Profitable tech companies have to maintain their existing businesses, but development of new businesses is likely to stay low and unprofitable businesses are still scrambling to hit profitability before bankruptcy.
It does depend on interest rates to some extent. For the past decade, the prevailing wisdom of the software industry has been to pour money into unprofitable ventures with the hope of getting profitable later. In the past year, austerity measures like heightened interest rates have made it so VCs are more interested in money now instead of money later.
Pulling back from investments is definitely related to the increased interest rate, but there really isn’t any government austerity in the federal government at the moment.
It’s really bizarre how so many business can exist while not turning a profit just because there’s a profit potential because they rose in popularity really fast, Uber will be 15 years old this year.
Car culture means that anyone who does gain a monopoly will still have a ton of small competitors. Delivery services have existed for centuries before Uber. All it did was offer a single interface for a wider area so it can take a cut. Ultimately, I don’t think local deliveries or taxis are profitable enough for there to be a cut for some middleman unless the market is artificially restricted (which it was for taxis, hence Uber being very welcome when they first started up until people realized they were looking to take over what the taxi racket was doing, not give the public more choices).
Classifying drivers as employees for such apps might prevent the non-profit iteration that just charges drivers an infrastructure fee but otherwise allows them to set their own prices. IMO the approach should have been to open up how they charge fees and pay drivers, change it to be commission-based with the drivers getting most of the money. But that might be getting too close to challenging how most of the rich make their money (it’s not from their own hard work).
Even the anticipated cut of 2.25% is still higher than why the Silicon Valley boom was based on. You are also seeing the cuts happening due to an anticipated recession.
Uber has posted profits for the last two quarters. Lyft hasn’t yet been profitable, but they have been reducing their losses quite a bit.
I don’t think either of them will fail this year. Some AI gold rushing unicorns out there certainly will. It’s hard to know which though; they’re still private companies.
That tech will regress due to the greed of tech corporations.
Tech is regulated by the big corporations that consistently either throttle innovation or degrade what already is established because they all want to figure out how to squeeze as much profit out of everything possible while blocking or preventing anything new that might compete with them.
Any new innovation that will occur will be military and will either have a machine gun attached to it or can deliver a high explosive.
One potential regression that I see is that the current generative models are abandoned, after being ruled as “infringing copyrights” by multiple countries. The tech itself won’t disappear but it’ll be considerably harder to train newer ones.
The most problematic part is however if one of them survives; likely Google. That would lead to a situation as in your second paragraph.
Law makers will start treating the open source community like pirates because they make LLMs freely available for anyone to run at home. And sure you can debate whether it’s theft or not but you know that’s not why regulations go after them. Meanwhile the mass theft of corporations will be deemed „ethical“ use because they „own“ the data they use. Lobbyism will likely make sure of that I‘m afraid.
Or the complete opposite, we will realize that AI is hard and LLM s will probably not take over the world. Self aware AI is probably much further away than we think. But who knows! 🫥
The problem is actually testing for self awareness. We’re not even sure what makes humans self-aware or whether certain animals are. How will we actually know that AI has reached self-awareness?
So glad you didn’t say “takes over the world”. Pretty sure taking over and power is a human hard-wiring, which would not translate to circuits and models (unless simulated intentionally). Taking over is part of our evolution, and AI didn’t evolve in that way.
Honestly they’re barely hacks at this point, hacking implies some kind of social engineering, internal leak or mad computer skills. The last few major data breaches have been more along the lines of leaving things with default passwords or storing customer data in plaintext.
Outside of unpredictable things like hacks which are bound to happen, always the potential of something with widespread impact, 2024 will be a year of increasing “AI” venture capital investment and some widely used online services are going to pivot or completely rebrand.
New content for streaming is going to fall off a cliff. Except maybe for Apple, no streamer seems willing to put money into new flashy shows the way they used to.
If a new breakout TV show hits this year, it is likely going to be more in the model of IASIP or Shoresy.
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