>Researchers at MIT published a report showing that 95% of the generative AI programs launched by companies failed to do the main thing they were intended for — ginning up more revenue.
AI startups were meant to solve problems in novel ways not to amass revenue.
I smile with glee when these people fail. The fundamental issue of modern capitalism is that its a coerce and exploitative system, true believers (who are in charge unfortunately) ignore this, and think money and value are the same thing.
Let me show you what I mean: Let's someone runs a grocery, and they want to make it more profitable. After looking at the value chain, they conclude the person growing the lettuces makes 10% of the profit, logistics makes 40%, and retail 50%.
So they conclude that the best way to improve the business, is to optimize the retail side.
Then you walk into the store and see the tiny withered lettuce on the gleaming fancy shelves.
If they decided to focus on where the value is created, and helped the farmer grow better groceries, everybody would've been happy.
In capitalism everybody specializes in something, retailers in trading, logistics in storage and transport and producers in producing. The most efficient way to improve all that is to have vertically integrated business where you do all of the above. In my country we had one big retailer like that but it became so huge and in the end it imploded. And yes I agree that capitalism is exploitive and I think that instead of working for salary people should work for equity. I would certainly be more motivated if I own piece of the business instead of merely getting a salary.
> In capitalism everybody specializes in something, retailers in trading, logistics in storage and transport and producers in producing. The most efficient way to improve all that is to have vertically integrated business where you do all of the above.
I don't agree with this, merging completely unrelated activities into one company isn't good or efficient - it's only a good idea because the perverse incentives disappear, which exist, because the big powerful fish (the retailers who monopolize access to markets) can dictate the terms for small and divided fish (the producers who produce the goods).
This is endemic in the system, and very hard to fight against.
It's also incredibly prevalent in the field of software engineering as well - if I create a best-in-class open-source tool, I won't see a dime of return on it (maybe very little), even if a huge cloud provider build a product on top of it that makes billions (this has happened too many times to count).
If I do the same thing in the confines of a big company, the end result wouldn't look like capitalism at all - lets say I do the same good work, but someone has an even better idea or executes better on it - in a free-market system if somebody were to come up with a better tool, they would just announce it, and people would be free to move to it - in a corporate setting, it would be seen as redundant, a waste of money, and an organizational red flag to run 2 separate parallel teams.
It'd be great if there existed a system that rewarded individuals and organizations according the value they bring to the table. However at the very mention of 'intrinsic value', capitalists break out in hives and call you a Marxist.
If you're alluding to the fact that a lot of startups run at a loss to capture as much of the market as they can, that is true. But I don't think that's the point here.
Revenue is probably the wrong measure, it should be profit. And a startup that doesn't somehow turn into profit for its _customers_ usually doesn't see much traction.
They can either increase revenue (there's a lot of AI sales tools that promise just that), or, more commonly, reduce costs, which also increases profits. If it saves time or money, it reduces costs. If it doesn't do either of these things, you'd have to really enjoy the product to still pay for it.
They offer "spying" services for your big data. Essentially something like Facebook and Google but without selling ads, instead spotting patterns that seem interesting for whatever reason.
Payment ecosystem is so complex and convoluted that it is hard to tell. I was using my Visa card for years on Steam and all of a sudden Steam started refusing it. Steam support was repeatedly telling me that the problem is not on their end but on my end. At the end I figured out that I need to enable Visa 3D Secure feature on my credit card because I assume Visa was seeing a lot of fraud from Steam so they started requiring 2FA for Steam payments.
Also Bandcamp.com refused to accept the payment from my credit card and I contacted my bank and they told me that payments to Bandcamp are always blocked because of security reasons(that is their policy) and they had to manually approve my credit card for use on Bandcamp....which is totally fu*king crazy. Manually approving payment transactions in the 21st century is wrong. How the hell should I know which vendors are on my bank's blacklist?!
Tbh or at least that's my impression all comes down to the problem of fraud and crime. That's why we still have shitty payment providers and processors.
Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin can probably be made by LLM so if you have a good idea for cryptocurrency or some crypto token and you can vibe code it with LLM, perhaps it can reach a $1bn market cap.
Ironically enough rampant piracy turned out to be the best method for preserving history because that way thousands of people have x or y thing on their hard drive stored and preserved in decentralized fashion. One way centralized archiving is fragile.
I don't understand why somebody didn't fork the Wikipedia and build the version where you can self promote. It kinda sucks that you are not allowed to claim and edit your Wikipedia page.
There's this wiki (I forget the link sorry) that always gave me the impression that it was made by people disgruntled they were turned away from wikipedia for original research, that's full of original research by self-styled experts. I'm sure you could write an article on yourself there, after all who's more an expert in yourself than you?
My idea was to have Wikipedia like platform where you could write about yourself and then have your friends, family and colleagues confirm that information or vouch for that. You can even turn things around and give permission to your friends, family and colleagues to write and maintain Wiki page about you.
I don't use LinkedIn but when I stumble upon someone's page, I often see testimonies from their work colleagues about them.
I doubt Google and Facebook are any better but the catch and the question is; how to measure awareness of ads e.g. if I see an ad and it sticks in my mind but that doesn't show up in advertiser's ad campaign analytics? Raw stats are one thing but awareness is another.
