That was a wild ride of an article. It’s also a good showcase of why it’s usually not the best tech that wins, but who can secure the funding and the marketing.

A social app for uploading and swiping through short videos is not technically all that impressive. It takes quite a bit of infrastructure to scale and implement well, but it wasn’t exactly science fiction in the early 2010s. He was not the only one around that time with a similar idea, anyone remember Vine? Ultimately, Snapchat and TikTok (née Musical.ly) had the bigger backing and more successful marketing. Maybe ten years from now the same idea will have been reinvented and people will point out what TikTok is today.

I remember the signs of a new AI spring from 2015 when DeepDream was in the news. It’s entirely expected that a techie serial entrepreneur with an Open Source mindset would have tried to foster open collaboration in a potential new and exciting AI renaissance. For all his techbro tendencies I think his goals for his Open AI project seem laudable enough and he’s entirely correct in blaming OpenAI for not living up to its name. It’s not the biggest issue we should have with OpenAI – being transparent about their research and open sourcing their products wouldn’t make them environmentally sustainable or morally fair to us mortals who have to abide by copyright law – but it’s a legitimate point.