FWIW, I just heard this guy (Head of Growth) on Lenny's podcast a few days ago and one of the things he explicitly mentioned was creating intentional friction for growth. This seems to be one of those tests.
In periods of massive inflation, only the most wealthy survive.
But there's competition out there -- the open-source chinese models. In their current form, I assume that will turn off many people but new models -- based on those -- are likely to appear. Also, OAI and Google will release new models and pick up the lost customers.
Yeah, that's completely unbelievable. You don't just accidentally call Trump a "dictator" or go on an extended tirade about Sam Altman. Clearly, he was speaking how he truly felt and how he's doing damage control.
Whether you align or don't align with these politics, I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked. There's clearly some expectations of privacy (using Signal with expiring messages) and someone leaking this really destroys trust and open communication. It causes people to not engage in open dialog and to move to even smaller and smaller circles. This ends up stifling open and honest debate and results in more narrow, provincial views of the world.
And for what? For clicks? To tell on someone? To smear someone? What "good" was accomplished from this leak and this article? Some advertiser dollars were made -- probably a trivial amount compared to the value of honest debate among the most powerful in tech.
For all the snark from people who dislike Elon, this is a bit of a sad ending. I remember when Twitter announced their presence in mid-market and the promises of how it would help the area. What people don't realize is that his will lead to real revenue losses for the city -- the largest companies in SF are overwhelmingly tech. Twitter is in the top 5 when it comes to how much tax they pay. Loss of revenue for the city will translate to cuts.
Generally this is unlikely the happen (obviously will depend on which EV and which ICE). The reason being is that consumers have generally accepted the cost for cars at a certain level. Rather than dropping the price for cars, they add more features or improve quality to justify a certain price point.
The average ICE engine hasn't changed, from a technology standpoint, has not changed in decades. What's changed is all the internal technology (entertainment systems, parking cameras) as well as trim that's become standard (power everything). These standards are defined by the market. Case in point: see what the standard for cars (both quality and price) are for a given market like US vs India.
It's unlikely they will lower margins so much as to make less money from EV's than from ICE cars. An analogous model are iPhones. The old iPhones could be sold today at a fraction of the price but instead they release new models with better features to justify the higher price point.
(This is all with a caveat that I'm talking about sticker price. Given that EV maintenance should generally be cheaper, without a doubt the target is to have the total cost of ownership be lower than an ICE car as that's how EV's are being positioned today.)
Will people be able to build on the engine like the original? I used to love playing the Day of Defeat mod (ww2 themed) and could definitely see mass appeal for that on top of this new engine.
Ok. What's your point? Is someone supposed to know?
I think people didn't really have any idea how the iPhone would really have an impact. At best people said, "Now I don't need to carry a phone and an iPod." That's probably one of the least touted feature today because it is simply taken for granted.
The thing with iPhone is that it really removed any threshold to mobile applications. Sure, I could've probably done everything on my laptop that I do on my iPhone. But who wants to bust out their laptop every 5 minutes to check Facebook, find directions and beam someone money using PayPal? Oh yeah.. you'd also have the barrier of actually having connectivity no matter where you are.
I will say that there will be a similar evolution with the iPad. Certain applications lends themselves better to a touch interface with a lightweight form factor. These applications need more screen real estate than an iPhone but less power than a laptop. The most obvious? A book reader.
I can see any sort of designer app being huge: web page designing, graphic designing, photo editing. Personally I would love a personal entertainment console. In a perfect world, I'd have a smooth, user friendly and rich touch interface to pick a movie to stream from Netflix and have it start playing automatically through my Apple TV.