The CEO/founder as the L1 support is not the flex it may appear to be.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".
You hit the nail on the head. The rest of the world yearns for a phone that is cheap, has many years of updates, and not directly subject to US government control.
Motorola on GrapheneOS can run away with this and create a Global South phone ecosystem that can rival that of Apple and Google. The fact they are Chinese owned is a feature.
The keyword in "Software as a Service" is not Software; it's the Service.
In the early days, the tagline for Salesforce is "No Software". It's secret recipe is this: your sales team only need a browser and a credit card, to get the service. No software installation needed. Even if you have a genius can code something equivalent, it will never be a "service". That genius is not going to support it, not going to add storage for you, not going to restore an accidentally deleted record for you. That takes an army to deliver. It is a service.
Of course, Marc Benioff kind of shot himself in the foot by trying to get ahead of the AI curve... and gutted their customer service division. If the service is delivered by AI agents, what is the selling point again over other AI agents? They have debased their key strengths and are getting punished for it.
The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size comparable to the ISS.
How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something that big?
Do you see how unrealistic this is?
Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and still have change left.
I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.
Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.
There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.
And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.
Because big companies can crush competition, either via lobbying for government regulations, acquiring the competitors, or driving the competition out of business by offering something comparable but cheaper or free.
It's the old Microsoft playbook of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with more finesse.
It is also why their acquisitions tend to just die, because once the big company inefficiencies get integrated, the acquired startups just cannot function.
On paper, Google should never have allowed the ChatGPT moment to happen ; how did a then non-profit create what was basically a better search engine than Google?
Google suffers from classic Innovator's Dilemma and need competition to refocus on what ought to be basic survival instincts. What is worse is the search users are not the customers. The customers of Google Search are the advertisers and they will always prioritise the needs of the customers and squander their moats as soon as the threat is gone.
Google allowed this to happen because they listened to their compliance department and were afraid of a backslash if LLM says something that could anger people.
Exactly, Google's business isn't search, it's ads. Is ChatGPT a more profitable system for delivering ads? That doesn't appear so, which means there's really no reason for Google to have created it first.
There’s a very negative immune response to the idea of Netflix running ads.
And yet they’re there, in the form of prominent product placement in all of their original series along with strategic placement in the frame to make sure they appear in cropped clips posted to social media and made into gifs.
Stranger Things alone has had 100-200 brands show up under the warm guise of nostalgia, with Coke alone putting up millions for all the less-than-subtle screen time their products get.
I’m certain AI providers will figure out how to slyly put the highest bidder into a certain proportion of output without necessarily acting out that scene in Wayne’s World.
I suspect google can last much longer in regards to an AI model chat engine that competes with open AI and other companies, without needing a profit from that particular product in a timely manner. I can's say the same for the others. Google is using it's own money to fund this without mch pressure for immediate profit in a time deadline. They can rely on their other services for revenue and profit for the meantime.
Google had an in-house chatbot that was never allowed to launch. I used to think that they were wrong but now I'm pretty sure they were right to not launch it. Users are very forgiving with a newcomer but not with an established company.
Think about it in terms of the research they put out into the ether though. The research grows into something viable, they sit back and watch the response and move when it makes sense.
It's like that old concept of saying something wrong in a forum on purpose to have everyone flame you for being wrong and needing to prove themselves better by each writing more elaborate answers.
Does anybody actually work with H100s and the like? Their failure rate is so high, I dont understand why anybody will even consider it feasible to put the machines in orbit or even the sea. By my ballpark estimate, if you have 800 H100s, after 6 months, about 100 would be overheating or throttling, and a few will disappear and one or two will crash the machine with load.
> Does anybody actually work with H100s and the like?
They don't. The expectation the cloud develops in people is that magic computers just appear. They're living at a virtualized layer where all the nitty gritty of real machines going down and needing to be serviced all the time is handled by unseen minions (sorry SREs and DC staff) and cluster management and provisioning software.
The reality is that datacenters in space is mind-boggling stupid, just from the infeasibility of maintenance alone.
During my army days, the sergeant major always seem to know where we would fail to clean during inspection standbys, eg the top rim of doors. Part of it is a hazing ritual, but it also means if you know where to look, you know where people will consistently fail.
As an SRE who previously had to manually inspect changes and releases, I quickly learn what to check for, and saved many production issues from happening, but I guess nobody will know about the failures that didnt happen, but they will notice the delay I introduced and the inspection process was automated together with the CD system and I am cut out. Fingers crossed the automation is as thorough or can learn common failure modes.
I've been in your position before, and it is indeed thankless. So, for what it's worth, thank you for all of the disasters you prevented. I believe you, and I appreciate it.
Oh, yeah, Obama being aloof was why the white men who questioned his citizenship openly - who are now entirely complicit in or supportive of an unaccountable gestapo randomly kidnapping people from the streets wth no ID or due process based on their skin tone - weren't "charmed" by him.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".