Ask HN: Anyone suffering from the tyranny of the Waiting Equation?

Posted by akersten 1 day ago

In space exploration, there's a famous conundrum that we shouldn't launch a 100-year journey transport ship to another galaxy, because in 20 years technology will have made the ship twice as fast, and we can get there earlier by waiting.

In this episode of "how this translates to B2B sales," I ask if anyone else is struggling to invest in ideas (anywhere from side projects to startups) knowing that the frontier of AI might soon overlap any possible technical or operational moat that you spend a year or more building, and your entire business is just a one-shot prompt away (from either you, meaning you wasted time building, or your target customer, who no longer has a reason to pay you).

Historically it's always been better to Just Build, but this reality seems to be getting tougher to ignore.

Comments

Comment by atleastoptimal 1 hour ago

This is true, which is why the ideal things to do now are actions which increase your moat, or return on model improvement in the future (for example, accumulating data which future better models could more effectively capitalize on)

Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by ac2u 1 day ago

I guess the difference is the folks on the 100 year ship won’t get any feedback that the tech leapfrogs have happened, whereas at least some of the software players have a chance to use their market knowledge to at least adapt.

The marketing outreach in general for too many companies still leans heavily on “we use AI”, whereas most customers just want results and whether you use AI to either provide those results (or to make it cheaper or faster) isn’t a primary concern of the customer.

Comment by brudgers 13 hours ago

AI might soon overlap any possible technical or operational moat that you spend a year or more building

If your operational moat is customer service, you will be safe.