Thanks for giving it a read! Honestly, I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I think for the most part, the things that people talk about and try to predict don't usually come to fruition. It could be that I'm just completely off my rocker and absolutely wrong, in that case, great. Or, it could be that the things we talk about, people internalize which enables us to sidestep the bad reality. Who knows!
Predicting the future is hard and people are never 100% correct.
If you’re up for some honest feedback: There are a lot of words here with little substance. The article just spits out a series of sci-fi scenarios without justification, reasoning, or logic other than saying things are going to change rapidly.
Yeah you might be right. I typically am a lot more bull than my other colleagues lol. I don't think I'm far off though. I might be several years off, but definitely not 10s of years IMO
Author here. Thanks for reading. I've been thinking about this for a long time. I used to work at Snapchat where a lot of the talking points were still centered around the "Social Dilemma".
As I've transitioned to working on AI, I think the average person doesn't understand how there's a gigantic underbelly that's just purely dedicated to pornographic use – whether that's in erotic roleplaying with LLMs, or generating pornographic images with diffusion models. It's massive, but largely not talked about and remains out of view.
From my experience, when you go from text to image, it's basically an order of magnitude change in the dopamine response.
When you go from image to video, it's essentially another order of magnitude.
What I'm trying to say is... I don't think we're ready for what's to come...
But a plethora of freely available, porn in every flavour already exists. In full HD video, even in full 8k VR. Whatever addiction epidemic that AI brings to porn, already exists, and doesn’t seem provably that damaging. Further, porn has a kind of cap for males, you can really only engage with it so often..with diminishing returns. It is nothing like gambling, drugs or alcohol.
Playing around with stable diffusion, I’m wondering if the act of prompting/“creating” pornography is somehow more engaging/addicting than simply consuming pornography. Watching gambling channels isn’t the problem. Actively making gambling choices leads to the problems. I suppose we will find out.
Also, the sort of inconsistent porn/IP controls these image creation AIs implement add a peep show element (will it or won’t it generate this image, or something close…let’s find out) which is oddly more engaging. It adds a puzzle element to the mix…”boudoir oil” prompts combined with historical eras lead to a range of sensual images most wouldn’t know even existed as part of the history of Western Art. Their training sets pretty obviously include sensual images of many eras, and clever folks with a knowledge of cultural history can ferret that content out with the right stream of legitimate prompts. So that gaming/discovery element unintentionally makes generating these “almost-porn” AI images under simple screening more engaging/addicting than a simple Internet search. Boy, I would have been a popular 14 year old boy in AI class in junior high…
…I don’t think you know what people want. People don’t want a 80 hour video that nobody else sees, they want shows that they can talk about with their friends and make fan content for that others will recognize. If nobody else can experience it, nobody will give a fuck.
I still don't watch that much media, because I mostly prefer reading, with the exception of documentaries and lectures which take full advantage of modern media, or so called 'explorable explanations'.
No matter how sophisticated new sorts of media may be, it would only feel more gross to me, than the stuff which is available now, and has been since almost the start of every medium, be it painting, photography, film, and so on.
IMO it's for people who haven't experienced real things, akin to pigs in industrial farming settings, happily chewing on iron chains dangling in there.
Let them have their shit and keep your distance. Bad luck when you can't.
To be fair, equities.fyi seems to label every company as down roughly 80% from highs -- I typed in 10 random private companies I know of, none of them were fintech, and it modeled them all as having similar valuation drops. It's possible that they all are but I wonder if equities.fyi's model is just saying "drop valuation by 80% unless there is a reason to do otherwise." (I do work at Plaid but I am responding mostly in a personal capacity of being someone who's curious about where these numbers come from.)
(FYI, your data is only saved on localstorage for now)
I basically just wanted an excuse to create something fun this weekend. I struggled to find a very simple to use app where I could just start writing for the sake of writing. Some other problems I have:
1. Full text indexing isn't great on many of these writing apps (not like I have that right now though lol)
2. Using google docs at night melts my eyes
3. Other writing apps focus too much on publishing, which detracts from writing
4. I want more tools to eventually help me write (no idea what this means)
Yeah, it's frustrating. I was using Sparrow until it got acquired and then shut down. Then switched to Mailbox... which then got acquired... Whoops.
I ended up so frustrated I created my own email client in my spare time and half accidentally got into YC S14 haha. You can check it out here: http://www.slidemailapp.com
I'll admit, as a previous poster said, it's not without it's flaws but we try hard and we really do spend all our waking hours improving it since it's our baby and we love it to death. We've been beta testing the private current release with a lot of Hacker News users and I think we're fast approaching something really awesome!
Feel free to email me at vu0tran@gmail.com for a beta invite and would LOVE to hear your suggestions of what you'd like to see in an email client!!
Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course).
