Nothing is really coming out of the layoffs - all the money is pooling in maybe 10 companies, and most don’t stand to gain anything from this - maybe slightly better candidate pool when they do hire.
For the most part, the AI layoff trend has ran its course and isn’t innovative. Nothing big will come out of it - if all AI can do is lay off but can’t make anything.
My question is this: Why is seemingly nobody taking advantage of AI?
Nobody wants to be the next Netflix?
Nobody wants to be the next Blizzard or Pixar?
Nobody wants to be the next Steve Jobs or Walt Disney?
Nobody with money wants to hire a small team of experts to obliterate Google Search as it leaves the opportunity wide open? Google just switched to AI abandoning their old product leaving it wide open for disruption - nobody wants it? Huge ad business there.
The next FAANG can’t be born out of layoffs and unproductive speculation but from making something new that everyone uses.
Why aren’t companies hiring like crazy - putting AI to direct use to disrupt just about every vertical? Put people in seats using this stuff to make WAY better stuff than exists now.
Everyone is just sitting on their hands wondering what Amazon or whoever will do next.
They aren’t doing anything - and never will again. If you’re one of the very few benefiting from the layoff trend sure good for you - most of us just aren’t! My question is why isn’t everyone else jumping at this massive disruptive opportunity?
If I had a $1 billion fund I would be throwing it at AI startups doing product-focused work.
You have tech talent now operating at their best and brightest levels ever, disruption just WAITING in the form of AI, office space vacant as far as the eye can see, and nobody’s doing anything. Nobody wants to. Nobody apparently sees this gold mine of opportunity to be the new leader in just about any category.
Why?
1) LLMs just aren't good enough
2) Making a billion dollar company is too expensive. Netflix lost money for years. Amazon lost money for years. Tesla lost money for a decade. Spotify took 18 years to become profitable. The AI companies are losing billions of dollars each month.
People don't just jump social networks because a new one exist, there has to be a compelling reason to migrate over to it. And for a lot of people, there needs to be a sufficient number of people (and probably existing friends) already using the app for them to expend the effort to start using it.
It's not like there haven't been other attempts at competitors for these over the years, and you haven't heard about them probably because none of them ever got any traction. And that takes more than just building software.
Like DuckDuckGo has been competing with Google search for years (it first came out back in 2008, it looks like), and likely is way better developed than anything someone will crank out with A.I. in a short period of time. And it still has a tiny fraction of Google's marketshare.
I'm not saying there won't eventually be other competitors to these, but it'll take more than just whipping up an MVP with A.I. in a few weeks.
Why build a new Google when the potential Google customers now just get their results from LLMs instead of SERPs?
How to be the next Jobs when there's no actual new product, just essentially an assistant tool?
How to create the next Disney, Netflix, Blizzard or Pixar when LLM's are still not good enough to produce quality content and many people are also starting to despise AI generated content? Art is still an intrinsic Human thing, even if LLMs are able to produce it.
So, although these LLMs are super amazing and definitely revolutionary, this whole AI/AGI hype is still a bit on bubble territory imho so I'm not really sure we'll see what you're hinting at with this generation of LLMs.
Also, wasn't AI supposed to be the last product we'd ever need to invent and then it's utopia and singing kumbaya for all eternity?
We won't need new companies, big personalities or heroes once Skynet/Hal9000/GLaDOS/Agent Smith/etc are in charge :)
Here is an example of software that can scale with a single person assuming AI can write software: a web-based alternative to Photoshop built on wasm. Figma is analogous to that and it's worth $10Bn.