Mastodawn

Dominik Röttsches Feb 23

Every AI company knows they're building the wrong thing.

And they can't stop.

Because the competitive structure specifically punishes anyone who slows down long enough to build the right thing.

The race is real. The destination is fake.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everyone-in-ai-is-building-the-wrong-thing-for-the-same-reason/

Everyone in AI is building the wrong thing for the same reason

Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn't quite make sense, with no idea about how to get off. There is an overwhelming feeling that if everyone stopped and

Westenberg.

" Find a niche that's too small for the Moloch-captured companies to notice and go so deep into it that by the time they arrive, your product is years ahead in the dimension that matters to those users."

Yes.

@KevinFlynn @Daojoan

Then you run into what I call "The Oracle Problem". Eventually an Ellison (or Jassey or Pichai or Zuckerberg or whomever) will notice your product is profitable and do one of three things:

Buy you out - whether willingly or hostile

Sue the shit out of you for whatever bullshit reason they can come up with and keep fighting you until you run out of money

Drop a bunch of money to make a shoddy competitor but push it to your customers for half the cost or as part of their existing bundle or whatever until you go under

In the long run, the rich people win

Dimitris Nakos, MSc Feb 23

@Daojoan It's being going on like that for years... I wonder when everything will fall apart because of very very rotten and bad foundation...

I like your ending though. It gives me some hope...

Howard Cohen Feb 23

@Daojoan It's like a space race to get to a planet that doesn't exist.

Robertof Feb 23

@Daojoan
You are right 😩

Nuwagaba Gift Feb 23

@Daojoan
How can we protect ourselves from being the victims of the wrong thing that the AI companies are creating for their own benefit?

Some people call me Pete Feb 23

@Daojoan I agree 100%. For the better part of a year now, it feels like the expectation is that they'll just *happen* upon an ultimate AI product. The target doesn't exist, but they expect a bullseye.

@Daojoan
It really is reminiscent of the tulip bubble, in that you could genuinely go out of business if you didn't participate. It's a giant game of financial chicken.

fuzzyfuzzyfungus Feb 23

@Daojoan 'AI' seems uniquely bad because of the very high cost of entry. VCs are far more cowardly herd animal and much less adventurous than advertised across the board; but that matters less when the cost of entry is close to zero and the burn rate is a handful of developer salaries; while it is the single concern when you need to set a billion dollars on fire just to sit at the table.

@Daojoan CLI then ... oh ... claude ... + api ... oh chatgpt has it...

Human 3500 Feb 23

@Daojoan
I've heard a million times that AIs write better code than people, so these AI companies should be using an / their AI to write their AI. It should speed things up and save them money.

Frank Prendergast Feb 23

@Daojoan i mean... there's a lot of truth to this. But then also, at the frontier lab level... Yann LeCun? Ilya Sutskever? And do we really believe that Google Deepmind are solely focused on LLMs and the chat interface for them?

🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑Feb 24

@Daojoan
Also, no one actually knows how to build the right thing, but the race you have described means that they can't even expend any resources on research toward finding the right thing.

It's the same common but faulty syllogism routinely employed by politicians:

We have to do something.
X is something.
Therefore we have to do X
(where X is known to be the wrong thing, but we try to pretend that it is not)

Paco Hope Feb 24

@Daojoan You write:

Nobody stops, because nobody can afford to, and that feeling has a name. It's called Moloch,

The blog post doesn't really say WHY the name is Moloch. I did a little looking for the historical origins of Moloch and I can sorta see a metaphor there. But it isn't quite obvious to me. Is there a reference I'm not connecting?

I keep sharing this blog with folks. It's perfectly fine to say "It's called Moloch because Joan says so," but I'm hoping for more to it than that. 😃

Moloch, The Ancient Pagan God Of Child Sacrifice That Demanded Its Offerings Be Burned Alive

Proof of the cult of Moloch’s existence is largely contained within just one passage in the Hebrew Bible in which children were said to have been "passed through the fire."

All That's Interesting

Andrej Radoš Feb 26

@Daojoan Quantum computing even more so.