Good piece, but not YC specific imho. If you assume generative AI is going to continue to advance (reasonable pace, not AGI), it is democratization of power in the same way renewables are vs centralized fossil fuel generation. If everyone can build inexpensively, do you need capital concentration (VC funding) to explore a TAM, expand to your maximum potential within it, and exit? Its an interesting thesis, and should be exciting to see what we discover collectively from the experiment. The Singularity is not near, but certainly we are rapidly approaching a point of perhaps more aggressive discussion of what value and meaning means.
Broadly speaking, what role does capital play in a world where capital's power is diminished or is less needed (digital and software specific of course, does not apply to physical world capital needs, manufacturing, etc) through technology advancements? Is capital's chasing of returns through VC and technology an existential crisis, like a snake eating its tail?
We already have an example though. The game industry. Game slop existed before AI slop. Anyone can download a free first/third person template. Few hundred bucks of assets and release on steam in an hour. So what?
Anything that the anyone can do with almost zero effort has no value.
The democratization of games just made those with capital able to stand out more and more by separating themselves from the worthless slop.
And now those of us without capital that have access to these game dev tools need to get very creative and good at our craft to not be labeled slop.
Good piece, but not YC specific imho. If you assume generative AI is going to continue to advance (reasonable pace, not AGI), it is democratization of power in the same way renewables are vs centralized fossil fuel generation. If everyone can build inexpensively, do you need capital concentration (VC funding) to explore a TAM, expand to your maximum potential within it, and exit? Its an interesting thesis, and should be exciting to see what we discover collectively from the experiment. The Singularity is not near, but certainly we are rapidly approaching a point of perhaps more aggressive discussion of what value and meaning means.
Broadly speaking, what role does capital play in a world where capital's power is diminished or is less needed (digital and software specific of course, does not apply to physical world capital needs, manufacturing, etc) through technology advancements? Is capital's chasing of returns through VC and technology an existential crisis, like a snake eating its tail?
We already have an example though. The game industry. Game slop existed before AI slop. Anyone can download a free first/third person template. Few hundred bucks of assets and release on steam in an hour. So what?
Anything that the anyone can do with almost zero effort has no value.
The democratization of games just made those with capital able to stand out more and more by separating themselves from the worthless slop.
And now those of us without capital that have access to these game dev tools need to get very creative and good at our craft to not be labeled slop.