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Comment by blantonl | Hacker News Reader

The "problem" is we really are in an technology revolution similar to the industrial revolution 200-300 years ago. For every 100 tech startup businesses that don't generate a penny of profit and are propped up by hyper valuations and stock prices, there are companies like Facebook and Google and Apple that absolutely print money in profits.

That in turn covers the outlay by venture money. All those companies that burn money in fire pits are essentially subsidized by the staggering amount of money that some new companies only recently formed in the past 20 years are printing.

Spray and pray and see what sticks for investors will work in this type of rapid revolutionary environment.

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All the companies that have stellar net incomes and profit margins are more than 20 years old, except Meta which is about to turn 20 in a couple years.

The crop that came after that (Uber/Airbnb/Snap/etc) do not show the same, except maybe Bytedance, but their numbers are not public.

That might be a side effect of destroying competition and vc exit strategy through acquisition.

YouTube, instagram, Slack, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, etc. all second generation software that companies that were acquired by bigger companies as exits, or to squelch competition.

What if we have exited that tech revolution era already? I don’t recall a lot of successful tech innovation or revolution in the last decade but I recall a lot of scams.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/froth.asp

And now we are about to get AI froth that will follow the same Gartner hype cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

I wonder where you guys would place us now? I’d say Peak of Inflated Expectations since every other story on HN is about AI or large language models.

Isn’t a number of scams almost tied to the era of free money as well?

What technology has come out in the last decade that isn't an increment or miniaturization?

The revolution we Ade still in is the transistor and it started 60 years ago and probably has 40 years left to go.

I would argue that the mobile communications device called the "iPhone" is one of the most significant technology innovations developed in the past 100 years.

Love it, hate it, whatever, but it completely revolutionized what is practically access to "everything". You will be hard pressed to find an American consumer, from the richest guy to homeless people on the street that don't have a mobile communications device on their person with a touch screen and instant access to the collective works of the world.

The iPhone by itself as a stand alone business would be larger than Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds among other revolutionary businesses.

The iPhone is 15 years old, so it wasn't in the last decade.

No. But ubiquity and smartphones being just part of the fabric of everyday life comes pretty close to squeezing into the last decade. I didn't have one until probably 2011 (iPhone 3GS) and I'm not really a technology laggard.

The always on always online computer in your pocket changed things for sure - and perhaps it was the Internet finally coming into its own.

Maybe (maybe) ChatGPT will do something similarly transformative (I’m sus as the kids say).

From the perspective of today, the dot-com era wasn't really that different from before from the perspective of consumers. OK, e-commerce was gearing up but it's not like we didn't have mail order catalogs before. Many of us had feature phones but didn't use them a lot; you were mostly still tethered to a desktop of maybe laptop. Online information could still be pretty sparse for many things. Not really any streaming entertainment. Etc.

Not a great answer for the GP though.

Last ten years? Maybe something in deep learning.

It's not just the iPhone/smartphone. If you showed me just the device in 2005, I'd probably have been "OK. Cool. But how well does it work without a keyboard?" And, in fact, I had a Treo in 2006 and didn't buy an iPhone until around 2010 or so. What was really game changing was the whole app ecosystem and universality of mobile. And that wasn't really in place until maybe close to ten years ago.

LLMs/generative AI could be game changing although I'm somewhere on the fence between this year's hype and this will change everything. Autonomous driving could be pretty radical as well but it would have to be pretty general purpose and that doesn't seem close to reality.

IPhone was 2007, 16 years ago, which is more than the decade the OP asked for.

LG Prada predates iPhone and the form factor we have in phones is almost an inevitable outcome. The iPhone was a great execution and ahead of it's time, if you think it is the reason we have smartphones then you couldn't be more wrong.

GPT!

We are in a transformative moment right now with GPT3 onwards, as great as anything in the computer era.

While possible, I'm not ready to put all my chips on that particular bet yet.

Hacker news in the iPhone launch was a riot.

Agreed that AI is transformative. That this for kids they grew up with the internet is their epoch moment that those of us they saw the internet come already had.

However… I don’t think it counts exactly. When you look at the trillions that have been dumped into basically “ take the best and brightest in the world, and then get them to increase advertising performance by 1% a year” and the money effort and time put into AI, thst the big players were caught completely off guard by AI, it’s more of a mistake than an organic technology evolution.

Other than AI, what seriously happened in the last decade? Where in terms of user product has tech innovated?

It's just "boring plumbing" but software server infrastructure (containers, Kubernetes, and everything cloud-native associated) has basically competely changed in the last 10 years.

Being able to rent computers by the hour was definitely a big change.

Arguably mainstream public cloud computing is a little more than a decade old but not by much. AWS was only announced in (late?) 2006.

But how do you increase advertising revenue? Isn‘t that also a ML problem in the end?

Presumably. OpenAI was trying to convince the world that GPT1.0 was a danger to society. They tried the same scare/hype tactic again after that for literally every version they released.

I'm not convinced.

Might be just over a decade, but how about the Oculus Rift DK1?

mRNA vaccines are a huge deal. I don’t think it would be fair to call them incremental.

Fracking? Might be slightly older than last decade though.

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