Total side note, it's interesting seeing "Move fast and break things" become the dominant phrase vs what I remember initially as the "MIT vs New Jersey methods". Both describe the same thing where fast and sloppy wins vs slow and clean.
I agree. Super excited to see what people are going to be able to make as the number of people/resources needed per piece of work keeps going down. Are we about to hit a printing press/word processor moment for TV/film? Going to be wild to see a feature level piece of media with one author/credit.
WAN 2.2 FFLF2V (first-frame last-frame to video) could get you close to the tweening between key-frames today.
Looking back on history I think this will lead to meaningful art (and tons and tons of absolute garbage!).
The printing press led to publishing works being reachable by more people so we got tons of garbage but we also got those few individual geniuses that previously wouldn't have been able to get their works out.
I see similarities in indie video/PC games recently too. Once the tech got to the point that an individual or small group could create a game, we got tons of absolute garbage but also games like Cave Story and Stardew Valley (both single creators IIRC).
Anything that pushes the bar down on the money and effort needed to make something will result in way more of it being made. It also hopefully makes it possible for those rare geniuses to give us their output without the dilution of having to go through bigger groups first.
I'm also excited from the perspective that this decouples skills in the creative process. There have to be people out there with tremendous story telling and movie making skills who don't have the resources/connections to produce what they're capable of.
The printing press enabled the artistic visions of single individuals (the writers) to find a wide audience.
To do something similar, this has to allow the director (or whomever is prompting the AI) to control all meaningful choices so that they get more or less the movie the intend. That seems far away from what is demonstrated.
Homeowners are typically going to be leveraged with a mortgage on their homes. This amplifies prices going up or down.
IE: I buy a house for 100 by using 20 of my own money and 80 of the bank's with a mortgage. If the house prices goes up to 120 and I sell, I now have 40 (doubled what I initially put in) after paying off the mortgage. If the price goes down to 50, I now owe the bank 30 (wiped out my initial 20 first then another 10 I'd have to come up with) if I want to sell.
At the classical 20% down 80% mortgage ratio you're in that 5x leveraged bucket for a long time (longer than you think due to amortization).
Bit of a tangent, but you might have better luck with hardwood vs. plywood. The glue in plywood makes it more difficult for CO2 lasers to cut through. I was super surprised when someone at work mentioned they were able to blow through some hardwood in a single pass but had a struggle to get through plywood.
My understanding is as interest rates go up prices need to come down as people only have $X/month to allocate towards housing. EX: If you have $100 to put towards housing per month you can put $90 towards the house itself and $10 towards interest on the loan in low interest environments, but only $80 towards the house and $20 in high interest environments. If people can only put $80 per month towards the house you're selling that ultimately means the house price can't be as high as when people are able to put $90 per month towards the house.
For the renter with a lot of cash this means you can come out ahead if you're able to minimize the loan or outright purchase in cash a house. The renter with a lot of cash gets to benefit from the lower prices from higher interest rates while minimizing the downsides of higher interest rates.
How much does the cost of labor really factor into a 20B factory? Assume 200k fully loaded at 3000 people is 600M a year on labor. That's not nothing but it seems pretty insignificant if you can save enough on the actual buildout of the fab(s).
Just a note, we're getting close to fiscal year end (9/30) for a lot of companies. Maybe totally anecdotal but I've noticed in the past that I see a lot of these kinds of announcements this time of year presumably to get these done before the next fiscal year.
Since we're commenting on a pg essay, IIRC startups are said to be the place where you CAN play it straight and get rewarded justly. The core idea being you can't fake or politic your way into making something users want.
I wish I could find the link to the essay that directly states this but I'm having trouble finding it now (and my Google-fu doesn't seem to be strong enough to locate it).
I really don't think this is the case anymore unfortunately, at least in my experience.
My anecdote: I worked at a startup for 4 months and I was basically playing it straight, ie, a loser. My CEO constantly kept pushing the idea of releasing a shitty product which just barely worked. His justification was that there were giant foreign competitors that raised millions of $ with admittedly very shitty products. Like I'm talking about forms that barely worked in their shitty React Native mobile apps. Anyway, our product was shitty and our users did not use the damn thing (poor retention). However, there was an easy/cheap way to grow quite quickly due to the nature of the service. It was all too much for me and I quit.
Anyway, it really dawned on me during the last few months that my boss didn't actually care about the product - he was playing the game of growing at all costs, put the nice numbers on a chart, and raise the next round of funds from VCs (a lot of them showed interest from the outside). And to be really frank, if he was honest with me that this was the actual game, that he wanted to get acquired or do an IPO purely based on growth metrics, it would be easier for me to understand. Instead, he kept talking about revolutionizing education with technology and that left a lot of us absolutely baffled.
I remember that essay too. I think at the time, he was probably correct but now (at least as an outsider, from a distance) it has become as much a game as the corporate world. The idea of being a founder eventually became as much a trope as being a company man, so I'm not so sure its a viable solution anymore.
Then again, I've never been in a startup or a founder so what do I know?
I have seen former employees of mine join companies started in YC, and the ethos I've seen around YC in that way reminds me of how my great grandmother talked about working at General Electric. It's a decentralized Empire in vibe, with all the games and politics. It was really difficult to deprogram people once caught by the allure. People think in terms of their programs, like cookie cutters.
Structuring SAFEs, doing mentoring and creating batches, and creating a kind of orthodoxy based on unorthodoxy done better, definitely hit a stale point. I think it's even to the point the founders could return and do it again based on what they learned, with more "stay hungry, stay foolish" again, albeit with veteran wisdom now, and it would be revolutionary all over again, upending its own past.
I'm pretty sure that's the one! Takes a bit to get to the punchline but the idea that you want to look for tests that are unhackable is the big idea (and making a good product to get lots of users is the exemplar for an unhackable test).
Yeah i recall that essay. But getting a startup financed as a founder is a different story altogether. When you're asking people to invest on faith ( regardless of your MRR or what have you ), politics if back in the picture.
