Item — HN Reader

I can’t help feeling like sand running through my fingers. All the low hanging fruit applications for GPT are getting taken by companies fortuitously in place to take advantage of the them.

It feels like the stock market: by the time you hear something about a company it’s already been priced in.

It feels like the only way to be ahead is to get in on the action early, make your millions and then not have to worry about getting displaced out of the workforce in 1-15 years.

4 comments

The majority of work we do now, even in skilled professions, is busy work. How much of the work you do each day is unique and novel? How much of your work could have either been automated or made unnecessary long before ChatGPT? Probably most of it. We’ve long since been able to do less work and yet we continue to do the same things over and over again. Even if ChatGPT can magically do everything for us, what evidence is there that we would take advantage of it? World hunger is a trivial problem to solve given the resources we have today and yet we apparently can’t be bothered to fix that extremely low hanging fruit — why would we buck that trend by radically rethinking knowledge work… because of an LLM?

If LLMs were enough to radically change knowledge work, we already wouldn’t be wasting our lives grinding out 40 hours a week so we can retire at 65.

  > World hunger is a trivial problem to solve given the resources we have today and yet we apparently can’t be bothered to fix that extremely low hanging fruit

Except world hunger isn't a resource problem at all, which sort of goes against your point. Solving the real problems are in fact quite hard as you need to solve for human greed and mental illness.

The best way to get ahead of big companies is to pursue an angle that seems too silly, obvious, pointless or worthless for them to entertain devoting resources to.

Every billion dollar company around today started in an environment where the big boys in the industry they disrupted called it "stupid".

So the best way to compete... is to not compete.

Not a criticism (I agree entirely), just want to highlight the irony here of how anti-competitive markets really are in reality.

Something similar happened with mobile. Established businesses in banking, social media and e-commerce were already well positioned on day 0 to make billions.

Mobile was a huge boom for indie development too, across all categories. AI will be the same.

A lot of these companies won't be able to ship a high quality GPT product. It'll feel like a shitty add-on, grafted onto an existing product (Word etc.). Just like existing players failed to think "mobile-first", "GPT-first" thinking will be just as difficult to do and execute well.

Additionally, a bunch of these products will reduce existing revenue sources, which most companies will resist until its too late.

Have you tried asking chatGPT if there are any novel applications using chatGPT that you could develop?

One option I think could be interesting, provided by GPT-4:

> AI for Experimental Recipe Generation: Build a platform that generates unique and experimental recipes based on users' ingredient preferences and dietary restrictions. Target home cooks, food enthusiasts, and culinary professionals.