Since my LinkedIn is full of people shilling for Sam Altman and his latest blog post - https://ia.samaltman.com/ - I read it and like many of you didn't like it for several reasons.
However, I thought, instead of dissecting the torrent of bad ideas and half baked assumptions that's in the post, I'd look at what HackerNews thinks about it.
So I scrapped the related discussion from here https://lnkd.in/e5keEd8H and pushed it through a tool we are building. Have a look at the resulting Prisma dashboard here https://t.ly/q-8v9
A few interesting things that stand out after just 2 minutes:
- CrowdPrisma found just 4 main clusters of comments, each talking about different themes on average. You can quickly run through them by pressing the Ctrl (Cmd) key + 1, then 2, then 3, then 4.
- For example group 1 has comments that are always replies (never a 1st comment) and are mainly about the theme "The intersection of technology and sustainability". This is of course in response to Altman's claim that his amazing vision demands exorbitant amounts of energy.
- Group 2 is almost exclusively about the topic " Integrity in Communication", a mostly negative set of comments from people who basically just call BS on the whole vision - with some very entertaining comments.
- Interestingly (and replicated across several HN dashboards), the longer a discussion goes on (more replies and replies to the replies) the more civil and less negative the sentiment gets. Create a filter on the "Comment position" chart and drag it from left to right to reproduce it. It's almost like in some corners of the internet, people can still discuss stuff (even contentious issues) without escalation and insanity.
- Old HN users are way less negative than new users (do the same as above, define a range on the "User signup" chart, then pull it to the left, then to the right).
More than a year ago (when MS announced that it will introduce copilot in all of its office suite) I posted here. I said (with total conviction) that our bootstrapped, two-man NLP/AI company is now doomed and GPT4 will basically solve everything we ever wanted to.
Crowdprisma is a free-text survey analysis tool that aims to understand survey responses, extract topics from it and accurately assign each response to them. Then allow the user to cross-check these topics against non-text (ie qualitative) variables, through a unified dashboard. To be brutally honest, before GPT our text engine sucked, even though we worked a ton on it (the fact that we were two senior ML engineers with 10+ years experience between us, didn't make a difference).
It took us a whole year to realise that GPT4 cannot do this easily and in a single go, and another 7 months to completely rewrite our pipeline and make it water tight (yepp, we are probably not silicon valley fast).
Now it's better than it could have ever been pre-gpt4 and is super valuable for our customers.
So maybe it is truly the case that AI will not (just) kill old jobs and companies but make some of them adopt, then adapt & survive (or at least give them a second chance). Surely we are biased but for us, it certainly feels that way.
What layoffs? The labour market is still the tightest it's ever been almost everywhere.. don't get hn myopia from a few react developers being fired and whining here..
There are entire websites like layoffs.fyi[1] and layoffstracker.com[2] that tell you which tech company laid off how many. I don't know about other industries but at least IT and a few others are undergoing a bloodbath right now as far as employment is concerned. BYJUS laid off over a thousand recently and they're an Ed-tech company.
Those layoffs are the totally necessary consequences of the idiotic COVID overhiring these tech firms did and if you zoom out the problem is still the opposite: too many jobs are chasing too few job seekers.
I guess you could outsource ID verification for someone else to get a photo of my government ID but either way that's too much friction to join a social network.
1 or 2 $ / month is actually more than enough to run a profitable and great company if you have hundreds of thousands of users. Not everything needs to IPO or be called a unicorn or whatever.
> Not everything needs to IPO or be called a unicorn or whatever.
I definitely agree, but for social networks you do need some volume unless it is very specific, but this creates some catch 22 paradox.
I am a member of more than one specific subject, free Slack communities, on the small-medium scale, with un-verified identities. I don't get junk messages, spam recruiters or other inappropriate approaches, I assume the reason is that the size of the communities is not big enough to attract those.
On the other hand I would agree to pay for such small-ish community which attract top talent and is highly moderated, but it seems that it is not needed in real life.
ok so you have to
- steal an ID or forge one
- deep fake the person on the ID (at least a 10sec video)
- then you'll pay a monthly fee
- since there's no API you'll need to pay troll farms to use these accounts
I'd say that's already a barrier 100x higher than any other platform so not a lot scammers will jump over it. I don't see this as a binary thing. This (like most things) is a scale. Having 100x less scammers on a platform is qualitatively better than having 100x more. Wouldn't you agree?
not trying to be facetious but are you really suggesting that "scammers" will kidnap ppl, and photograph them next to their ID (which they also conveniently have), just to sign up to a social network (where they have to pay a monthly fee)? and they'll do this by the thousands? wow.. what a world we live..
You really underestimate scammers. If you create a popular social network and there is money to be made, they'll find a way. They'll visit a developing country and pay people $5 to hold a fake ID card for a photo or video. Paying $5,000 for 1,000 fake accounts isn't a problem for them, because they'll quickly make that money back selling likes, followers, or pushing advertisements.
This quickly changes the premise of your service from a verified social network with content written by real humans, to a social network with mostly real paying users, some fake paying users, and any content you see may or may not be written by a bot. Is it really that different from other social networks at that point?
Cold email wont work. You would need to get a warm introduction to the ceo of the company. Nurture that relationship a bit on the basis that you are both in the market and working on similar problems, then once a rapport has been established you can broach the topic of acquisition.
Anyways, I'd never do an accelerator kinda thing again or even take funding unless it makes a ton of sense.. turns out there are a lot of business (not unicorns) you can build with a buddy on the side and not get caught up in the craziness of raising, posturing, raising again, playing someone else's game, etc..
> turns out there are a lot of business (not unicorns) you can build with a buddy on the side and not get caught up in the craziness of raising, posturing, raising again, playing someone else's game, etc..
This! Precisely my take away from my own experience with EF (nothing against them, they are quite cool to be honest).
The people i've met at EF, failed startups or not, have been absolutely.brilliant. Keep it up!
However, I thought, instead of dissecting the torrent of bad ideas and half baked assumptions that's in the post, I'd look at what HackerNews thinks about it.
So I scrapped the related discussion from here https://lnkd.in/e5keEd8H and pushed it through a tool we are building. Have a look at the resulting Prisma dashboard here https://t.ly/q-8v9
A few interesting things that stand out after just 2 minutes:
- CrowdPrisma found just 4 main clusters of comments, each talking about different themes on average. You can quickly run through them by pressing the Ctrl (Cmd) key + 1, then 2, then 3, then 4.
- For example group 1 has comments that are always replies (never a 1st comment) and are mainly about the theme "The intersection of technology and sustainability". This is of course in response to Altman's claim that his amazing vision demands exorbitant amounts of energy.
- Group 2 is almost exclusively about the topic " Integrity in Communication", a mostly negative set of comments from people who basically just call BS on the whole vision - with some very entertaining comments.
- Interestingly (and replicated across several HN dashboards), the longer a discussion goes on (more replies and replies to the replies) the more civil and less negative the sentiment gets. Create a filter on the "Comment position" chart and drag it from left to right to reproduce it. It's almost like in some corners of the internet, people can still discuss stuff (even contentious issues) without escalation and insanity.
- Old HN users are way less negative than new users (do the same as above, define a range on the "User signup" chart, then pull it to the left, then to the right).