dot-com bubble companies were not good companies. They either built something that was not novel so it could be copied, or had insufficient value to monetize. We'll see the same with current AI.
Similar to the invention of the web, AI is not a bubble. Real value has been created.
Cisco was the quintessential dot-com bubble company. Back then, it was what Nvidia is today: at the very spearhead of investors rallying behind the Internet.
"Good company" is subjective, but to argue that the company that built the backbone of modern web didn't make anything novel or monetizable is a bit short-sighted, don't you find?
And if you'd invested in Cisco then, it would have gone very badly for you. It was _wildly_ overvalued; at peak it had a P/E ratio of ~200 (even Nvidia's only about 50).
how so? Many internet companies that went bust like Webvan and Pets.com have successful equivalents in Instacart and Chewy?
I'm pretty sure many internet companies would be given a longer rope to survive now. E.g OpenAI and Anthropic will probably take years to get profitable but investors are OK with it
I think of certain types of knowledge as one way functions. In order to acquire the knowledge you have to search a huge key space or experience costly elimination of options. Once you know the answer it feels obvious and intuitive. We have accumulated so much of this knowledge now that we have a hard time intuitively understanding the gap between people without it and us.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." ... Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative [the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services] upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives [to impose upon the world a system of thought and action and to create employment]. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."
Thank you for this; surprised I haven't heard much about him prior, since I've been digging into political economy lately.
Specifically, his notes on consumption / full employment are refreshing - it never sits right with me that the goal of economic policy at a high level is so often at odds with doing things in a "smart" way (measuring projects in jobs created, for example).
Like air travel and hotel rooms. Even market based approaches like eBay have different prices for the same things. I'm not for dynamic pricing but it's pretty common.
Aren't there wiretapping laws that make recording conversations in certain situations illegal? I love the idea of this type of technology but it seems tricky to deploy from a moral and legal perspective.
I've previously worked on the Google Assistant from several angles, and this demo'd awesome, and I was very surprised. Then I saw it is listed as "soon" on the roadmap. Then I remembered the demo was very much a video, not a demo.
I might be jaded from years of bigco, and I'm rooting for you, hopefully you're already set enough financially you can ignore this, innovate, and already have teams of people demo'ing a solution internally:
As a company, you can't get trust back. Fudging a bit and projecting what you'll have when you ship is very tempting when the competition is this thick. Having this much competition also implies there will be choice, and given the use case, it's likely people will always opt for choices that appear more trustworthy.
On a completely separate note, I've seen many, many, teams of extremely bright people be funded for 2-4 years on things that you'd think "it can't be that hard..." and it turns out it's impossible. Not this specifically, but voice adjacent stuff.
Again, rooting for you, but a forthright version of me would have just said it'll never work as demo'd, and it's worth considering what impact it'll have long-term on your success if even just 20% of whats on the roadmap doesn't work out, you're already talking about it in present tense, and it's absolutely key to your user trust story. 20% is conservative in my experience.
I'm sure you've considered how the BIPA law in Illinois applies since it's one of (if not the) strongest biometrics privacy laws in the U.S. Could you share some detail on how you store and process unknown voices before consent?
You're wording in this comment (and the twitter/comment video) gives off the same vibes as the google april 1st videos for things like gmail motion (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAD8wFTLnQKeDsINWn8Wj...). I honestly thought this was full sarcasm at first.
Just a tip - consent shouldn't be a mode, it should be the default. Might want to re-think how you market the idea because done correctly, it is a powerful feature.
So you record people without consent and pinky swear that your software will “unrecord” after the fact? I don’t know if you can just hand wave that away… ship has probably sailed on anyone enforcing these kinds of laws I guess, good luck
I'm reminded of how I felt it was unfair that the hotword detector for assistants was discussed as "recording", but it's really just parsing a byte stream, never storing it.
Voice ID systems I'm familiar with work on a similar premise.
We lost net 10 of them costing hundreds of millions of dollars already.
Short term rentals were basically banned outright.
Not very many vacant real estate holdings, and how are you going to prove that they were sufficiently vacant -- going to roust them all at night?
City needs to actually get its act together to become more efficient.
I'm generally a proponent of soft limits on almost everything. It's better to hit some artificial cap than to end up chewing away on a transaction forever or crashing some service that can't allocate the memory to deal with it. In this case a limit on gems in an account, packs in a transaction, packs in an account, etc.
I suspect your question is rhetorical but I, and quite a few other Marxists, would say yes. Dividends, stock buybacks and other types of profit should be banned.
My issue is with the concentrated control of where the surplus value goes, I see the existence of dividends & stock buybacks as more of a side-effect of the system than a core-problem.
How is this a workable system!? Why would anyone pay them. This seems like fraud on the part of the phone networks for billing for service that was never provided or should have been provided cheaper.
while I don't agree with sanctions, this seems like the kind of time where you just block off a country/exchange entirely if you cannot have the confidence of what things cost to send there.
Similar to the invention of the web, AI is not a bubble. Real value has been created.