However this is relevant because this is an investor report helping people forecast, and this stat helps calibrate readers expectations of just how fast a product can scale in this day & age, using a relevant comparison of products in the same category that when launched offered the same step change in value.

Also, quantity has a quality of its own.

Maybe this will turn out to be a valuable user segment, but I'm not sure.

I saw another one recently that said something like "ChatGPT has 350 millions unique visits per month, if it were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world"

Or something along those lines.

I hate this so much I actually ran the numbers and saw that per capita box office revenues have remained generally stable since the 1980s.

Yes. The question isn’t which team is better. The question is how fast they can grow. Similar companies in Pakistan and America will grow disparately. Same for companies on the Internet in 1998 versus, practically, 2022. That isn't fair. But nobody cares about fair, we’re measuring what’s true. It’s fair, from those data, to conclude that the latter should beat the former's record, whether separated by space or time.

(You correctly conclude, from that slide, that Google grew in a less favourable environment than OpenAI et al. You just need to take it one step further into the potential rate for growth and disruption today versus in the past. Put another way, Google could be disrupted quicker than it could disrupt.)

This argument is like a classic. But on which time frame is it supposed to be operative? Is that back with any empirical data to test the claim?

Less involvement of edge nodes in the decision process is also encouraging "don't give a shit to suggest improvements" and "utter whatever lie is expected by the system to avoid claims of dissidence".

There are actual pragmatic benefits in democratic systems, it's not only pure idealistic motivation at stake that can argue in their favor.

It's overwhelmingly the case that affluence and national wealth goes hand in hand with greater democracy, there is a tight correlation (and of course there are exceptions). All you need to do is look at the top ~50 nations in terms of GDP per capita or median wealth per adult, then look at the bottom 50.

Less democratic nations will be left even further behind, as the richer democratic nations race ahead as they have been doing for most of the post WW2 era. The richer democratic nations will have the resources to make the required enormous investments. The more malevolent less democratic nations will of course make use of good-enough AI to do malicious things, not much about that will change. Their power position won't fundamentally change however.

Having never ridden in a Waymo, I’m curious if anyone sees a reason those trends won’t continue in SF or replicate elsewhere.

As someone who was very worried about how this would impact artistic output I've started to change my mind. It seems younger people are extremely sensitive to AI content and happy to call out anything that could conceivably be generated by AI as slop. People want real art created by real people with real skill. They want to be able to connect with their art and connect with them in person. The muzak industry is in trouble but I no longer think music in general will be replaced by AI. We'll see improvements to software instruments, plugins etc but AI improving the tools is a different prospect than fully AI generated music.

Her use is not the math sense, it's the conceptual sense. In AI space, a common example is:

    king - male + female = queen

    philosopher's stone + mercury = gold

But asking if average people will pay for AI is the wrong question. It's like asking if average people will pay for Salesforce or Oracle. Even if consumers don't pay for AI en masse, their employers will as the value proposition is a lot clearer.

Just like paying for a smartphone or data or broadband.

I think it will be similar in AI. The AI will be free or cheap; the money will be made in its application. I won’t be surprised if my kid looks back on Anthropic and OpenAI the way we look back on Sun and Netscape.

Now with headless agents (like CheepCode[0], the one I built) that connect directly to the same task management apps that we do as human programmers, you can get “good enough” PRs out of a single Linear ticket with no need to touch an IDE. For copy changes and other easy-to-verify tweaks this saves developers a lot of overhead checking out branches, making PRs, etc so they can stay focused on the more interesting/valuable work. At $1/task a “good enough” result is well worth it compared to the cost of human time.

[0] https://cheepcode.com

Search. AI works about as well as a clueless first-year analyst. You need to double check its work. But there is still value added in its compiling together sources and providing a reasonably-accurate summary of, at the very least, some of their arguments.

Also basic web development. Most restauranteurs I know no longer deem it necessary to hire a web developer. (Happy side effect: more PDF menus instead of over-engineered nonsense.)

For the other stuff like automating white collar jobs, good enough might not suffice due to the intricate dependencies and implicit contracts formed naturally out of human groups.

Creative jobs will be the most impacted by "good enough" depending on the number of features. For 2d art it was almost certainly over (unless you add text feature to it like manga). You can see with increasing features, like starting with general photography, stock photography and now product photography are overnight made redundant. ex) with the latest Flux image editor negates a need to hire a photo editor, photographer, camera equipment, lighting, product artist. Veo3 not quite there but handles speech features in video generation that other models did not and getting closer to replacing videographers. I think 3d model is the next frontier here following the trend but is still quite difficult as it involves mesh generation/texture/rigging/animation/physics that also must come with shaders and interaction with other 3d models.

Software engineering falls somewhat in the creative field but also shares the complexity from white collar jobs for the same reason that will prevent it from being completed automatable with "good enough".

The hallucination issue is less of an issue and an old trope. The truly challenging enemy of AI of "good enough" is due to "not enough context" and "poor context compression and recall". The problems I listed in white collar and software engineering jobs is context problem. The compression of contexts cannot be stable as the former isn't solved. The fast efficient recall of contexts then cannot take place due to poor compression and so on.

This is just my observation of seeing how things are progressing. I do feel that we will see something different from LLM altogether that could solve some of the context issues but a major misalignment of incentives is what I think would prevent an AGI know-all-see-all type of deal. ex) you might not have any incentive to share all the essential context with the AI because you might become irrelevant and want it to stay in the dark. you might have a union or some social organization to legislate monopoly of human knowledge/skill workers in a field.

but perhaps THE most difficult problem even after we solve the context problem is the inability for the God AGI to be awake or conscious which is absolutely critical in many real world applications.

I like to focus more on the very near impact of what AI is currently doing in the labs and its impact on humans than worrying about who and when all of the other problems are going to be addressed.

Whether we get a UBI-first socialist world order or a continuation of technological feudalism with the poors still using GPTs while the rich sell the energy and chips (software would almost be worthless on its own by then) is the least of my concern.

I'm an optimist and I'm very excited for the very-near and immediate impact of our currently available AI tools doing the "good enough" in very positive ways.

It's replacing drive-through attendants [1].

[1] https://investors.yum.com/news-events/financial-releases/new...

Waymo is clearly growing fast, but it's not bigger than Uber—yet. Super impressive its already surpassed Lyft. From personal experience, it also seems to have driven Uber prices down materially.

Page 6: https://www.bondcap.com/report/pdf/Trends_Artificial_Intelli...

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There were a few practical use cases mentioned here, but the only quantified impact to worker productivity from LLMs that I noticed was a single study of call center agents from 2023 that showed a 14% increase in cases handled per hour.

(yesterday evening I read about 400 pages of text as entertainment, it is not much - though admittedly this specific one failed as entertainment and it was not content worth reading)