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Baking Metaphors

Have been reading about Intel's likely demise and many opinions of how that happened. It was completely unthinkable when I went to college for example and the 8086 was the processor we cut our assembly language programming teeth on. Many of my peers dreamed of working at Intel and several went on to fulfill that dream. That was then and this is now - even Intel needed to have a moat and came a time when they did not have one anymore. 

I am sure a lot of books and case studies will be written on this subject that will dissect it all. These days the conversations around moats (or the lack thereof) tend to center around the rash of AI startups that are very reminiscent of the dotcom boom times where everyone and their grandmother had an idea for a something dotcom that went belly-up in the end. Particularly loved the cake, baking and oven analogy by this author to explain what is going on the in AI startup space

In almost all cases, the solution to getting the desired output from the LLM is to fix the input by making the prompt and context data more precise, more targeted, or transformed in a way that makes it more likely to get the desired output from the LLM.

In a sense, this is not unlike baking: the AI is an appliance — the most fantastical and amazing appliance man has made, but yet still an appliance — and the artistry and science all happens before the ingredients go into the oven and we hit “bake”.

Indeed, there are many “AI startups” that quickly fizzled because having an oven does not a baker make and many startups were just content putting supermarket box mix cake batter into the oven and calling it a day.

I am the kind of baker that does infact puts a supermarket box mix cake batter into the oven and calls it a day The likes of me are known to love watching baking shows completely mesmerized by what real bakers can do with the same core ingredients and appliance. There are only a handful of bakers that will win competitors. My tier of bakers is the lowest rung and there is a ton of us judging by the number of cake mix batter boxes in the baking aisles. There is no hope for us and we are well aware. The real purgatory is the infinitely large mid-tier where people no longer need readymade mixes but they are very far away from winning any competition - AI startups with no moat fit right there.

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