> Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff

I played with it a bit, and no, it doesn't! And I am talking as someone with limited music culture, musicians are likely to be even more critical.

For the first few tries, it sounds impressive and the tunes are catchy. It used to sound wrong in the background but they mostly (but not completely) fixed that. However, after a few dozen songs, it starts to always sound the same. It is all generic stuff, the songs tell no story, it is a bit like the kind of music that accompany corporate advertisement. You can try to be more precise in your prompt, but I never had any success, it will just ignore most of the details that could make your song interesting.

The most interesting result I had was actually when I managed to get it off rails, a bug more or less. I asked it to mix two very different genres together, and it made something unsettling in a way I don't remember hearing before. But as always, further working on it proved extremely difficult, as it always tried to go back to making generic stuff, ignoring the details you give it.

Suno can do remixes though. And it is a bit like with code. LLMs are very good at porting, when you already have something that works, it can make it work in another language. But if you just have an idea, it will screw up at anything original. If you want a LLM to implement your idea properly, you have to give it so much guidance that it amounts to writing the code yourself, while struggling with the ambiguousness of natural languages.

> If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness".

They don't "solve" execution.

If you're willing to push them enough, and put in place the system that they can actually get working code, they can solve execution - but that IS engineering!!

They are far from doing that by default now (replacing engineering).

Maybe in 3 years. They're moving fast.

But you can't ask them to build you a better Rust compiler, sit back and watch, and get a result today.

Suno is a good example. I've written lyrics for a lot of songs and then "produced" them with Suno, a process that involves dozens to hundreds of remix/cover/extend revisions or a lot of time in their editor to get it sounding the way I want it to. The songs are songs that I like and will listen to in my playlist but they haven't gotten much traction on Suno's algorithm. I haven't tried to promote them much elsewhere either but when I have posted them they get a few likes at best. I'm not disappointed because I was creating the music for myself and just sharing it as a side effect but what I take away from this is that getting people to pay attention to and enjoy something that you've created takes a lot of work. You have to market it, get it in front of them, get them to pay attention to it and I'm convinced you also need to give them a reason to like it by associating it with something whether that's a video, a story, a persona or some other vibe. If you want it to "stick" you need to do all of that over and over again for the same audience so that they learn it.

That is what takes determination and why you have to really care about the thing you are trying to sell to people. You have to stick to it before they will stick to it.

This starts from a false premise. Ideas aren't cheap.

Good ideas are expensive. They're expensive because you have to weed through all the bad ones to identify them, find a market, and turn them into a product. You don't know that from the start, which is why the landscape is littered with millions of dead projects from thousands of dead companies.

Even if the execution were cheap and implementation were perfect, if the starting idea was bad, it's all been a waste.

Ideas aren't cheap, because bad ideas are expensive and good ideas cost money to vet.

> I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness".

https://x.com/chamath/status/2033385903520129161

> I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff. What's happening there? A lot of people play with their own little universe and get tired quickly, move away from it, and only a few prolific creators stay and turn it into a "job like" environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Sturgeon's law states, "Ninety percent of everything is crap". The adage was coined by American science fiction author and critic Theodore Sturgeon while defending the merits of the genre. Sturgeon observed that most works in any field were low quality. Therefore, science fiction was not uniquely inferior.

Could you elaborate on the AI Music tool? My impression was that it's used as a one-shot generation tool. I don't know much about music but I imagine artists need intermediary steps, track separation, instrument customization and other stuff I'm oblivious about. Without these, it's hard for me to imagine it being used for professional work.

Sumo produces plausible cheesy stuff that is otherwise sonically awful, ringing alongside the full spectrum due to how it works. As a musician I would not use it - I like to keep some creative power. Some people use it around me for samples… and then their tracks ring. But it works for them as they be advertising producers. Mind u - I’ve used paid version and I know one or two about music production.

As an information architect I find it amazing it works so good, but is useless to me except being a great think to play with… a toy really. I’m much more fascinated by Strudel.cc and LLMs do a great job to educate me into it, myself being mostly an autodidact.

As a dev I struggle to maintain coherence with Claude Code even though I’ve piped more than 10b tokens since Jan. Certain trivial stuff is easily remedied but even more devil lives in abundance of details now. So the task moves one level above in terms of abstraction, but is not solved.

If guys were good at typing one and the same thing in one and the same lang, which is nothing wrong about given how crafts went for ages, then they will be struggling to compete with the GPTs. But if they are in the architectural and operational perspective … well - work and demand just increased, so please stop whining.

To continue paraphrasing Steve Jobs, focus is the most important thing. When the cost to produce new features/implementations goes down, focus is even harder (and even more important).

I guess we have very different ideas around what makes good music. Every single Suno produced song sounds like a 60kbps extremely compressed mp3 while also having extremely generic, uninspiring structures and complete lack of interesting sonic/instrumental layers.

It's great that people find joy in it, but as someone that is critical of both music production and fidelity, the current offerings fall incredibly short of anything I would ever want to listen to.

> I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff.

Does it? It produces passable stuff that is fine. However the lack of passion and care completely disinterests me.

Code has never been the execution of the ideas is cheap mantra.

It is the whole business flow chain of value to the end user what is valuable.

> I don't know if y'all have tried it

No. I assumed that at best it will be not better than average human-made music available to listeners.

> but it now produces really good stuff.

Does it? Do you have examples?

(note: I actually do not care about all "hand-made" and have no preference for once-off over serially made products)

suno produces 7m "professional" songs per day. Can't think of a better example of a slop generator. Many songs that will never get more than a handful of listens if it all.

LLMs don’t “solve” execution at all. They aid and accelerate it.