Thread

1. reticulates · 1790981347 · focus · HN ↗

   An uninspired vision of the future. We have endless evidence through history that hiring the most engineers, producing the most output, raising the most money is not the path to success. The most successful businesses are those that deeply understand something about their customers, about how to sell to their buyers. The most has never mattered. An army of agents doing endless busywork is not the path to success.

   Google isn’t successful because it has the best engineers, it has the best engineers because it is successful. Google is an extremely boring business: show adverts to make money. And they made so much money. The next Google is not going to be the company with the best “harness” it’ll be the company that has an obscenely profitable product.

   Founder mode, what was considered a panacea just 12 months ago, is defined by a founder giving a shit about everything. You don’t succeed by handing everything off to an army of ~agents~ consultants.

   This vision of the future is nonsense that will not pan out. You can add that to the HN AI predictions. At no point will real businesses be “harnesses” around AI models.

   1. 2001zhaozhao · 1790982471 · focus · HN ↗

      I don't think your take is counter to the article. It is precisely the "founder giving a shit about everything" that will be amplified the most by a capable AI harness, because AI reduces the power of capital (e.g. hiring a lot of good engineers or buying a lot of data or ads) as a moat by amplifying good judgement.

      (This is temporary until the AI gets better judgement than humans, then capital will therever be the most powerful moat in a market full of dystopic, consequentialist, incredibly long-sightedly-greedy companies)

      1. reticulates · 1790984213 · focus · HN ↗

         The article is arguing that a company’s output will be entirely created by AI (via the harness) and only the input (developing the harness) will be human. My take is counter to that. My take is that success in business comes from the small important details, not the volume of output. You can develop a harness to produce 1000x more output than humans but that doesn’t matter because even today, most businesses fail, not because they didn’t produce enough output, but because their output was wrong.

         Long before A.I., tiny 10 person startups have been able to revolutionize industries.

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