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by BoredPositron 295 days ago
No, dozens of companies burning money to reinvent the same thing, and the best product rarely wins anyway. You get locked into inferior systems just because they had better timing or marketing.

The romantic startup vision sounds nice, but most of those businesses would just fail after wasting capital and talent that could've been used better elsewhere. It's messy and inefficient.

>> Or do we just want CorporateSoftTM to build and own everything in just one big single commercial platform?

It's gonna get acquired anyways... what do you think the endgame of 99% of startups is? Building a company?
2 comments
turblety 295 days ago
Maybe romantic, that's fair. But I think a world with lots of different choices and options is far better, than one with a single few efficient/optimal solutions.

Burning money to reinvent things is fine with me if it trains people up, pays people a salary, creates some original ideas, leads to more choice in the market.

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BoredPositron 295 days ago
But that's the whole point it never does lead to more choice in the market. Maybe for the year of the hype cycle after that it gets consolidated real quick.
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turblety 295 days ago
We could say the same before AI, but I don't think it's true. Ignoring AI for a moment, if I look at databases as an example, there is lots of choice and competition out there:

MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, Teradata, Snowflake, TiDB, SQLite, DuckDB, and more probably.

I think it's led to great choice and a great sharing of ideas. Theres also been a lot of failures too, that's true, but I'm sure some of those failures have led to a few unique features across those products too.

So now with AI, for me it's the same process, just accelerated. Yes, there is lots of junk coming out there, but I think there's lots of good too.

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BoredPositron 295 days ago
The situation differs when people work within established domains, where the foundational ideas have already been explored. atm everyone does exactly the same some with more salt some with more pepper. Just look back a few months how many of the RAG implementations survived?
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theshrike79 295 days ago
As long as everyone builds out in the open so people can share ideas, I think it's going to be a net positive.
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