Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

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...

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.

But all 400+ carriage maker had pivoted, would they have had a chance to survive very long? Would they have all made more money pivoting? The idea that all this is only a "lack of vision" rather than hard business choices is kind of annoying.