Maybe there's a bit more to a company and its software than the quantity of code it generates? And maybe there's a built in moat that a lot of these companies have that takes a lot of effort (and marketing, etc) to overcome?
People don't just jump social networks because a new one exist, there has to be a compelling reason to migrate over to it. And for a lot of people, there needs to be a sufficient number of people (and probably existing friends) already using the app for them to expend the effort to start using it.
It's not like there haven't been other attempts at competitors for these over the years, and you haven't heard about them probably because none of them ever got any traction. And that takes more than just building software.
Like DuckDuckGo has been competing with Google search for years (it first came out back in 2008, it looks like), and likely is way better developed than anything someone will crank out with A.I. in a short period of time. And it still has a tiny fraction of Google's marketshare.
I'm not saying there won't eventually be other competitors to these, but it'll take more than just whipping up an MVP with A.I. in a few weeks.
Oh yeah - did not intend to mean to limit the opportunity only to those who use AI.
I'm saying across the board there is massive disruptive potential because of AI (no matter what you are building) that seemingly no major corporate player is taking advantage of.
If Google goes all-in on AI, then yes the opportunity is a "non-AI" one (taking the market they left behind when they abandoned conventional search and advertising models), and to your point those like DuckDuckGo, I might even add Proton, are doing just that - going after that market Google built an empire on.
> whipping up an MVP
That's one way to think of it. Or you can take a purely mathematical and finance perspective:
Code and pixels are cheaper than they have ever been, and yet still have the same or greater earning potential than before. Replace [code and pixels] with real estate, gold, or anything else and the economics would be simple: BUY. It's cheap - buy. Hoard.
For some reason, very few finance people are seeing it that way. I would bet that even a company like DuckDuckGo (in all their benevolence /s) are still benefitting greatly from cheap code and cheap pixels. It can't be avoided - it has pervaded the industry and is providing value whether or not you believe in it or partake.
AI can help you write code, but it still can't help you get customers, or attention. In fact, it makes it worse. AI helps with introducing more noise, more content, and more people clamoring for attention. It's a lemon market.
Mainly am asking why those with attention (or VCs who can get it) are not introducing more noise, more content, and more clamoring - as you put it.
I thought that was the whole idea?
Lemon market - maybe - but it remains to be seen IMO. The market seems almost entirely unrealized. There are only a few major AI companies in the media, and it seems like innovation is largely directionless or stalled.
I haven't really seen any "startup boom" for AI yet. It's all the same kind of AI wrapper startup still. The most innovative thing in San Francisco right now is AI complaince.... Compliance... I'll leave you with that.
Can you frame your question in a single sentence? Even after reading everything you wrote above, I’m not clear what the essence of your question really is.
2) Making a billion dollar company is too expensive. Netflix lost money for years. Amazon lost money for years. Tesla lost money for a decade. Spotify took 18 years to become profitable. The AI companies are losing billions of dollars each month.
Agree LLMs are more like a calculator than the person who uses it. You actually still need the person to use it! And you want that anyway for accountability and ownership. That's one of the big reasons I think companies should be hoarding AI talent right now.
And 2 - yeah I really mean "product focused" companies, not these YC AI wrapper replicas you see everywhere (no offense to YC but hey, they know what they are doing lol). Those companies must be only there to drive usage to the model providers they wrap.
The disruptive potential is not limited to those who use AI, or those who offer it in their product to end users. The potential is here regardless. Because of the fact workers use it in their workflows - in Adobe software, in their IDE, and so-on, it's effectively here.
The company does not need to do anything special - just hire.
AI is not just disrupting companies and contributing for layoffs but it's also changing the buyers and customers.
Why build a new Google when the potential Google customers now just get their results from LLMs instead of SERPs?
How to be the next Jobs when there's no actual new product, just essentially an assistant tool?
How to create the next Disney, Netflix, Blizzard or Pixar when LLM's are still not good enough to produce quality content and many people are also starting to despise AI generated content? Art is still an intrinsic Human thing, even if LLMs are able to produce it.
So, although these LLMs are super amazing and definitely revolutionary, this whole AI/AGI hype is still a bit on bubble territory imho so I'm not really sure we'll see what you're hinting at with this generation of LLMs.
