AI
It's becoming increasingly evident that in many circles, AI is not perceived as merely a technology, but as "something else" entirely. This misconception is exemplified by the recurring debate: "Humans vs AI." To illustrate the absurdity of this framing, let's replace "AI" with "technology":
"Humans vs Technology"
This reframing immediately highl... See more
The Death of the Junior Developer
sourcegraph.com
AI adoption and capabilities are distributed bimodally across industries.
Writing-heavy professions like writing, law, software are feeling it first. It doesn't feel that way because other industries are still untouched. That may continue for long or it might not.
It's always calmest before the storm
AI follows auditability
grantslatton.com
Excerpt: “Over the last 15 years, Excel has been unbundled into a host of other apps, such as Asana, Looker, and QuickBooks. But this unbundling was only possible once Excel became ubiquitous enough for users to know they wanted a purpose-made alternative. In order for that to happen, Excel needed widespread adoption with power users who began using it for niche workflows that it wasn’t originally designed to support.
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Once those workflows were created, the power users realized that parts of their workflow were inefficient, or that features were missing for their use cases. They felt a need for purpose-built tools—and that became the opportunity for B2B SaaS to develop into a $327 billion market.”
llms are trained on internet-scale datasets, but their effects are not like the internet.
calculators — or tables that can be calculated on (llm + rag) — are better analogs.
the rise of spreadsheet applications allowed professionals to migrate their tables to spreadsheets. eventually, they put even fancier wrappers around their spreadsheets in vertical applications.
The State of AI with Marc & Ben
open.spotify.comAI and the Internet are different phenomena.
The internet increased the leverage of computers by connecting them to other computers. Amplifies things that benefit from wider distribution. Network effects.
LLMs are stateless calculators (computers). Amplifies things that have a lot of computational complexity. Quick and Reliable decision making.
When the first steam engines were introduced, the owners had a really hard time finding people to operate them who wouldn't get drunk in the middle of the day, fuck up, and wreck the machine.
Technological change is only possible with societal (behavioral) change
To use databases, you need to be able to think about your data in a structured way. The people who could do that gained most of the leverage from using databases. The folks who made it easy for people to transition to databases (ERPs and Co) captured the rest.
AI systems are fundamentally scalable decision making engines. And data is the oil required to power it. If you want to properly leverage AI, you need to make sure you're fueling it with the best refined data.
Otherwise, you're no different than the drunk trying to reliably operate complex machinery. The only repeatable part of that is injury.
AI is the new plastic
notion.so
There is beauty to naturally occurring material… and thought