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apxhard's avatar

Are you familiar with the 'smiling curve' of value add? Ben Thompson writes about this a lot.

https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-theory/smiling-curve/

I suspect that what these LLM's and Image Generation models will do is end up reducing a lot of 'intellectual grunt work' involved in a content pipeline that currently looks roughly like:

ideation -> implementation -> distribution

One big change recently was distribution going from 'expensive broadcast media' (newspaper, radio, TV) to 'cheap multicast media' (email, social media). That caused all kinds of problems.

What the LLM's might do is simply cheapen the _implementation_ portion of the pipeline, which could have the effect of moving all the value creation to the 'ideation' portion of the pipeline so that it looks more like this

ideation -> (neural network) -> (social media)

For example, i have a novel, kind of written. By this, I mean I have a one sentence, one paragraph form, one page form, etc. If I could feed this into an LLM trained on _my writing_ personally, that would be awesome.

This suggests something like the horses and railroads section for written content.

I seriously doubt the 'LLM's get better and everyone gets fired' scenario plays out, because most of what i pay for, when i pay for content, is the relationship itself. The thing I think I'm really paying for is "whatever that thing is that drives ideation", which i think is, itself, a function of personal values and lived experience.

It's also far easier to imagine lots of indie games with graphics that look pretty decent, since a HUGE portion of game development costs involve the absurd quantities of content developers need to create. I think you might even see an interplay of LLM's and art geneation software.

An artist puts into the LLM: "a description of a science lab in a high school in the 1980's, in the dark, with one computer screen on." The LLM then turns this description into a bunch of text describing all the objects and their positions. Then this text is parsed by an 3d image generation tool, which uses the text to generate a scene graph, and then renders all the individual objects in the scene graph in parallel.

The end result is we could be in a world where someone could write up a movie script and turn it into a decently produced feature length film, or write up a description of a short game: "players cooperate to herd cats through an escher-like landscape while pursued by the sleepwaking ghost of Werner Herzog" and a future version of unity spits out an actual playable binary.

Combine 'really cheap prototypes' with modern entrepreneurial models, and i think should likely see an explosion of cool indie shit coming around the corner.

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Jon Deutsch's avatar

Great post. Exposing the many paths forward is a great thought exercise and has opened my mind to a structured way to explore these different progress metaphors. Thank you.

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