I think more than 50% of our economy's businesses, are cosplaying. Not in it for customers or profit; in it for investors and investments. "Looking like a business", as your real line of work.
Any conversation
Overvalued, maybe. Extremely valuable, yes, though.
For sure. We're well past the point of being able to reasonably claim that the tools have no practical use.
But I share the article's skepticism that LLM-based AI will "produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers". Which it at this point has to in order to justify these companies' stupendous valuations.
Tomorrow no but there will always be the “hope” which is enough for the next 20 years before giving up. Which meanwhile would be replacing larger and larger chunks of the workforce so it won’t really matter, we’ll be adjusting our lives around it as well so we meet in the middle.
Tesla has been overvalued for over a decade with the promise of “fully autonomous cars” and it’s still not losing its value, despite not meeting that (and probably never will, as the computation necessary to achieve it is bounded by physics).
I find myself building bespoke tooling for my own and workflows these days, not only because of the obvious reason of software being so much cheaper to build, but also because there are SO MANY options for solving any given problem that it feels impossible to evaluate all of them.
If it's not a crucial piece of tech for a work problem then it often feels like paving my own way is both cheaper mentally (kind of amazing that's true these days) and probably a better fit.
It will become increasingly harder to find niche markets for software when those people can just build it themselves exactly how they want it. In the end, people want to accomplish tasks, and the AI is going to be building the software on-the-fly exactly for that task, why do we need generic software that may or may not be a fit?
Yeah. It makes me think that protocols for exchanging data between apps will become even more important in that landscape. But maybe, not - maybe each exchange is another bespoke AI-driven implementation?
Protocols, infrastructure, containers, those kinds of things. I was actually playing around with an idea for a minimal markup language + runtime that can be utilized by AI to spin up apps more easily, and brainstorming it with ChatGPT, I have a feeling something like that will appear soon to complement MCP.
"Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly." - Marcus Aurelius