George Bilbrey

something essential about software economics: the complementary good to any given software product is a lot more software! This is part of the mystery of Docusign, i.e. why do they have so many employees? And why doesn't someone else just make a cheaper replacement? You can build a cheaper replacement pretty quickly—the service I use, Dropbox Sign,... See more

Platform-provided AI capabilities will not only be the easiest way for developers to incorporate these features, they will also likely be the best way, at least in terms of the overall user experience. Users will understand how to use them, because they will be “trained” by Apple’s own apps; they will likely be cheaper and more efficient, because t... See more

The marginal cost of writing code is dropping, while the marginal cost of running it—to the extent that much of this new code is frequently using inference, or doing other computationally-intensive tasks—is rising. That's the reverse of the economic tailwind that's done so much for software engineers' incomes and software investors' returns.

Meanwhile, a lower cost to creating new programs also means a shorter half-life for a given piece of code

It's easier than ever to build version 0.1, and takes more time to connect with everything that's going to get it to 1.0 status.

The Internet, though, is a world of abundance, and there is a new power that matters: the ability to make sense of that abundance, to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack. And that power is held by Google. Thus, while the audiences advertisers crave are now hopelessly fractured amongst an effectively infinite number of publishers, t... See more

Here’s the problem with leading the world in regulation: you can only regulate what is built, and the E.U. doesn’t build anything pertinent to technology.

It’s easy enough to imagine this tale being told in a few year’s time:

The erstwhile center of civilization, long-since surpassed by the United States, leverages the fundamental nature of technolog... See more

If you have a business intelligence bot that you're using to check in on your company's performance, it won't matter whether the relevant numbers are in Excel or Google Sheets or a Pandas dataframe or a Postgres database; if the tool is smart enough, it will know how to convert your request into the appropriate query and get an answer. And that mea... See more

In short, this isn’t a case of Apple driving arbitrary differentiation; you really do need better hardware to run AI, which means there is the possibility of a meaningful upgrade cycle for the iPhone in particular (and higher ARPUs as well — might Apple actually start advertising RAM differences in iPhone models, since more RAM will always be bette... See more

Finally , the commentariat exclaims! Apple is in danger of falling dangerously behind! The fact they are partnering with OpenAI is evidence of how desperate they are! In fact, I would argue the opposite: Apple is not too late, they are taking the correct approach up and down the stack, and are well-positioned to be one of AI’s big winners.