I don't know if it's in my best interest to answer this publicly, but screw it. The honest answer is I'm not entirely too sure, but an acquisition is always on the table for any startup IMO. I think whenever you ask a founder, "If someone offered you $100M, would you take it?", it's a pretty loaded question.
There's really three outcomes to a startup: They die, they get acquired, they IPO. The thing is, if you think your company is valued at $1M and someone offers you $100M, of course you're most likely going to take it. It's 100x what you were expecting and it would be unwise not to take it. However, if you deep down believe that your company is worth more or can be worth more than the offering price and you have the proof to back it up, then it'd be unwise to take the offer.
For me, I strongly believe that email has A LOT to go. I mean, it's nearly 2016 and I still can't connect my Dropbox to my Gmail app client or send stuff into Evernote / Trello? Given all the time we spend on email, shouldn't we at least have some better automation / AI integration by now? Something smarter and more contextually aware that can make my life a bit easier?
So many people use email in the world. Literally everyone that has a Facebook account has to have an email account. I think the reason why we haven't seen a billion dollar plus company yet is that it's very ubiquitous and it's hard to build solutions for the masses. So companies give up, sell out, close down, and then we have to start again at ground zero.
So to your question, what's the end goal? Well, if we're right about our beliefs, hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die. Which one will it be? No idea, but we're just working our butts off right now.
> There's really three outcomes to a startup: They die, they get acquired, they IPO.
There's a fourth: they serve the needs of their customers over the course of years and decades. which, as someone in the market for an email client I can fall in love with and use for the rest of my life; is exactly what I want.
It's interesting that this option wasn't even considered.
Why does every startup need to aim to take over the world overnight? Is it not feasible to first take external funding to grow quickly in early stages, and then transition to a more organic growth model once you reach a point of profitability and sustainability (and maybe also slowly buy back shares in the company to eventually become fully autonomous)?
If that was an option, he wouldn't be in YC, half-accidentally or otherwise. Nothing against YC here, but long-term steady-state isn't what they're looking for. Remember that next time you start using a VC-funded tool.
Again, how was that not an option? Why did he have to get into YC? What's wrong with telling them that the type of unsustainable growth isn't right for their business now that they've had a chance to look at things?
Of course its feasible! But is it preferable? No. I want to work on on something for 2-3 years, tops, and then cash out and or move on. I don't want to grind a project for the next 10 years. Life is too short for that.
thats certainly your choice to make, but my point was simply that there is an alternative way to do things. For me, if I could work on my best idea for the rest of my life, and it could go and serve the needs of millions of people (or even just a few thousand) across the globe, that would be pretty cool.
I don't disagree with you at all, but the idea I want to work on isn't going to make me wealthy. I just need enough money in the bank so that basic needs are met, rent is taken care of, and I can go work on fixing homelessness, dysfunctional healthcare systems, etc.
Those are really the only three outcomes for a venture-backed startup
Once you raise venture capital, you have to go big or go home, in the span of a decade. You don't have the "grow slow and stay private" option after raising a Series A.
That being said, this is just the current, common state in VC-backed companies. With the weak IPO market and hostile public environment that forces short-term quarterly thinking, we may see alternatives like formalized secondary markets. Perhaps companies like Uber will be able to avoid going public and still provide liquidity options for their early investors & employees.
> Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course).
> hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die.
No offense, but it doesn't really sound like you were kidding. I have no skin in this game because I never used Mailbox and am content to continue using GMail, but if I was upset about this shutdown and in the market for a new email client that would be around long-term, your answer wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. You've basically said you're going to shut down (or get acquired and then, inevitably shut down) unless you hit the lottery ticket of a billion dollar company.
Speaking more generally, I think this sort of attitude is going to catch up with VC-backed startups sooner or later. Why would I make my workflow depend on a startup that is, in all likelihood, going to either shut down or get acquired and shut down? For anything with a high switching cost, using a product from a VC-backed startup that has this outlook is just going to cause me problems later if I get dependent on it.
I think a lot of companies would do better by their customers (and themselves) if they instead looked for a more sustainable business model. But there isn't as much of a lottery ticket in those businesses, so I can see why some founders avoid it.
"So to your question, what's the end goal? Well, if we're right about our beliefs, hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die."
What's wrong with just having a nice business that just makes some money?
Without joining the rush to judgement, allow me to say that I find this to be a legitimate inquiry, especially given the nature of your appeal in this thread. Care to respond?
Nitpick: "If you delete the application from your phone, your data is gone for good" is the worst possible way to phrase what is otherwise an excellent feature :-)
vu0tran, I'm almost sold. It looks great, and I love the private part (which was the one thing I could barely live with in Mailbox).
If you do snooze[1], I'll throw all my money at you :)
[1]: which of course either requires server side (e.g. Mailbox) or (preferably) client side logic. I'd be fine with the latter, but I agree it's a non-trivial problem.
Predicting the future is hard and people are never 100% correct.