Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark.

With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than they do now about implementing AI, especially in the front end.

This AI hype cycle is missing the mark by building ChatGPT-like bots and buttons with sparkles that perform single OpenAI API calls. AI applications are not a new thing, they have always been here, now they are just more accessible.

The best AI applications are beneath the surface to empower users, Jeff Bezos says that (in 2016!)[1]. You don't see AI as a chatbot in Amazon, you see it for "demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations."

[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to...

> The best AI applications are beneath the surface to empower users

Not this time, tho. ChatGPT is the iphone moment for "AI" for the masses. And it was surprising and unexpected both for the experts / practitioners and said masses. Working with LLMs pre gpt3.5 was a mess, hackish and "in the background" but way way worse experience overall. Chatgpt made it happen just like the proverbial "you had me at scroll and pinch-to-zoom" moment in the iphone presentation.

The fact that we went from that 3.5 to whatever claude code thing you can use today is mental as well. And one of the main reasons we got here so fast is also "chatgpt-like bots and buttons with sparkles". The open-source community is ~6mo behind big lab SotA, and that's simply insane. I would not have predicted that 2 years ago, and I was deploying open-source LLMs (GPT-J was the first one I used live in a project) before chatgpt launched. It is insane!

You'll probably laugh at this, but a lot of fine-tuning experimentation and gains in the open source world (hell, maybe even at the big labs, but we'll never know) is from the "horny people" using local llms for erotica and stuff. I wouldn't dismiss anything that happens in this space. Having discovered the Internet in the 90s, and been there for every hype cycle in this space, this one is different, no matter how much anti-hype tokens get spent on this subject.

I’ll spend an anti-hype token :)

ChatGPT wasn’t the iphone moment, because the iphone wasn’t quickly forgotten.

Outside of software, most adult professionals in my network had a play with chatgpt and have long since abandoned their accounts. They can’t use chatbots for work (maybe data is sensitive, or their ‘knowledge work’ isn’t the kind that produces text output). Our native language is too poorly supported for life admin (no Gemini summaries or ‘help writing an email’). They just don’t have any obvious use case for LLMs in their life.