[carterklein13]

Even if AI should be home-run, it probably won't be for most people. In a more technical community, it's natural to think that most people care about "values" when it comes to tech. However, the reality is that people just want what's easiest / cheapest / most fun. It's great when what's easiest/cheapest/most fun aligns with what's best for the individual or society, but those cases are outliers. After spending a few years building a crypto startup, I left with more conviction around this theory.

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

> In a more technical community, it's natural to think that most people care about "values" when it comes to tech.

Do people actually think that? I know people sometimes joke about an HN bubble but I never really took that seriously. People are using stuff like AWS and Azure which probably wouldn't be the case if "values" was more important than what is most convinient. (relatively) few people today set up their own email servers and instead use Gmail or whatever.

[carterklein13]

You actually just kind of gave an example of what I meant! Developers are the consumers in this case, and they'll almost always opt to use AWS and Azure versus hosting their own infra. It's easier, faster, usually cheaper, and it makes you yourself are more marketable.

There's a reason software-as-a-service has beat out software-as-a-product. While people might think they want full ownership/control over what they're buying, they want it to be as safe or secure as possible, they want it to be self-hosting and not communicating information back to the distributor... that's just not what plays out for the most part.

OpenAI vs Mistral, Coinbase vs Metamask. I'm not that old, but I'm beginning to notice a trend where the fast, easy, cheap business model wins the most market share, and then slowly works towards providing more values-aligned features as it grows. The company aligned to consumer values from the get-go usually has a tough time keeping up (although they can usually still carve out a good niche from people who are particularly values-focused - Mistral and Metamask aren't doing poorly by any stretch of the imagination).