Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet
<i>This is largely because leveraging power on the Internet requires technical expertise, and most distributed power groups don’t have that expertise.</i><p>This is actually my biggest concern.<p>Our company is bleeding edge technology in AR and ML and it&#x27;s really fucking hard to hire computer vision and machine learning people because Goog&#x2F;Face&#x2F;Apple can offer 300-400k for PhDs and give them exciting and engaging projects.<p>If giant companies constantly &quot;disrupt themselves&quot; and acquire anything that looks like competition then they just consolidate further and nobody can take a competitive position.<p>I know people will hand wave this away, but as RL becomes the architecture for software - especially led by these big companies - it&#x27;s going to be increasingly hard to unseat big players.<p>At the AI meetup at Stanford I went to last week, Andrew Ng was asked by Jen-Hsun Huang, &quot;How do small companies create the new technologies for the future better than the big ones&quot; and Andrew&#x27;s comment was basically: &quot;They don&#x27;t anymore.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m worried that the time for disruptive startups (at least in software) is coming to an end. Hopefully I&#x27;m wrong.