Thread

1. pradn · 1790371022 · focus · HN ↗

   I'm not sure what this means for AI startups if their innovations can be copied by OSS so quickly (what, like 2 weeks?). There's "consumer surplus" for everyone, to borrow an economic concept. But we do ideally want some of the surplus to flow to the innovator, too. I know there were precursors, but that's fine - it's hard to have a totally novel idea in such a popular field. I don't know what the end game is for TypeSafe - they'd need to demonstrate perpetually better results, or compete in another axis: UX, support, custom solutions, etc. So much of the time, someone proving a concept, or it simply getting enough publicity, is enough for a "Cambrian explosion" of follow-ups and copies. Famously, that was true for "Attention is All You Need", and the general idea of "next-token prediction" being so powerful.

   We've stumbled into general differentiable models..

   1. Fordec · 1790381989 · focus · HN ↗

      I think the idea of a "feature startup" is dead. What used to be a niche subscription business is now an individual Epic level of work. The smallest viable business becomes what two or three years ago was a mid tier enterprise. It is no longer "look at this tool I maintain", but "we take this specific approach using these hundreds of tools merged together to solve a problem in a specific way that nobody is going to compete with. Not because they can't compete if they wanted to, but that the competitions approach diverges in fifty different chosen ways that they are targeting a different market segment essentially."

      I adhere to the idea that this is software's "Tower of Babel" moment where everyone just fundamentally ships things in completely diverging architectures, because creating a ground up architecture is no longer something that needs to be avoided for an economically viable business mode that in the past two decades would have otherwise incentivized people into industry standards. In a world where "taste" is the focus, single ingredients in the recipe aren't enough.

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