alt Hacker News> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow.
The article says:
"Ideas are cheap - execution is hard"
"Announcing, signaling your ideas offered much greater benefit than risk, because your value multiplied by connections, and execution was the moat you could stand behind."
That's the key difference. It used to be much harder for a competitor to catch up to the state of your implementation.
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Even if you're a small vendor. You created an innovative product, and you tried to sell your product to a large company. Before you can be destroyed by simply showing the product to a multi-billion company. But now even medium sized companies can destroy you.
Sharing any novel idea has never been so costly.
I am not arguing against sharing. Sharing can be for the greater good.
But as you note, things have changed. We could reasonably assume a genuinely significant good idea, set free, might go in the direction we shoved it for a minute. Or fade into inaccessibility.
Not any more.
Just a side note:
> "Ideas are cheap - execution is hard"
I would argue this mantra says more about the person repeating it. It simply means the person has no good ideas and is bad at execution.
I've not met many but I'm sure there are many out there who are scary good at execution. Something like 1% transpiration, 99% experience. I can have a designer do a 100 euro design, hire someone to write nice code, rent a factory or an office, I might even be able to buy the machines at a good price. What I cant do is spin the rolodex and (in 20 minutes) land enough clients who would absolutely love to work with me again. I cant find those private meetings and wouldn't be able to extend my reputation with the new project.
People with good ideas don't talk about them unless it is required. They don't talk with "ideas are cheap" people, it's pearls for pigs. You can spot some of them if they did bursts of multiple unrelated complex patents. My favorite are the rube Goldberg type of machines that combine well known things in ways that exceed the sum of the parts. Something like step 5 uses the vibrations from step 1 while step 3 uses the heat from step 6.
To have good ideas you need many of them but you also need to know execution or you end up thinking the easy stuff is hard and the hard stuff is easy. Improvement is unlikely from there.
And it's not just that the execution is faster now. The competition saw the "outer shell" of your idea. But LLM platforms (the forest) - they see the internals, if you used them to explore and develop it. They also see all similar ideas across the globe.
And they own - not rent the compute and models - as you do from them. If we want to extend this, they could "pre-cog" your idea and build it even before you do.
I'm not talking about what is happening now, I'm just playing out the thought experiment.