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Comment by femto | Hacker News Reader

In that regard, it's not too different from mobile telephony. Mobile phones drove the electronics industry 20 years ago, but there is limited demand for people who really know how to build a phone (ie. build the hardware and write all the signal processing from scratch), as there aren't that many companies that do phones at the lowest level. A few of the engineers got rich (eg. Viterbi), but most 'just' made a good living. Most people who got rich off phones didn't do it by knowing how phones work.

Incidentally, the skills for the lowest levels of LLMs aren't that far removed from those needed for mobile telephony, in that both are based on maths, computation and information theory.

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I was there at the start of the smartphone boom. I built a demo Android device that was capable of telephony/data, 3D rendering, etc. all before Google open-sourced the OS, for a SoC vendor that wasn't in Google's inner circle. Yet the industry was not interested in my junior profile during the subprime crisis.

I wonder if the modern incarnation of Android flagships would have taken off at all if not for Apple. When Android first showed up, the dominant "smartphones" were running Symbian/Windows Mobile and they had a very different view of the world when it comes to UX and hardware.

Phones were already going in that direction before the iPhone was released: https://phys.org/news/2007-02-samsung-unveils-revolutionary-...

But it was generally seen as a gimmick instead of desired before Apple made it look good. Even when the iPhone came out, one of the jokes was how the grid of icons looks like how a Windows user's desktop would look like when they didn't understand the filesystem.

Ridiculous frankly.

More than sad...

This is super interesting because I moved from mobile telephony into ML and data science, and information theory and working with data in statistically correct way was what helped me! This was 10 years ago though.

Good points, but I think we can expect the AI space to be more tumultuous.

What most people want from mobile technology is for it to work, not too expensively, and for it to get out of their way.

What most people want out of AI is for no leader to emerge and wield supremacy against the rest of us. People are afraid of it in ways they weren't afraid of mobile, so they're more willing to work together against whoever is in the lead.

Its more like an arms race and less like a utility. The disadvantage I face when my competition has better mobile coverage and bandwidth is minor. The disadvantage I face when my competition has better intelligence on tap is much more significant.

>* What most people want out of AI is for no leader to emerge and wield supremacy against the rest of us. People are afraid of it in ways they weren't afraid of mobile, so they're more willing to work together against whoever is in the lead.*

No.

That’s what people like us on HN want. The people out in “Greater Userland” just want the black box to answer their questions. They could care less who is behind it. They don’t yet attach their black box to Amazon or Microsoft etc. And most won’t care enough to be inconvenienced even when they do make the connection. (As your competition argument implies.)

Heck, a lot haven’t even made the connection between the black box that gives them answers and data centers. They think, “ ChatGPT good” and at the same time think “data centers bad”.

Same with telecom companies.

We don't really have the demand for as many telecom companies as actually exist in the world. There's a reason we just have one Whatsapp and one Instagram, not three or four almost-but-not-quite clones in every single country that mostly differ in branding. The reason for the current situation has mostly to do with regulation and traditional, enterprise, "obviously every country needs a separate local branch, because that's what mcDonalds does" thinking. Technology has very little to do with it.

This is why the telecom world now consist of equipment manufacturers, who do most of the hard tech stuff, and actual telecom companies, who operate the equipment, rig towers in their local country, and maybe write some glue code to integrate a core from vendor A, a billing system from vendor B and a CRM / corporate invoicing system from government-approved local vendor C.

Banking also works similarly, though modern Neobanks / Fintechs and bank consolidation are slowly dissolving the concept of national bank branches.

Also, in a few years, LLMs will be building the next generation of LLMs anyway, probably autonomously to a high degree.

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