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>Open Source was never the commercial product. It's the conduit to something else.

this is correct. If you open source your software, then why are you mad when companies like AWS, OpenAI, etc. make tons of money?

Open Source software is always a bridge that leads to something else to commercialize on. If you want to sell software, then pick Microsoft's model and sell your software as closed source. If you get mad and cry about making money to sustain your open source project, then pick the right license for your business.


> then pick the right license for your business

That's one of the issues with AI, though; strongly copylefted software suddenly finds itself unable to enforce its license because "AI" gets a free pass on copyright for some reason.

Dual-licensing open source with business-unfriendly licensing used to be a pretty good way to sell software, but thanks to the absurd legal position AI models have managed to squeeze themselves into, that stopped in an instant.


Open source software helped to dramatically reduce the cost of paid software, because there is a now a minimum bar of functionality you have to produce in order to sell software.

And, in many cases, you had to produce that value yourself. GPL licensing lawsuits ensured this.

AI extracting value from software in such a way that the creators no longer can take the small scraps they were willing to live on seems likely to change this dynamic.

I expect no-source-available software (including shareware) to proliferate again, to the detriment of open source.


If your business can easily get destroyed by AI, then the problem is your business model.

Perhaps, but training AIs relies on the existence of libraries like Tailwind, sites like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, etc. If people stop using all those businesses and services and projects and they eventually disappear, we're stuck relying on asking LLMs whose knowledge is based on a dated snapshot of an internet that no longer exists.

Which business is 100% not at risk in the next 10 years?

Elderly care? With an aging population in most of the western world it will become more and more important IMHO

Look up Humanoid Robots.

Farming, livestock, arms, school/nursery, medicine, construction, real estate, finance. Basically anything rooted in the physical world and elemental services.

I'd agree with medicine, school/nursery, real estate, and finance but mostly because in those industries the ability to connect with clients at a human level is often more valuable than sheer talent.

With farming/livestock, pretty much all of that can become automated. And even in the previous human-centric sectors, there are definitely roles that will be replaced by AI, even if the sector as a whole continues to employ a lot of people.

Take law, for instance. Due to the prevalence of bar associations (which will likely prevent AI from doing lawyers' jobs), AI will never be a lawyer. However, many lawyers have and continue to replace paralegals with AI.


I can’t see a good reason real estate wouldn’t go the way car dealerships are going.

Hmm, for real estate and car dealers we may see a market segmentation effect.

Past a certain price point, both for real estate and cars, a buyer is paying almost as much for the "feeling"/experience of buying the house/car as they're paying for the actual thing itself. Humans are generally better at conveying these things than machines.


Funeral Homes

According to Peter Thiel, taking care of children. Gotta make sure the housewife is happy in the AI uprising after all.

Very myopic thinking. Fallout New Vegas had its plutocrat of interest make sure to scan the brains of his biggest fancies before the Great War. A true visionary.


If your business can easily be replaced or lose revenue because of AI, it doesn't sound like a good business model to begin with

Maybe we need regulation on tech which requires anyone who wants to use a piece of tech to be at least 18 years old and have been examined by a doctor to be mentally stable. /s

i remeber video game was blamed for school shooting tragic


Stack Overflow set out to be a better Q&A site but has turned into a user-unfriendly, gatekeeping platform where questions are often marked as duplicates because a similar question was answered 15 years ago. Everything and every question is banned, gatekeep, or marked as a duplicate.

"I left Meta because I made a bet that models were going to commoditized and the value would be in products on top of models, but MetaMate and GenAI were highly politicized sucking up all oxygen in the room."

- Erik Meijer

https://x.com/headinthebox/status/2005873104317497426?s=20

I found Erik's takes on this is interesting.


You missed the ending - "As always, I was right.". Anyone saying this needs to take a long look at themselves.


Many people have pointed out that if AI gets better at writing code and doesn't generate slop, then programmers' roles will evolve to Project Manager. People with tech backgrounds will still be needed until AI can completely take over without any human involvement.


>He's mainly talking about environmental & social consequences

That's such a weak argument. Then why not stop driving, stop watching TV, stop using the internet? Hell... let's go back and stop using the steam engine for that matter.


The issue with this line of argumentation is that unlike gen AI, all of the things you listed produce actual value.


Maybe you're forgetting something but genAI does produce value. Subjective value, yes. But still value to others who can make use of them.

End of the day your current prosperity is made by advances in energy and technology. It would be disingenuous to deny that and to deny the freedom of others to progress in their field of study.


Just because somebody believes Gen ai produces value doesn't make it true.


You definitely didn't read what I said. It is subjective value, it will be true to some.


> Then why not stop driving

You mean, we should all drive, oh I don't know, Electric powered cars?


The cat's out of the bag. Even if US companies stop building data centers, China isn't going to stop and even if AI/LLMs are a bubble, do we just stop and let China/other countries take the lead?


China and Europe (Mistral) show that models can be very good and much smaller then the current Chatgpt's/Claudes from this world. The US models are still the best, but for how long? And at what cost? It's great to work daily with Claude Code, but how realistic is it that they keep this lead.

This is a new tech where I don't see a big future role for US tech. They blocked chips, so China built their own. They blocked the machines (ASML) so China built their own.


>This is a new tech where I don't see a big future role for US tech. They blocked chips, so China built their own. They blocked the machines (ASML) so China built their own.

Nvidia, ASML, and most tech companies want to sell their products to China. Politicians are the ones blocking it. Whether there's a future for US tech is another debate.


> but how realistic is it that they keep this lead.

The Arabs have a lot of money to invest, don't worry about that :)


It's an old argument of tech capitalists that nothing can be done because technology's advance is like a physical law of nature.

It's not; we can control it and we can work with other countries, including adversaries, to control it. For example, look at nuclear weapons. The nuclear arms race and proliferation were largely stopped.


Philosophers argued since 200 years ago, when the steam engine was invented, that technology is out of our control and forever was, and we are just the sex organs for the birth of the machine god.


Can you please gave us sources of your claim?

"Philosophers" like my brother in law or you mean respected philosophers?


Heidegger, Deleuze & Guattari, Nick Land


Philosophers after 1900 are kind of irrelevant.


"There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it." - Cicero


>It's an old argument of tech capitalists that nothing can be done because technology's advance is like a physical law of nature.

it is.

>The nuclear arms race and proliferation were largely stopped.

1. the incumbents kept their nukes, kept improving them, kept expanding their arsenals.

2. multiple other states have developed nukes after the treaty and suffered no consequences for it.

3. tens of states can develop nukes in a very short time.

if anything, nuclear is a prime example of failure to put a genie back in the bottle.


> kept improving them, kept expanding their arsenals.

They actually stopped improving them (test ban treaties) and stopped expanding their arsenals (various other treaties).


Technology improves every year; better chips that consume less electricity come out every year. Apple's M1 chip shows you don't need x86, which consumes more electricity and runs cooler for computing.

Tech capitalists also make improvements to technology every year


I agree absolutely (though I'd credit a lot of other people in addition to the capitalists). How does that apply to this discussion?


The world is bigger than US + China.


I'm not sure what your point is. The current two leading countries in the world on the AI/LLMs front are the US and China.


Yes.


How long before the EU comes out with a social credit system like China?

How long before the EU has its own version of China's Great Firewall?


> How long before ...

20 years ago in the EU & US.


[flagged]


They're downvotes, not bullets. GP isn't brave for enduring them.


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