←back to thread

Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

(steveblank.com)
128 points ArmageddonIt | 1 comments | 08 Jul 25 13:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
Show context
jampa ◴[08 Jul 25 15:43 UTC] No.44501089[source]▶
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...

replies(10): >>44501192 #>>44501224 #>>44501278 #>>44501389 #>>44501569 #>>44505291 #>>44505340 #>>44505796 #>>44506753 #>>44508378 #
mcswell ◴[09 Jul 25 02:23 UTC] No.44505796[source]▶
"With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence."

I'm missing something here. First, I thought Steve's point was that the carriage makers did not see "individual transportation" as their business, and they should have--if they had, they might have pivoted like Studebaker did.

So if "most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence", that could mean that they ought to be.

However, I draw a somewhat different conclusion: the business that companies ranging from Newsweek to accountants to universities to companies' HR departments should see themselves in is intelligence, regardless of whether that's artificial or otherwise. The question then becomes which supplies that intelligence better: humans or LLM-type AI (or some combination thereof)? I'm not at all sure that the answer at present is LLM-AI, but it is a different question, and the answer may well be different in the near future.

There are of course other kinds of AI, as you (jampa) mention. In other words, AI is not (for now) one thing; LLMs are just one kind of AI.

replies(3): >>44506050 #>>44506477 #>>44506513 #
1. kamaal ◴[09 Jul 25 03:13 UTC] No.44506050[source]▶
This is a different way of saying, people must learn how to use a new technology. I think like cars, radio, internet or smart phones. It took a while for people to understand somethings are so disruptive, eventually it will find a way into your life in all forms.

Im guessing for someone in laundry or restaurant business it might be hard to understand how AI could change their lives. And that is true, at least at this stage in the adoption and development of AI. But eventually it will find a way into their business in some form or the other.

There are stages to this. Pretty sure the first jobs to go will be the most easiest. This is the case with Software development too. When people say writing code has gotten easier, they really are talking about projects that were already easy to build getting even more easier. Harder parts of software development are still hard. Making changes to larger code bases with a huge user base comes with problems where writing code is kind of irrelevant. There are bigger issue to address like regression, testing, stability, quality, user adoption etc etc.

Second stage is of course once the easy stuff gets too easy to build. There is little incentive to build it. With modern building techniques we aren't building infinite huts, are we? We pivoted to building sky scrapers. I do believe most of AI's automation gains will be soaked up in the first wave and there will little incentive to build easy stuff and harder stuff will have more productivity demands from people than ever before.