Also, wasn't AI supposed to be the last product we'd ever need to invent and then it's utopia and singing kumbaya for all eternity?
We won't need new companies, big personalities or heroes once Skynet/Hal9000/GLaDOS/Agent Smith/etc are in charge :)
There are opportunities to build a new Google without AI. In that case AI creates an opportunity in an unexpected way. If Google goes all-in on AI, the opportunity is wide open for someone else.
And we do see that (Proton, DuckDuckGo, even iCloud is becoming very Google-like in recent years).
As for "AI is not good enough" I remain unconvinced - I've seen production quality work, granted not 1-shot from a model but produced by a talented artist.
I never said AGI, (I believe that's only a marketing term from OpenAI). The other stuff at the end of your comment has nothing to do with what I'm talking about here! I really am focused on the low cost of code, video, and other media compared to the massive opportunity to serve content to people worldwide and how much money and disruptive potential is being left on table.
But here's another thought: Code and pixels are still cheaper than ever before.
Another one: The earning potential from code and pixels is the same or greater than it was before AI.
Put it together. If it was real estate where land was cheap but selling at the same rate as before, then investors would be all over it.
Innovation is something you have to believe in - I get that - but from a purely finance perspective why is there not a massive movement to obtain swaths of low cost, high potential IP? Data, engagement, emails and cards on file. Series A-F growth, greater fools and IPOs - either way it's massively generative of productive wealth, and you'll get a few game changers here and there.
I fail to see why it's not a great opportunity for, say, a $1B+ fund in just about any category.
It's simple: AI can't really write software. AI is good in generating garbage code averaged from millions of repos.
Here is an example of software that can scale with a single person assuming AI can write software: a web-based alternative to Photoshop built on wasm. Figma is analogous to that and it's worth $10Bn.
Maybe there's a bit more to a company and its software than the quantity of code it generates? And maybe there's a built in moat that a lot of these companies have that takes a lot of effort (and marketing, etc) to overcome?
People don't just jump social networks because a new one exist, there has to be a compelling reason to migrate over to it. And for a lot of people, there needs to be a sufficient number of people (and probably existing friends) already using the app for them to expend the effort to start using it.
It's not like there haven't been other attempts at competitors for these over the years, and you haven't heard about them probably because none of them ever got any traction. And that takes more than just building software.
Like DuckDuckGo has been competing with Google search for years (it first came out back in 2008, it looks like), and likely is way better developed than anything someone will crank out with A.I. in a short period of time. And it still has a tiny fraction of Google's marketshare.
I'm not saying there won't eventually be other competitors to these, but it'll take more than just whipping up an MVP with A.I. in a few weeks.
Oh yeah - did not intend to mean to limit the opportunity only to those who use AI.
I'm saying across the board there is massive disruptive potential because of AI (no matter what you are building) that seemingly no major corporate player is taking advantage of.
If Google goes all-in on AI, then yes the opportunity is a "non-AI" one (taking the market they left behind when they abandoned conventional search and advertising models), and to your point those like DuckDuckGo, I might even add Proton, are doing just that - going after that market Google built an empire on.
> whipping up an MVP
That's one way to think of it. Or you can take a purely mathematical and finance perspective:
Code and pixels are cheaper than they have ever been, and yet still have the same or greater earning potential than before. Replace [code and pixels] with real estate, gold, or anything else and the economics would be simple: BUY. It's cheap - buy. Hoard.
For some reason, very few finance people are seeing it that way. I would bet that even a company like DuckDuckGo (in all their benevolence /s) are still benefitting greatly from cheap code and cheap pixels. It can't be avoided - it has pervaded the industry and is providing value whether or not you believe in it or partake.
AI can help you write code, but it still can't help you get customers, or attention. In fact, it makes it worse. AI helps with introducing more noise, more content, and more people clamoring for attention. It's a lemon market.
Mainly am asking why those with attention (or VCs who can get it) are not introducing more noise, more content, and more clamoring - as you put it.
I thought that was the whole idea?
Lemon market - maybe - but it remains to be seen IMO. The market seems almost entirely unrealized. There are only a few major AI companies in the media, and it seems like innovation is largely directionless or stalled.
