of GPT or any disruptive technology today, but its trajectory. The trajectory of GPT is explosive growth, and that growth will be disruptive to imperfect human jobs and imperfect search engines. GPT does not have to be perfect to be disruptive.
This is especially threatening to Google because they have an organization that has never had to compete, like pandas they just consume. They don't hunt. Look at their vast graveyard of platforms they couldn't sustain even with their monopolistic power and endless money.
Consumers and ad purchasers want competition in search because like Uber and Lyft demonstrate, when you have two technology products competing head to head the margins get compressed toward zero.
Edit: spelling
Even through its from ten years ago it does a decent job of depicting what is happening now.
Yes it's wild that OpenAI raised money at 1,000X earnings but the tech giants keep mountains of money on hand at all times for just these moments.
Right now it's a "jump ball" in just about all tech. LLM threaten all the big incumbents because AI is racing "across the chasm" much faster than most people expected. AI is a new baseline expectation for customers and Google doesn't appear ready for that. It's unlikely other big incumbents are ready either.
For many years we've been working on machine learning to enhance the productivity of our client's employees, now it's almost possible to just replace those employees. AI will do to white collar work what the assembly line did to blue collar work. The ethical implications of that should be considered by people smarter than me.
Now to be clear I'm not crazy! These architectures are not going to become self aware or anything, and this article while thoughtful spends a lot of words picking on C3... whose pitch as best I can tell is just short of a manic fever dream promising an all knowing general intelligence. That's a dead end, and yes like any gold rush a lot of money will be lost but a lot of money will be made as well.
I for one am glad to see the big boys scared, and I'm thankful I get to have another one of these disruptions happen during my career.
Once more unto the breach!
The article analyzes Apple's organizational structure for innovation. It highlights the company's focus on small cross-functional teams, empowerment of individual teams, and a flat hierarchy that allows for quick decision making. The article also mentions the company's approach of combining hardware and software expertise, and its willingness to take calculated risks in pursuit of innovation. The author argues that this structure has been a key factor in Apple's success and ability to continuously launch groundbreaking products.
The most common mistake founders make is to underestimate the founders. They think they're smarter than they are.
This is the mistake I made when I started Viaweb. I thought I was smarter than I was. I thought I could build a web application, but what I actually built was a Lisp application that ran on a web server. That was not what I wanted to build. Only when I realized I couldn't build what I wanted did I switch to building something I could build: the web.
(I was lucky to realize this when I did. I was only a few months from running out of money.)
The reason this mistake is so common is that it's usually harmless. It's usually harmless to overestimate your own abilities. If you think you can do a 10 day project in 7 days, and you're right, you save 3 days. If you think you can do a 10 day project in 4 days, and you're right, you save 6 days. The difference between 7 days and 4 days is the same as the difference between 4 days and 1 day. [1]
Only when you're building something new can underestimating your own abilities be harmless. Only then can you be sure you're going to hit a point where you realize you can't do what you thought you could. And then you're in trouble. [2]
The reason founders make this mistake is that they're optimists. It's the nature of founders to overestimate their own abilities. They have to be. If they thought about how hard it would be to start a successful startup, they'd never do it.
But it's not just founders who overestimate their own abilities. It's everyone. This is a mistake that can only be made by people who are both optimists and trying to do something new.
Fortunately, it's also a mistake that's easy to avoid. The reason founders underestimate their own abilities is that they're pessimists. They have to be. Otherwise they wouldn't be founders; they'd be investors. So if you want to avoid this mistake, you have to consciously take on some of the pessimism of a founder. [3]
If you want to start a successful startup, you have to be as pessimistic as a founder, but only about yourself. You have to be as pessimistic as a founder about the chances of success, and as optimistic as a founder about your own ability to make it.
Notes
[1] There is one case where overestimating your abilities can be a good thing: when you're doing something you know you can do. Then you can save time by underestimating.
[2] The reason this mistake is so dangerous when you're building something new is that you're forced to make it at exactly the worst time. You're forced to realize you can't do what you thought you could at exactly the moment when you need to be able to.
[3] There are two ways to be pessimistic. You can be pessimistic about the chances of success, or you can be pessimistic about your own ability to achieve it. I've found the latter to be more effective.
For example, if you believe you can achieve a 10x improvement over existing solutions, but believe there's only a 1% chance you can succeed, you're overestimating your own abilities. You should instead believe you can achieve a 10x improvement, but there's only a 10% chance you can succeed.
In the first case you're overestimating your ability to achieve a 10x improvement. In the second you're underestimating it. But the second way of being pessimistic leads to the right answer.
For example, if you believe there's only a 10% chance you can succeed, you should either not start a startup, or only start one as a hobby. But if you believe there's only a 10% chance you can achieve a 10x improvement, you should definitely start a startup to try.
If you believe there's only a 10% chance you can achieve a 10x improvement, you have a 90% chance of failing. But the payoff if you succeed is not merely a 10x improvement. It's a 10x improvement multiplied by the percentage of the market you capture. So the expected value of the bet is a 100x improvement in the world. Which is a good bet.
(There is a case where overestimating your ability to achieve a 10x improvement is also a good bet: when you're so good at what you do that
Thanks to John Collison, Patrick Collison, Elon Musk, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.
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If they don't service the debt wouldn't it just roll over indefinitely and compound, and if so why would a counter party allow that?
Suggest closing your eyes and having someone else snap their fingers around you, you'll know immediately where that sound came from. This is accomplished by your mind differentiating the slight time difference between when your left and right ear register the noise as well as the volume difference.
This innate ability can be developed by DJ's to take two songs playing at different speeds and speed or slow them down to match. This is called "beat matching" and before software made this more accessible (aka more automated) it was the key skill necessary for DJ'ing as it allows seamless transitions between songs.
I still find your comment insightful and interesting, I just had to nitpick that one part.
Cheers
That might not exactly be it but I think a technical payment/usage standard open to all is directionally the right way to let the new artists play/create.
As a former professional DJ turned tech startup CEO I believe this article is very accurate and the author well researched.
I'm troubled that the next generation of DJ has their hands tied by terrible tech and onerous licensing restrictions rolled together. Tools like Apple Music and Spotify encourage users to just consume music one slice at a time from start to finish which is boring. It also caters more to the commercial interests of the labels than the listeners. Imagine for example if you couldn't mix your food together, only one product at a time. That's the current state of music without immense ongoing effort on the part of users to convert their music into DRM free and seek out complicated and/or expensive DJ tools.
DJ's should be able to access all available music and monetize their art by sampling whatever they want from any artist as long as that artist gets paid for the full "spin" of the song even if there is just a one second sample.
If you want to hear what music can be like when licensing restrictions are flagrantly ignored you might enjoy...
"Girl Talk" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWzkK7tUjaU
"2 many DJ's, Hang the DJ" https://www.mixcloud.com/2manybootlegs/2manydjs-hang-the-dj-...
Edit: in case it's not clear I'm not being sarcastic
There is a growing danger that war will go hot at some point and Taiwan is the most likely catalyst.
Because of the concentration of TSMC's chip production controlling Taiwan would mean controlling much of the world's manufacturing of chip dependent products.
Given these risks letting china control an influential social media time waster for GenZ is an enormous strategic mistake.
Our bargain with China should be simple, we get access to your markets and you get access to ours and let's all be prosperous (win win). Instead we're playing a win/lose game with them and we're losing.
“when goods (and services) don’t cross borders, soldiers will”