It seems to me that you used to have to work for years to create a product and prove it’s worth in the market place and only then could you convince some wealthy person to back you to make it into a product and eventually a valuable company because the commercial viability was so glaringly obvious. Thomas Edison, Chester Carlson, etc.
But now it seems that has been turned on its head. Assemble a group of brilliant people, back them with a giant company with a highly respected CEO, and wait for success and product market fit to inevitably arrive.
I hate to sound like a downer but it just seems very odd for so many people to talk about how transformative a company is without much evidence that the products are really being used at scale. And the way opportunists like Benioff have piled on to enhance the perceived value of their own products with their own spins feels off. In fact many have openly discussed that Nvidia’s future growth relies on GPT finding product market fit at scale or they will end up with massive supply overhang which would actually cause costs of AI research to plummet, opening the door for many others to work on it. So many are already seemingly aware that commercial viability is still TBD.
I believe all this is likely a product of a period of a string of successful products starting with the iPhone, then Amazon’s transformation of shipping then AWS, etc. Whereas everyone used to be skeptical by nature, it seems now we’re in an age of extreme credulity. Everyone wants to believe in every new storyline.
And I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that there aren’t some useful applications of GPT. But the value of products should be self evident and consumption of them should flow naturally from demand. This all just feels backwards to me. Success is assumed straight away and historically that tends to coincide with bubbles and precede a pretty nasty crash in sentiment. I’d love to be proven wrong.