Jake Wildstrom

Hey, Democrats, I know you have people to write your talking points for you, but they suck. You're welcome to use some of mine. I'm not any sort of fancy politics-talking person, but I think I can do better than the fancy people you have.

When you're asked about surgical transition in youth: "There's well-established medical guidance for when social, hormonal, and surgical transitions are appropriate, based on sound research. Those guidelines are effective in making sure everyone receives age-appropriate care."

Hey, Democrats, I know you have people to write your talking points for you, but they suck. You're welcome to use some of mine. I'm not any sort of fancy politics-talking person, but I think I can do better than the fancy people you have.

(Reposting because image upload failed the first time for some reason) Today I was nearly brained by falling hardware while teaching! OK, I exaggerate. I was a good 10 feet away, but on any given day, I quite reasonably could have been near or under the projector screen as it fell.

Apropos of nothing, looking at trade dress for various editions of the Lord Peter Wimsy stories. It's interesting because they're both murder mysteries — and thus gritty — but also moderately comic, with the central character being a faintly Wodehousian upper-class twit, and art can go either way.

Harper's design seems very American, and very mid-90s. I feel like if I had a brain injury where I couldn't decipher text and I saw these, I'd reckon the author was Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard or something: still crime stories and funny, but a bit more gonzo and a bit less British.

Apropos of nothing, looking at trade dress for various editions of the Lord Peter Wimsy stories. It's interesting because they're both murder mysteries — and thus gritty — but also moderately comic, with the central character being a faintly Wodehousian upper-class twit, and art can go either way.

Open Road Media definitely leans towards "silly and fun", but their trade dress is weirdly inconsistent, with a complete changeover in style from _Have His Carcase_ to _Murder Must Advertise. Both are basically lighthearted though; the "empty suit" design particularly seems to fit the style.

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

And with LLMs repriced to a point where ordinary human meatsack work is cheaper, they're going to do just that. Yes, businesses hate having to pay querulous humans and meet their dumb biological demands, but I promise you they like money more than they hate people, and people are cheap.

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

Well, we're seeing it in real time now. Token-based pricing makes everyone who is using LLMs reconsider if it's actually a good deal. With rideshare this didn't happen. After killing taxis, Uber could reprice higher than taxis and it was still a better value proposition than the extant alternatives.

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

Sooner or later, even the dumbest investor is going to realize that you have to raise prices to the point where you sell the product at a profit, and venture capitalists are surely putting pressure on their debtors to actually, y'know, try to actually make money instead of losing it.

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

The LLM industry really can't, not without making their product an attractive value proposition for long enough that skilled human labor in their field totally dies out. And that leads into related problems (3) LLMs massively exceed human labor in cost, and (4) they jacked prices too early.

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

"Creatives" (or, if we were to drill down to a specific segment of creatives, like "software developers") are a bunch of individual humans who will retain those skills, and likely an enthusiasm to use them, even after you somehow convince their employers to replace them with robots.

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

This leads us to (2) "creative labor" is not already monopolized. Uber succeeded because they were targeting a business, and a highly monopolized business at that. Taxi sevices varied locally, but everywhere they were incorporated, and many places they had weird, exclusive "medallion" systems.

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

This is the least convincing point because, on pure creation (i.e. fiction in any media), LLMs make superficially plausible products whose inferiority to human work is arguably a matter of taste. But when asked to make functional work (e.g. law briefs, research articles, and the all-important CODE)

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

Looking at the current inflection point in client-side LLM pricing, it's not too hard to draw a parallel between Uber's cheap rideshares to undercut established taxi services, and the service providers' subsidized tokens to undercut a huge number of creative fields (most overtly coding).

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

First, a quick primer on what Uber did: they set up a platform better than, and rates cheaper than, local medallion taxi services. Once local taxi services lost market share to the point they couldn't compete, they raised prices. They lost money hand-over-fist on the first half of this deal.