The flaw here is in capitalism, if a company has too many bullshit jobs it’s costs are higher. Even a company that owns a monopoly has a limit to how many bullshit jobs it can sustain.
For example if Google were to stop updating their core software or selling ads their revenue would decline. They can’t have everyone working on passion projects and moonshots. They have a finite number of dollars they can invest long term, probably equal to their “monopoly rent”.
Hypothetically if they adopt an AI system capable enough to do almost all the real work two things happen:
The number of bullshit jobs they can support increases a little
It makes it possible for competitors to actually catch up. Googles tech lead is partly the collective effort of thousands of people. If GPT-4 can just churn out similar scale tooling with almost no effort then someone else could just ask GPT-4 to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust, then write an HMI layer with some ultra high level representation that is auto translated to code..
Boom, a 10 person startup has something better than android.
So google has to make Android better to stay ahead and so on. Or they fail like IBM did—retaining enough customers to stay afloat but no longer growing.
In the long run, yes. And that tends to be the end stage of behemoths. But in the mean time the juggernaut carries on, running on inertia, crushing everything in front of it.
If a 10 person startup has something better than android, you first offer them a couple of millions, and if they don’t accept it, use your power to crush them.
Maybe. I suppose many successful startups came along after better tools such as python/JavaScript/cloud hosting also made it dramatically cheaper to create a product it would have taken a behemoth before. See Dropbox as an example.
So gpt-4 is like another order of magnitude more productive a tool, similar to prior improvements.
The flaw here is in capitalism, if a company has too many bullshit jobs it’s costs are higher. Even a company that owns a monopoly has a limit to how many bullshit jobs it can sustain.
For example if Google were to stop updating their core software or selling ads their revenue would decline. They can’t have everyone working on passion projects and moonshots. They have a finite number of dollars they can invest long term, probably equal to their “monopoly rent”.
Hypothetically if they adopt an AI system capable enough to do almost all the real work two things happen:
The number of bullshit jobs they can support increases a little
It makes it possible for competitors to actually catch up. Googles tech lead is partly the collective effort of thousands of people. If GPT-4 can just churn out similar scale tooling with almost no effort then someone else could just ask GPT-4 to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust, then write an HMI layer with some ultra high level representation that is auto translated to code..
Boom, a 10 person startup has something better than android.
So google has to make Android better to stay ahead and so on. Or they fail like IBM did—retaining enough customers to stay afloat but no longer growing.
In the long run, yes. And that tends to be the end stage of behemoths. But in the mean time the juggernaut carries on, running on inertia, crushing everything in front of it.
If a 10 person startup has something better than android, you first offer them a couple of millions, and if they don’t accept it, use your power to crush them.
Maybe. I suppose many successful startups came along after better tools such as python/JavaScript/cloud hosting also made it dramatically cheaper to create a product it would have taken a behemoth before. See Dropbox as an example.
So gpt-4 is like another order of magnitude more productive a tool, similar to prior improvements.