[hnthrowaway6543]

> I'm not in the industry and I can tell he's failing to conceive many possibilities.

It's also possible that because you're not in the industry, you don't understand the problem domain well enough.

Tech bros love to think they're just so much smarter than everyone in other industries, but it rarely ends up being true. We saw this with Blockchain; this distributed consensus protocol was supposed to solve all the problems with money transfers, settlements, and securities across the world and uh... did none of that. But tech bros sure did love to talk about how the blockchain doubters just didn't understand the technology, without considering that maybe they didn't understand the problem space.

[rollinDyno]

I think the other thread did a good job showing you that it's the other way around, people who have been in the industry do not tend to have the imagination people with fresh eyes (and maybe some tech chops) do.

An example I had in mind was when Affleck was speaking of being able to generate the show but with their preferred cast from a different production. He really has no clue that people will be generating themselves and their friends as the main characters of these stories. Like this one, there are many other examples where I thought he was lacking creativity.

Kudos to him for spending time thinking about it but I'm surprised how well received his thoughts have been for just stringing a few ideas together.

[danielmarkbruce]

That's one example. Here are a few others...

Bezos wasn't in retail. He also wasn't in compute hardware.

Reed Hastings wasn't in entertainment and crushed it. Jeff Katzenberg was, and Quibi was a disaster.

Ken Griffin was a punk kid in harvard, never worked in finance. Jim Simmons was a math professor, didn't work in finance.

AirBnb guys weren't in real estate or tourism or whatever bucket you want that to be.

Larry & Sergey knew zero about advertising. Zuckerberg too.

The incumbents have been destroyed with some frequency by outsiders who take a different approach. It's almost impossible to tell in advance if understanding a domain is an asset or a liability.

[hnthrowaway6543]

Ok but you're listing people/businesses, not technologies, which is what I'm talking about. Or is this nonsensical LLM slop to prove a point?

[danielmarkbruce]

Nah, you were talking about tech people operating outside of their domain. You just don't like how easy it is to show counter examples so you pretend you had some other point.

But if you don't know the technology involved for each of the above, maybe stay out of a conversation involving technology.

[ofcourseyoudo]

Except every company you listed is a technology company. It's technologists doing technology. Katzenberg proves the point.

Amazon, Netflix, Quibi (a disaster run by a non-technologist), AirBnB, Google, Facebook. These are websites and apps.

I don't think Griffin is particularly illustrative of anything except it's nice to ask your grammy for $100K when you're a teenager.

Feel free to listen to a NotebookLM podcast of a PG post, but if you think any AI is going to create an original thought that catches fire like the MCU, Call Her Daddy, Succession, cumtown, Hamilton, Rogan, Inside Out, Serial, or Wicked, maybe it's you that should stay out of the conversation when it comes to creativity.

[danielmarkbruce]

Amazon is a retailer. AWS is compute(/etc) for rent. AirBnB is homes for short term rent. Quibi is/was short movies on mobile. Google and facebook are advertising. Netflix is movies/tv shows. There is no such thing as a pure technology company - the technology has to be used to do something people want.

The people closest to the thing which is about to be dominated by machines are often clueless about what is going on.

[ofcourseyoudo]

First, do all the techbro failures where they thought they were smarter than the industry.

Second, show the company where the technologists made the same thing the old school was making, and better. Amazon retail disrupted but didn't destroy physical retail, and certainly didn't replace it, and certainly isn't better at it. Same with AirBnB => hotels, Google/FB => advertising (disrupted with a new type of product... a tech product... but have no presence in literally every other form of the industry).

The closest thing you can get to dominance is Netflix making movies and television, and there's no evidence that they make better movies and television than the old school. Technologies can use money to leverage their position against slow-moving industry players, but in this specific discussion, we've seen nothing to suggest that eventually AI could make a better film than human beings.

If you were actually in the industry you'd know that the top decisionmakers at Netflix have decreasing respect from the creative community, increasing reputation for being a cheap and difficult company to work with, and are generally regarded as a mill that creates a lot of mediocre to slightly-above-average content that gets swept aside every 3-6 months for the next wave of grist. Profitable certainly but nowhere close to being a leader in quality, for as much money as they've thrown at trying to win that Best Picture trophy (and spoiler: Emilia Perez isn't gonna do it this year either).

If you don't know anything about Hollywood, maybe you should stay out of a discussion about Hollywood.