> like “make a cure for ” that will yield billions of dollars of value

I think it's important to qualify that while I will very much appreciate such an innovation and I think it'll provide significant value to society... I remain doubtful of the ability for any company to actually capture such an astronomical yield. Either there's enough of an investment required by the company to help get that to market that the yield will be significantly lower or everyone and their brother will just launch competing products two days later. And, as a society, I don't think it's logical for someone writing "Hey Alex, cure cancer" with billions of dollars so I doubt there's going to be much appetite for creating such a moat via legislation.

This gets to the same point of "If ChatGPT can make you a successful million dollar business in a few prompts why is OpenAI sharing it" paradox. It very well may be that AI tools can accomplish the labor that used to be required to create such a business, and I'm sure a few people will land a jackpot and get rich in the transitional phase but if it's so cheap to build it why would someone pay you money for yours instead of just running the same prompting themselves? For most people that's because they lack the knowledge that they can but you'll still have a significant number of instant impersonators.

> This gets to the same point of "If ChatGPT can make you a successful million dollar business in a few prompts why is OpenAI sharing it" paradox

I agree fully, to be clear o was using that prompt as a shorthand, I don’t think _you_ can type that prompt and get $1B back.

It can’t do this now, obviously. You need a lot of scaffolding and domain expertise to get the most out of these models. (Eg Harvey.)

But eventually, the labs can just run the business themselves.

I’ve long held that as we see models become more capable, they will be less available to the public. It seems pretty obvious that vertical integration on private models (perhaps a per-industry fine-tune, eg a legal model) licensed to subsidiaries will let the labs capture more value.

Why would you publish your model, enable competitors, and enable distillation of your hard-won intelligence? Only antitrust law can prevent this outcome IMO, the business pressure is extremely strong.

I disagree, Yahoo was actually seen as a technological leader and, unlike Google that was purely a search engine in its early years, Yahoo was a full platform that seemed poised for a while to become a landing page for the internet.

When it comes to AI there simply isn't a moat - Anthropic would be my best guess out of the current entrants due to them trying to construct one via value-adding code assistance tools that might create enough friction to prevent customers from jumping ship but the models themselves are a commodity that depreciates extremely quickly. If you want to retain the frontier premium you need to constantly be improving due to the ease of distillation.

Your comment makes the timeline seem very different from the way I remember it. Yahoo was dominant much earlier than Google, and was one of a handful of big search engines. Google was a relative newcomer at the time, which had the benefit of being way better at search, which is why it eventually dominated the competition.

From the producer's side, sure, we[1]'re all pretty sympathetic to the fact that if you publish a library a bunch of random people will build bridging libraries for languages that you have no control over.

But from the consumer's side it is very much an expectation and if you find yourself in the situation above it's on you to make it very clear that such extensions and third party tools are unofficial.

In this particular case I think it's fair to say that Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool.

1. We specifically being library and tool producers that are noticeably overrepresented on this forum.

> Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool

Had the tool been up longer than the 11 hours the malware was live? If not, then why would Anthropic try to get it marked as unofficial, as opposed to take it down?

Or are you saying that every author and publisher should request Cursor to mark their extensions on the Cursor vsx pass-through as unofficial?

And the folks currently in the FTC mysteriously will receive cushy board positions when the administration turns over. Literally everyone wins!

Except in Canada where we get the silly Gulf of Mexico sub-script name but Lake Ontario is labeled just that.

In one fell swoop Trump accidentally made all Ontario Residents Americans and entitled them to Social Security benefits.

Google Maps shows Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America) to Canadians - it does properly label Lake Ontario, though. The idiocy isn't limited just to the US.

I'm surprised the strata was able to offload that to you. Most building corps are in charge of maintaining the fire alarm system especially if it's a tower (rather than just a SFH community under a strata) where unit to unit spread needs to be addressed promptly.

Fire is one of those things that really sucks for you - but also really sucks for your neighbors.

You never want to supply any reason for someone to demur about reporting a fire.

Counter point - accumulating extreme wealth seems to require a cooked brain. I genuinely believe that level headed people are unable to reach more than a few million in accumulated wealth as they'll clearly see how much more that money would benefit others compared to themselves.

Counter counter point - we've constructed a society that provides excess rewards to people with cooked brains and antisocial behavior

There is a theory that the industrial and information revolutions rewarded certain types of neurodiversity more than what you was natural, I think that is entirely plausible.

While some of those traits may be prone to antisocial behavior, given the right social cooking conditions, they are also natural so I don't think people with those traits shouldn't be considered "cooked" from from brith either.

There are also seemingly neurotypical people who win the lottery and get cooked, I think it mostly comes from alienation because wealth changes how others around you act.