Comment by oliwary
6 hours ago
"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing."
My favorite quote from the excellent show halt and catch fire. Maybe applicable to AI too?
6 hours ago
"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing."
My favorite quote from the excellent show halt and catch fire. Maybe applicable to AI too?
Something like that used to be Apple’s driving force under Steve Jobs (definitely no longer under Tim Cook).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=1m54s
> You’ve go to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
If those LLM addicts could read, they'd be very upset!
ChatGPT, tell me how I should feel about this!
1 reply →
That works when you are starting a new company from scratch to solve a problem. When you're established and your boffins discover a new thing, of course you find places to use it. It's the expression problem with business: when you add a new customer experience you intersect it with all existing technology, and when you add a new technology you intersect it with all existing customer experience.
Apple was a well established company when they came out with the iPhone - I don't think anyone but Jobs would've been able to pull off something like that.
That sort of comprehensive innovation (hardware, software, UX - Apple invented everything), while entering an unfamilar and established market, I'd argue would've been impossible to do in a startup.
Isn't that why the big tech companies switched to acquiring up-and-coming scaleups?
I feel like if Jobs was still alive at the dawn of AI he would definitely be doing a lot more than Apple has been - probably would have been an AI leader.
Jobs also needed to control the user experience. Apple wasn't really a web leader either.
They were able to bootstrap a mobile platform because they could convince themselves they had control of the user experience.
I'm not so sure where AI would land in the turn of the millennium Apple culture.
> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
The Internet begs to differ. AI is more akin to the Internet than to any Mac product. We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve. And this stage of AI is also very very close to the consumer. What took dedicated teams of specialised ML engineers to trial ~5-10 years ago, can be achieved by domain experts / plain users, today.
> We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve.
We've always had that.
In olden times the companies who peddled such solutions were called "a business without a market", or simply "a failing business." These days they're "pre-revenue."
Maybe it will be different this time, maybe it will be exactly the same but a lot more expensive. Time will tell.
I think you’re missing the point. Of course you can make such a product. As Steve says right after, he himself made that mistake a lot. The point is that to make something great (at several levels of great, not just “makes money”) you have to start with the need and build a solution, not have a solution and shoehorn it to a need.
The internet is an entirely different beast and does not at all support your point. What we have on the web is hacks on top of hacks. It was not built to do all the things we push it to do, and if you understand where to look, it shows.
> excellent show "halt and catch fire".
I found it very caricature, too saturated with romance - which is untypical for tech environment, much like "big bang theory".
IMO it really came into its own after the first season. S1 felt like mad men but with computers, whereas in the latter seasons it focused more on the characters - quite beautiful and sad at times.
IMO the first series was excellent, the 2nd took a massive downturn and stopped watching after that.
I vaguely remember that they tried to reboot it several times. So the same crew invented personal computers, BBSes and the Internet (or something like that), but every time they started from being underfunded unknowns. They really tried to make the series work.
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It's still very good I'd say. It shows the relation between big oil and tech: it began in Texas (with companies like Texas Instruments) then shifted to SV (btw first 3D demo I saw on a SGI, running in real time, was a 3D model of... An oil rig). As it spans many years, it shows the Commodore 64, the BBSes, time-sharing, the PC clone wars, the discovery of the Internet, the nascent VC industry etc.
Everything is period correct and then the clothes and cars too: it's all very well done.
Is there a bit too much romance? Maybe. But it's still worth a watch.
I never really could get into the Cameron/Joe romance, it felt like it was initially inserted to get sexy people doing sexy things onto the show and then had to be a star crossed lovers thing after character tweaks in season 2.
But when they changed the characters to be passionate stubborn people eventually started to cling to each other as they together rode the whirlwind of change the show really found its footing for me. And they did so without throwing away the events of season 1, instead having the 'takers' go on redemption arcs.
My only real complaint after re-watching really was it needed maybe another half season. I think the show should have ended with the .com bust and I didn't like that Joe sort of ran away when it was clear he'd attached himself to the group as his family by the end of the show.