alt Hacker NewsChina is the factory of the world. They don't need software to win. Rather they prefer software is free and they can win in hardware. So if AI inference is free, they can put it in as many hardware components as possible and sell them in the market - think toys, cars, tools with chips manufactured in china optimized for the use case. In long term you tend to commoditize hardware. We have thousands of device types of cheap x86, and with linux/bsd software on it coming from china. Why do we think GPUs will be different.
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America was the factory of the world before and England before that. The temptation of “moving upstream” is irresistible.
We just sacrificed our entire lucrative SaaS market to this, and perhaps even big tech itself. To the altar of AI.
And now it's all going to become commoditized.
Billion dollar software will be commodity. Salesforce. There are orgs already moving to their own internal tools.
It does not seem hard now to rebuilt Google Search, Google Chrome, Gmail, Gsuite, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare, Vimeo, Twilio, or even Stripe. The cost barrier has to have dropped 1000x, maybe 10000x.
We have millions of engineers with the talent to do this. Many of whom are unemployed and have savings and nothing better to do. They could easily carve these markets into pieces.
We shouldn't shut down open weights. It's too late. They'll win, and that's a good thing. Big tech was a thermodynamic bubble of high energy waiting on the dam to burst, and now it has. The genie won't go back into the bottle, and that's totally fine. It's progress.
Now we need to rebuild our factories and supply chains and energy and resource inputs. Because the back half of this revolution is going to be robotics and factory automation. If we don't have the connective tissue in place, we're really going to hurt.
We'll do well if we regrow manufacturing. If we don't, we might be in for a world of trouble.
So, "commoditize your complements". A big part of Microsoft's old playbook (and a smaller part of its current one), so we know it can work.
- Software is copy-able for nearly free. - Hardware is not. Even if you have the plans, you've to build the infrastructure for it, and its a fairly finite, physical item.
Both are however hard and expensive to produce. It's much better for profits to develop and sell the hardware, and copy the software someone else spent resources on.