upvote
The narrative that superintelligence is imminent is partially at fault here.

There are competing definitions of what intelligence even is, and the one that I find most striking is from Francois Chollet which is that intelligence can be boiled down to skill acquisition efficiency. This type of definition makes intelligence more akin to polishing a ball than growing a watermelon.

The superintelligence doomers warn that the watermelon is going to start growing exponentially and crush everyone. But what might actually be happening is that we are not growing a watermelon but rather polishing the ball until its really smooth and shiny. There's a point where you can get it to micron levels of polish but for most tasks (white collar text domains tasks), it's smooth enough! You will be able to go to the ball store and buy a low cost made in china ball for most tasks.

The real challenge is actually branching out domains and modalities to tackle things like blue collar labor. Over time, white collar work automatable or able to be made hyperefficient by LLMs will see LLM commoditization.

reply
Observationally, for people that /aren't/ using models to code but to just do their white-collar job, claude.ai /is/ AI, now. The entire perspective for how to use AI is through claude skills, claude projects, claude cowork, etc. They've massively won the corp buy-in at the moment I believe.
reply
> The entire perspective for how to use AI is through claude skills, claude projects, claude cowork, etc

But as they have repeatedly pointed out, creating software is almost zero-cost now, so software cannot be a moat.

After all, all of the Claude software can be vibe-coded by any competitor; that's the dream that Anthropic has been selling anyway...

reply
doesn't matter. that just means they've incentivized all competitors to enter the market and let's be honest none of their tools are that novel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J2Fb1bBufA

reply
I guess I’m thinking a lot of companies seem to be getting Claude code subscriptions. It usually takes some time and effort for an org to switch away from one solution. In the meantime a lot of workflows get more and more tied to Claude in particular.

It’s not much of a moat, but it’s more than a lot of orgs have.

reply
obligatory correction: the semiconductor layer is still owned by TSMC and Samsung. Google sketches chip designs for them to implement - that's the lowest layer they control. I am not denying that this is impressive.
reply