It's also difficult for engineers to understand how a sustainable industry can be built on tech where the primary method of "engineering" it is to try doing something (training a new model, changing a prompt) and hope it will work rather than knowing what will and won't. The potential to get trapped in a local maximum or burn massive resources for insufficient return is too high, and the cost of switching models is too low to build any moat based on model quality.
At the end of the day this is the only thing tech investors are excited about, so the market will dictate strategy until the bottom falls out for whatever reason. The video is not assuring on this front, saying that CEOs are just staying the course without much indication they have a reason to believe a return is around the corner.
What's the value in the 7 billion Meta paid for WhatsApp?
As an American, WhatsApp seemed like an odd fit with Facebook but I also travel internationally a great deal. Almost every single interaction I have while traveling anywhere that isn't Europe and North America, from coordinating airport pickups with drivers to requesting fresh towels from hotel staff, occurs via WhatsApp nowadays.
It's actually really nice. I booked a dive in Belize earlier this year and all I did was scan a QR code of an ad I saw in the hotel, send them a screenshot of my NAUI app, sign a waiver from a link they sent me, then they sent a payment link, google maps directions, and instantly responded to my question when I couldn't find the right dock. All of this occurred on WhatsApp in the span of like 90 minutes.
In the US the process IS NOT that smooth.
AI feels more like data utilizer
Sure, you can save the queries, but it aint much
WhatsApp and AI Chats are different products.
e.g WhatsApp is way, way more reliable than LLMs
Many things are valuable from a monetary point of view, but largely worthless (or of negative worth) otherwise. And many other things are worthless from a monetary view, but of great value otherwise.
AI is now this neat little thing to play around and has some values(non tech people makes MVPs/Emails/Slides, while tech people get faster search and code completion) but who know when the tiktok/fb like moment happens and takes all this AI into rocket to the moon.
At this moment, I think, the push is the slow boiling the frog, i.e. hold hard until skeptics just become used to it and then a generation becomes dependent on it, from which point it’ll become everyday necessity and become viable business.
I remember the “for cost of your morning coffee, you get this cool slice of server timeshare(VPS)” when people were skeptic until it became the norm. Now even if that VPS costs much less to operate, we still see the sticking “$5” price. May be AI will continue to be that “$30/month” but with advances in computing, it’ll get cheaper and at a certain point, that $1 spent to earn 80c will become 5c spent to earn $1.
So glad to find out we only needed reality to get sufficiently bad for augmentation to pick up. True innovation.
Roy Amara called it.
that translated well into business since people were familiar with how to use windows
the efficiency problems microsoft faces as an organization are disjointed from people trying to stay in touch effectively.
ai solves a lot of problems people can imagine having when being pitched the equivalent of digital timeshare, which mathematically does well when projecting for growth, but the vast majority of people look to get out of their timeshares when it becomes a burden on their lives.
slop is a new term, but why do we all know what it means already?