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> ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity

that's not destroying economic activity - it's removing a less efficient activity and replace it with a more efficient version. This produces economic surplus.

Imagine saying this for someone digging a hole, that if they use a mechanical digger instead of a hand shovel, they'd destroy economic activity since it now cost less to dig that hole!

> I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI.

You are missing the other side of the story. All those customers, those AI boosted startups want to attract also have access to AI and so, rather than engage the services of those startups, they will find that AI does a good enough job. So those startups lost most of their customers, incoming layoffs :)

The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time.

> With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art

Imagery

AI does not produce art.

Not that it matters to anyone but artists and art enjoyers.

In fact one could argue it makes it harder; if the barrier to entry for making video games is lowered, more people will do it, and there's more competiton.

But in the case of video games there's been similar things already happening; tooling, accessible and free game engines, online tutorials, ready-made assets etc have lowered the barrier to building games, and the internet, Steam, itch.io, etcetera have lowered the barrier to publishing them.

Compare that to when Doom was made (as an example because it's a good source), Carmack had to learn 3d rendering and making it run fast from the scientific text books, they needed a publisher to invest in them so they could actually start working on it fulltime, and they needed to have diskettes with the game or its shareware version manufactured and distributed. And that was when part was already going through BBS.

People will notice and still buy it if your game has done something else right. Source:

https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...

It’s really nothing special. I don’t do this a lot.

Generally I have an idea I’ve written down some time ago, usually from a bad pun like Escape Goat (CEO wants to blame it all on you. Get out of the office without getting caught! Also you’re a goat) or Holmes on Homes Deck Building Deck Building Game (where you build a deck of tools and lumber and play hazards to be the first to build a deck). Then I come up with a list of card ideas. I iterate with GPT to make the card images. I prototype out the game. I put it all together and through that process figure out more cards and change things. A style starts to emerge so I replace some with new ones of that style.

I use GIMP to resize and crop and flip and whatnot. I usually ask GPT how to do these tasks as photoshop like apps always escape me.

The end result ends up online and I share them with friends for a laugh or two and usually move on.

I chuckled seeing it in the first presentation of the conference. By the end of the conference, it was numbingly banal.

Not clear that being able to sample from a distribution == stealing.

I was literally experimenting with this today.

Use Google Nano Banana to generate your sprite with a magenta background, then ask it to generate the final frame of the animation you want to create.

Then use Google Flow to create an animation between the two frames with Veo3

Its astoundingly effective, but still rather laborious and lacking in ergonomics. For example the video aspect ratio has to be fixed, and you need to manually fill the correct shade of magenta for transparency keying since the imagen model does not do this perfectly.

IMO Veo3 is good enough to make sprites and animations for an 2000s 2D RTS game in seconds from a basic image sketch and description. It just needs a purpose built UI for gamedev workflows.

If I was not super busy with family and work, I'd build a wrapper around these tools

I think an important way to approach AI use is not to seek the end product directly. Don’t use it to do things that are procedurally trivial like cropping and colour palette changes, transparency, etc.

For transparency I just ask for a bright green or blue background then use GIMP.

For animations I get one frame I like and then ask for it to generate a walking cycle or whatnot. But usually I go for like… 3 frame cycles or 2 frame attacks and such. Because I’m not over reaching, hoping to make some salable end product. Just prototypes and toys, really.

I dont use AI for image generation so I dont know how possible this is, but why not generate a 3D model for blender to ingest, then grab 2D frames from the model for the animation?

Books also make us less capable at rote memorization. People used to do much more memorization. Search engines taught us to remember the keywords, not the facts. Calculators made us rarely do mental calculations. This is what happens - progress is also regress, you automate on one side and the skill gets atrophied on the other side, or replaced with meta-skills.

How many of us know how to use machine code? And we call ourselves software engineers.

This is what the people actually studying this say:

> Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?

> No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "passivity", "trimming" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.

— https://www.brainonllm.com/faq

The problem is different though, the containers were able to be made by others and offered dependable success, and anything downstream of model creators is at the whim of the model creator... And so far it seems not much that one model can do that another can't, so this all doesn't bode well for a reliable footing to determine what value, if at all, can be added by anyone for very long.

Because now they're keeping everything to themselves?

The value is going to be in deep integration with existing platforms. It doesn't matter if OpenAI had their tools out first, Only the Microsoft AI will work in Word, only the Apple AI will deeply integrate on the iPhone.

Having the cutting edge best model won't matter either since 99.9% of people aren't trying to solve new math problems, they are just generating adverts and talking to virtual girlfriends.

That's 100% not the case. OpenAI is wedged between the unstoppable juggernaut that is Google at the high end and the state sponsored Chinese labs at the low end, they're going to mostly get squeezed out of the utility inference market. They basically HAVE to pivot to consumer stuff and go head to head with Apple with AI first devices, that's the only way they're going to justify their valuation. This is actually not a crazy plan, as Apple has been resting on their laurels with their OS/software, and their AI strategy has been scattershot and bad.

Interesting thought. Once digital assets become devalued enough, things will revert and people/countries will start to keep their physical resources even tighter than before.

People aren’t getting rich with AI products, they are getting rich selling AI companies.

> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich

If they actually reach AGI they will be rich enough. Maybe they can solve world happiness or hunger instead?

Thats why i just biult my own tiny AI rig in a home server. I dont want to grow even more addicted to cloud services, nor do i want to keep providing them free human-made data. Ok, so i dont have access to mystical hardware, but im here to learn rather than produce a service.

>> Is there somehow a glaring vulnerability/missed opportunity in modern capitalism that billions of people somehow haven't discovered yet?

Absolutely with 150% certainty yes, and probably many. The www started April 30, 1993, facebook started February 4, 2004 - more than ten years until someone really worked out how to use the web as a social connection machine - an idea now so obvious in hindsight that everyone probably assumes we always knew it. That idea was simply left lying around for anyone to pick up and implement rally fropm day one of the WWW. Innovation isn't obvious until it arrives. So yes absolutely the are many glaring opportunities in modern capitalism upon which great fortunes are yet to be made, and in many cases by little people, not big companies.

>> if so, is a random startup founder or 'little guy' going to be the one to discover and exploit it somehow? If so, why wouldn't OpenAI or Anthropic etc get there first given their resources and early access to leading technology?

I don't agree with your suggestion that the existing big guys always make the innovations and collect the treasure.

Why did Zuckerberg make facebook, not Microsoft or Google?

Why did Gates make Microsoft, not IBM?

Why did Steve and Steve make Apple, not Hewlett Packard?

Why did Brin and Page make Google - the worlds biggest advertising machine, not Murdoch?

> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich.

There are still lots of currently known problems that could be solved with the help of AI that could make a lot of money - what is the weather going to be when I want to fly to <destination> in n weeks/months time, currently we can only say "the destination will be in <season> which is typically <wet/dry/hot/cold/etc>"

What crops yield the best return next season? (This is a weather as well as a supply and demand problem)

How can we best identify pathways for people whose lifestyles/behaviours are in a context that is causing them and/or society harm (I'm a firm believer that there's no such thing as good/bad, and the real trick to life is figuring out what context is where a certain behaviour belongs, and identifying which context a person is in at any given point in time - we know that psycopathic behaviour is rewarded in business contexts, but punished in social contexts, for example)

> If so, why wouldn't OpenAI or Anthropic etc get there first given their resources and early access to leading technology?

innovator's dilemma

The dig on Dropbox is that it was easy to build, not that it wasn’t useful. Juicero was neither easy to build (relatively) nor useful.