[raincole]

All you said is very reasonable.

But then you look at image gen. The established one, namely Adobe, are surprisingly not winning the AI race.

Then you look at code gen. The established IDEs are doing even worse.

I don't rule out the possibility of music being truly special, but the idea of "established tools can just easily integrate AI right" isn't universally true.

[danielvaughn]

Agreed. The problem with being an incumbent in this era is that much of the existing UI/UX assumptions are based on the idea of manual manipulation. We're so early that foundational assumptions are still up for debate, and for large companies like Adobe, there's just no way they'd be able to move at the required pace to keep up. Heck I'm at a company that's less than 2 years old, with less than 20 people, solely devoted to AI, and it's still hard for us to keep up.

What Adobe and others ought to be doing is setting up internal labs that have free reign to explore whatever ideas they want, with no barriers or formality. I doubt any of them will do that.

[tummler]

The innovator's dilemma is real. IMO none of the big DAWs are well-positioned to capitalize on AI, but that doesn't mean they couldn't.

I'd argue music generation is different from image or code generation. It's closer to being purely art. Take image generation for example. Most of the disruption is coming from competition with graphic design, marketing, creative/production processes, etc. The art world isn't up in arms about AI "art" competing with human art.

[leobuskin]

It does mean. The switch from writing “applicable” software to creating cutting edge AI is almost impossible. The parent comment makes great examples, we can add to that list JetBrains (amazing IDEs, zero ability to catch up with ML), for example. It’s a very different fast-paced scientific driven domain.