[iiJDSii]

Interesting examples. Personally, I don't really consider Ebay, AirBnB, Reddit, or Substack to be "technology companies". They are businesses that happen to be online, imo. I'm sure that e.g. AirBnB has lots of machine learning technology now, but I reckon it's doing niche stuff like optimizing conversion rates and profits by customer tracking, recommending, etc. So basically, after-the-fact value optimization. Nothing really invented or new created, aside from their novel ideas and unique executions.

Other actual tech examples seem to fall into 1 of 2 camps: obvious but hard to do (better search engine, better rockets, electric cars, etc), or cool but non-obvious customer end uses (maybe LLMs, VR/AR, curved or flexible high def screens, etc). The latter category has more risk but probably lower hanging fruit to get started, because the market needs are less obvious.

In your example, do you think the customer focus lead to pre-mature optimization and kind of tunnel-visioned the team away from further LLM development? That's another type of trade-off that's probably impossible to predict at the time. I mean who doesn't want customers.

I'm not entirely surprised that OpenAI was able to achieve so much given their structure - they had the mandate of a trendy new research lab, top talent, with 100M+ funding and no need to cater to any early customers. Seems like a great (though typically impractical) way to build big new things. Then they had the right top-level guidance when the tech was getting ready, to pivot and raise more money (unlike XEROX PARC for example).

[PaulHoule]

I'm going to argue VR has camp 1 problems. My persona for this is the owner of a few Thai restaurants who is brilliant at social media and SEO marketing. I could sell him a VR project easily if he believed in the ROI. Part of that is the user base but part of it is authoring and VR authoring is expensive.

If VR is going to be like the web we need some way he can get his business in the metaverse for $5000 not $500,000. Horizon Worlds falls down flat not because Meta is stupid but because the problem is difficult -- I'd like to make WebXR content based on my photography (and stereography) but once you have big textures you start to feel the 8GB limit of the device. The art gallery I want to make would require low resolution images or would require some of the programming techniques used in open world games.

In my mind VR seems to be the future of gaming, when I see many action games like Monster Hunter World or Rise of the Tomb Raider I think I'd like to experience them in VR but practically I still keep playing a lot of flat games like Dome Keeper and Dynasty Warriors 9 because there are a lot of them and they don't take the dedication that it takes to play through a game like Asgard's Wrath 2.

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At the time I believed that better training data (business process, UX, and lots of things go into that) rather than better models was the key to products (I saw projects, including mine, that went nowhere because people did not muster the will to collect this data) so I felt we were getting a lot out of being engaged with customers.

I advocated a lot for drawing a clean line so you could reuse the same training data from different models in which case we could have had a team working on advanced models while the customer facing team gathered the data we needed to eval and refined those models over time. It would have been good if we could have gotten more VC money to hire up.