[jenniferhooley]

I think that most people are pretty short-sighted about the utility cases right now (which is understandable given the negative feelings about a lot of what's currently going on).

There are a lot of really useful things that were impossible before. But none of these use cases are "easy," and they all take years of engineering to implement. So, all we see right now are trashy, vibe-code style "startups" rather than the actual useful stuff that will come over the years from experienced architects and engineers who can properly utilize this technology to build real products.

I'm someone who feels very frustrated with most of the chatter around AI - especially the CEOs desperate to devalue human labor and replace it - but I am personally building something utilizing AI that would have been impossible without it. But yeah, it's no walk in the park, and I've been working on it for three years and will likely be working on it for another year before it's remotely ready for the public.

When I started, the inference was too slow, the costs were too high, and the thinking-power was too poor to actually pull it off. I just hypothesized that it would all be ready by the time I launch the product. Which it finally is, as of a few months ago.

[pixl97]

With this said, a lot of people are likely worried about being eaten by whales when it comes to doing things with AI.

It's kind of like dealing with Amazon, or any other company that has both compute and the ability to sell the kind of product you make.

Said AI providers can sell you the compute to make the product, or they can make the product themselves with discounted compute and eat all the profits you'd make.

[jenniferhooley]

This is always a worry, but typically, being first to market is the most important part. As long as you can scale quickly and maintain your edge, this doesn't seem like such a big deal.

However, my product is so far removed from anything these companies would make, on top of that I'm using open-source models (e.g., oss gpt 120b is really, really good). I don't use any of the main providers like AWS, etc., and the underlying AI systems are only about 5% of the product. I need it for the idea to work, but it is a tiny part of the full offering. I can't really imagine it would make any sense for Amazon, etc., to compete on something like this.

But yes, in the end, huge conglomerates with infinite money can destroy smaller entrepreneurs - but that's not really any different than it's been for decades pre-AI.