Technology has made certain kinds of tech startups possible. Maybe a facebook or instagram or dropbox IPO doesn’t show in the numbers, but all 3 of those companies were able to leverage massively improved software tools to cheaply make a competitive product. Mere dozens of software developers could make a large, performant site, or a file sharing system that worked seamlessly based around python (dropbox), or a site and mobile app that immediately gathered many users (instagram).
This was from technology making it much easier—previous to all the software stack and hardware speed improvements, these products were much harder. Go back enough years and it was impossible.
Yet other forms of startups—rocket startups, self driving startups, VTOL startups, biotech startups, chip startups, most hardware startups—fail almost every time. This is because it’s REALLY HARD to do what they are doing, and they simply don’t have either the funding or the coordination ability to solve a problem this difficult.
Part of it is probably coordination—even if they technically HAVE enough engineers to solve the problems, there is missing tooling and automated design verification and many other tools, especially for physical world products, so their prototype blows up and their second prototype blows up and they run out of money before reaching a prototype worthy of sale.
AGI could make engineering problems, even for new products, possible to solve immediately, reaching a salable, manufacturable, reliable product in a short time. (through simulated testing large numbers of design variants, real world manufacturing and real testing of thousands of prototype variations in parallel, automating real world manufacturing for new products with no hand assembly stage required at all, automating the design of mechanical and electronic parts, and so on)
One counter-factor.
Technology has made certain kinds of tech startups possible. Maybe a facebook or instagram or dropbox IPO doesn’t show in the numbers, but all 3 of those companies were able to leverage massively improved software tools to cheaply make a competitive product. Mere dozens of software developers could make a large, performant site, or a file sharing system that worked seamlessly based around python (dropbox), or a site and mobile app that immediately gathered many users (instagram).
This was from technology making it much easier—previous to all the software stack and hardware speed improvements, these products were much harder. Go back enough years and it was impossible.
Yet other forms of startups—rocket startups, self driving startups, VTOL startups, biotech startups, chip startups, most hardware startups—fail almost every time. This is because it’s REALLY HARD to do what they are doing, and they simply don’t have either the funding or the coordination ability to solve a problem this difficult.
Part of it is probably coordination—even if they technically HAVE enough engineers to solve the problems, there is missing tooling and automated design verification and many other tools, especially for physical world products, so their prototype blows up and their second prototype blows up and they run out of money before reaching a prototype worthy of sale.
AGI could make engineering problems, even for new products, possible to solve immediately, reaching a salable, manufacturable, reliable product in a short time. (through simulated testing large numbers of design variants, real world manufacturing and real testing of thousands of prototype variations in parallel, automating real world manufacturing for new products with no hand assembly stage required at all, automating the design of mechanical and electronic parts, and so on)