I used to talk to a supermarket chain COO (or whatever the guy who handles the operations of all stores of that brand) in China. He told me that supermarket has extremely low profit margin that sometimes a couple of unexpected bad days would turn the number of whole year off. I can imagine they would like to squeeze every cent out of it.

Thanks for sharing. It is well written.

I think with the advancement of LLM many of those AI prophecies have been fulfilled. I found it sad that I’m no longer interested in that future, though.

We moved from enthusiast hacking various stuff together to corporation selling your data and asking for subscription with devices you no longer own communicating only to their cloud, in the way they designed and for a limited period.

We got everything but we killed the fun.

It's never been easier and more accessible to be an enthusiast hacking various stuff together though, from hardware to software. You don't have to rely on subscription services. Open-source software has never been better (see Blender, Kicad, Photopea). You can easily create custom software for your one-off needs using LLMs, and you don't have to rely on a bigco subscription either - pay API prices for open source models, or self-host. Run your own private cloud for your vacuum robot, reverse engineer your smart TV, deploy your own camera firmware...

You don't even need to rely on a single centralised corporate search engine for all your information look-up. 10 years ago, it would have been unimaginable that you could self-host something that could actually replace or be better than Google.

Selling shovels is definitely more profitable, less risky and easier than using it to earn money.

I did read from HN someone from Spain said that the system crashed very often that they had to rely on humans frequently.

I doubt Jensen is completely out of the scheme TBH.

That’s the deal. You are asking the hand to tax itself and for sure it’s going to make sure the rest of the body feels the pain.

That’s why it is extremely difficult to make even modest improvements in a dug-in system.

Probably because you are self employed.

Tech is the least important thing even for a tech company. Unless you are a 10x better than anyone else in the game. This did happen once for a while but you can do it without AI anyway — and probably better for you because it’s a lot more difficult to copy yours. However, hardware oriented companies may be the outliers.

The ability to rent cheap AI capacities, the ability to push to a million consumers, the ability to persuade for large contracts, these are the most important ones.

It shows 13 mins ago for me.