I haven't really seen any "startup boom" for AI yet. It's all the same kind of AI wrapper startup still. The most innovative thing in San Francisco right now is AI complaince.... Compliance... I'll leave you with that.
Can you frame your question in a single sentence? Even after reading everything you wrote above, I’m not clear what the essence of your question really is.
Why is there not an AI hiring spree in tech?
Two hypotheses:
1) LLMs just aren't good enough
2) Making a billion dollar company is too expensive. Netflix lost money for years. Amazon lost money for years. Tesla lost money for a decade. Spotify took 18 years to become profitable. The AI companies are losing billions of dollars each month.
Agree LLMs are more like a calculator than the person who uses it. You actually still need the person to use it! And you want that anyway for accountability and ownership. That's one of the big reasons I think companies should be hoarding AI talent right now.
And 2 - yeah I really mean "product focused" companies, not these YC AI wrapper replicas you see everywhere (no offense to YC but hey, they know what they are doing lol). Those companies must be only there to drive usage to the model providers they wrap.
The disruptive potential is not limited to those who use AI, or those who offer it in their product to end users. The potential is here regardless. Because of the fact workers use it in their workflows - in Adobe software, in their IDE, and so-on, it's effectively here.
The company does not need to do anything special - just hire.
AI is not just disrupting companies and contributing for layoffs but it's also changing the buyers and customers.
Why build a new Google when the potential Google customers now just get their results from LLMs instead of SERPs?
How to be the next Jobs when there's no actual new product, just essentially an assistant tool?
How to create the next Disney, Netflix, Blizzard or Pixar when LLM's are still not good enough to produce quality content and many people are also starting to despise AI generated content? Art is still an intrinsic Human thing, even if LLMs are able to produce it.
So, although these LLMs are super amazing and definitely revolutionary, this whole AI/AGI hype is still a bit on bubble territory imho so I'm not really sure we'll see what you're hinting at with this generation of LLMs.
Also, wasn't AI supposed to be the last product we'd ever need to invent and then it's utopia and singing kumbaya for all eternity?
We won't need new companies, big personalities or heroes once Skynet/Hal9000/GLaDOS/Agent Smith/etc are in charge :)
There are opportunities to build a new Google without AI. In that case AI creates an opportunity in an unexpected way. If Google goes all-in on AI, the opportunity is wide open for someone else.
And we do see that (Proton, DuckDuckGo, even iCloud is becoming very Google-like in recent years).
As for "AI is not good enough" I remain unconvinced - I've seen production quality work, granted not 1-shot from a model but produced by a talented artist.
I never said AGI, (I believe that's only a marketing term from OpenAI). The other stuff at the end of your comment has nothing to do with what I'm talking about here! I really am focused on the low cost of code, video, and other media compared to the massive opportunity to serve content to people worldwide and how much money and disruptive potential is being left on table.
AI is just not that good.
Exactly - meaning it doesn't replace employees.
But here's another thought: Code and pixels are still cheaper than ever before.
Another one: The earning potential from code and pixels is the same or greater than it was before AI.
Put it together. If it was real estate where land was cheap but selling at the same rate as before, then investors would be all over it.
Innovation is something you have to believe in - I get that - but from a purely finance perspective why is there not a massive movement to obtain swaths of low cost, high potential IP? Data, engagement, emails and cards on file. Series A-F growth, greater fools and IPOs - either way it's massively generative of productive wealth, and you'll get a few game changers here and there.
I fail to see why it's not a great opportunity for, say, a $1B+ fund in just about any category.
It's simple: AI can't really write software. AI is good in generating garbage code averaged from millions of repos.
Here is an example of software that can scale with a single person assuming AI can write software: a web-based alternative to Photoshop built on wasm. Figma is analogous to that and it's worth $10Bn.
The world runs on garbage code from millions of repos.
I agree with you that it doesn't replace a person, but it certainly makes code a lot cheaper.
If code is cheaper than ever, and the earning potential is the same. Why aren't investors all over it?
And I'll 1-up your Photoshop example with https://photopea.com
Made by 1 person, I use it literally every day.