Comment by theturtletalks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theturtletalks | Hacker News Reader

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If you’re falling for “sticky” interfaces, you’re not going make it. Your competitor won’t have the stickiness and the ability to use any harness and that will overcome Muse in the long-run. Let’s not forget, Muse is a close to SOTA model right now, but so was Google, and now they’re irrelevant. Google is one of many funded models that were close to SOTA, but we realized it’s benchmaxxed.

People are going to say that it doesn’t matter if you’re the best. If Muse, Grokbot, and Dot are able to reach mass appeal, it doesn’t matter if a person using a custom harness is better.

I respectfully disagree. There is a big difference between someone that’s running a custom harness that’s almost like a personal OS versus someone using something out of the box. And if you’re for using this to run your business, think for yourself who’s going to win, the person customizing everything or the one using what the big corps give you.

> Google, and now they’re irrelevant.

Argon is tied for first at worst.

> Google is one of many funded models that were close to SOTA, but we realized it’s benchmaxxed.

Who is "we"? Google is the least benchmaxxed.

I’m talking from experience. I’m run a software factory building open source alternatives and Argon is the worst model. Wrecked multiple codebases. But every use case is different. If you’ve found success in yours, use it.

I’m surprised it had time to “wreck multiple codebases” in the few days it’s been out

What you don't one-shot rewrite your entire codebase every time a model comes out?

I use it in my software factory and it made the applications worse. I didn’t push the changes. I just reverted them.

Astra still outperforms Argon for me. And with a lot more quota too.

I hope Google can catch up to OpenAI. The more competition the better.

These are good points, though OP did specifically say that Meta is going to win "consumer" AI. I don't think the average consumer of AI is going to ever have to think about harnesses or worry about SOTA, they really will continue to interact with whatever is stickiest.

This exactly. The "harness" for consumer is not well defined but likely quite sticky if someone can build one. Meta is better positioned with its reach of whatsapp etc unlike anyone to try this.

Meta being meta, will likely run this as an "experiment mode" for 6 months to an year and if it does not work scrap it all and move onto the next thing.

There is a risk ofc muse does not work. But there is a good chance that with the ridiculous number of product teams doing A/B testing with insane number of people already on it, something will emerge that is interesting in a way it never could for their erstwhile Ar/VR foray.

The field is changing weekly at this point. Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic have the most distribution right now so any can take this spot.

So why would you lock yourself in? They want you to lock yourself in, but if you build your own system, you won’t be. A layman will just use what’s best and get himself locked in, but they might be using an inferior model.

AI is a force multiplier. Doing the right thing with the right expertise is yielding dividends.

> So why would you lock yourself in...

Many people don't even know what locking in means. The crowd in this forum < 1% of the world do, you and I do, and maybe a few outside. There are only laymen outside of 99%. No one i know of knows or uses a harness. They don't know the large number of VMs built on say Hermes. They really don't care or have time. If you give them a ready made product thats a click away, and its good enough, they will use it.

But that’s who I’m appealing to. If you build a custom harness you have a 10x advantage over people who use Muse, GrokBot, Dot out of the box.

But this is what I’m saying, consumer AI is forever changing. Investing your time and money into a closed harness will put you behind someone running their own system that’s model agnostic.

If you’re on a forum like HN, would you realisticly invest your time and widgets into a closed harness instead of building your own? What if Meta’s model falls behind and all your things are on there? My advice is to invest in building your own because no one lab has shown they are worth using.

As far as “consumer,” I’m simply comparing consumer AI to a custom built one. One of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta will probably win since they have the most distribution.

And, "stickiest", mind, where most are allready soul-sucked into the neverending doomscrolling dopamine nightmare that is Zuckbook - to beging with.-

First they "captured", or moated "communication". Now, they are going to capture "utility" ("I am actually doing something useful, not just doomscrolling. I can spend an extra 8h here. It feels good").-

The "average consumer" is a very small part of the revenue opportunity for LLMs and AI.

The real money is coming from C-suites trying to reduce head count or at least multiply productivity for their existing head count.

Yep. Reminds me of the famous HN lore about Dropbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 (note the 4 digit ID - early days!)

>For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

> And if you’re for using this to run your business, think for yourself who’s going to win...

That's not consumer AI though. The whole "vs out of the box" is pretty much the definition of consumer AI. People don't want to fiddle with things. That's why UX matters. SOTA only matters in consumer if it translates to the UX. And no one has landed that yet. Many are working on it.

Muse, the app, is currently number one on the app store. Talking to non-technical friends who have adopted it, they may have landed it.

ahh makes me want to check it out. But my fb account is long abandoned. That's how they get you huh... ain't now escaping the grasp.

When I worked at Microsoft, I learned that the average user will fail to do ANY process that is longer than 2 steps. Let that sink in and then reread your comment. Nobody cares about SOTA outside of tech. They want the basic floor of “it does what I need at a reasonable price” that’s it.

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