He still ran the numbers.
I was too young to fully understand but basically accounting for every cost it was cheaper to call a cab or rent a car for every situation that actually requires a private vehicle, plus it saved loads of time overall (repairs, maintenance, checks, cleaning...) and headaches in general.
The discussion stuck to me, and I'm always amazed at how it became a realization for so many people decades after.
Granted, this was Western Europe where public transit is ages ahead of most of the US.
Even today, a cab to anywhere (even 3 miles) would cost me at least $10 each direction, and we have at least 5 such trips weekly. This easily surpasses the cost of the car, including depreciation and fuel.
Back in the day, when those new fangled relationship database things came on the scene, do you think people would have been well advised to try and find work on the actual database engine itself, instead of the more frivolous work of using the new technology to, say, solve actual business problems?
If you are not rigorous, then what you are doing is essentially "black art". It may work for some tasks ad-hoc, but with the rapid pace of model improvement your skill will likely become irrelevant/not needed quickly.
Besides, the "free market" is not a goal on its own. It's a method that is frequently the most beneficial one, but not always.
I'm not saying you are wrong or right, btw
OpenAI is more of a "one-(very impressive)-trick-pony", so they have a stronger incentive.
Investments should be based on the actual value of the company relative to its price, as well as relative to other investment oppertunities. Trying to making a profit by trading based on historical stock prices will get you whipped by quants who are already doing a much better job of that sort of thing than you could ever hope to do.
It's also not necessarily about the 2021 peak but why isn't Nvidia bigger? allegedly it's a necessary component to a technology that can replace hundreds of millions of people (worth trillions in economic output). And unlike OpenAI, Nvidia wins no matter which company wins the model competition.
In a way, it feels like Nvidia is embarrassingly aware of this. They were the reluctant shovel salesman during the cryptocurrency gold rush, and they're rightfully wary of going all-in on AI. If I was an investor, I'd also be quantifying just how much of a "greatest technological advancement" modern machine learning really is.
The cryptomarket was less favorable to Nvidia because it harmed the loyal customers (gamers, AI) for a temporary market (crypto) that indeed largely declined.
Perhaps someone like OpenAI has both the expertise and incentive to do so, but not many others.
Good to know, that means I'm still economically useful.
I'm using ChatGPT rather than Copilot, and I'm surprised by how much it can do, but even so I wouldn't call it "good code" — I use it for JavaScript, because while I can (mostly) read JS code, I've spent the last 14 years doing iOS professionally and therefore don't know what's considered best practice in browser-land. Nevertheless, even though (usually) I get working code, I can also spot it producing bad choices and (what seems like) oddities.
> I weep for the juniors that will be absolutely crushed by this garbage.
Indeed.
You avoid the two usual mistakes I see with current AI, either thinking it's already game over for us or that it's a nothing-burger.
For the latter, I normally have to roll out a quote I can't remember well enough to google, that's something along the lines of "your dog is juggling, filing taxes, and baking a cake, and rather than be impressed it can do any of those things, you're complaining it drops some balls, misses some figures, and the cake recipe leaves a lot to be desired".
A fence with a hole is useless even if it's 99% intact.
A lot of human jobs, especially white collar, are about providing reassurance about the correctness of the results. A system that cannot provide that may be worse than useless since it creates noise, false sense of security and information load.