I agree with this sentiment. But OTOH, if something is so easy to copy maybe we just have to accept that it's not that special anymore. Isn't excellence in a sense *defined* by ability to consistently achieve results above average? So the only consequence of the average shifting upward is the threshold for excellence shifting accordingly?

What constituted excellence a year ago is trivial and common today, so maybe excellence just shifted somewhere else, and the realization many of us are having is that our valuable skills are now just average, and the top has shifted upward?

Shifted upward to what, though? What is still hard to someone with enough tokens to burn?

Not OC you replied to.

I had similar question as you and conclusion as OC.

My answer maybe abstract in some ways, but:

- something that requires network effects, e.g social media, even twitter with megahitler stuff is going strong. Even though twitter's base app model could be done in 30min by LLM;

- something that maps to infrastructure in someway. Good luck copying Cloudflare, residential proxy provider, established email provider or VPS with LLM in a weekend. Though parts of it are definitely easier;

- something that is a platform (adjacent to first point). Google's search platform, ads, docs, youtube, music, email, business tools, etc. Similar to Meta (seemingly half of the world's small businesses control their business with whatsapp) and others. Though parts of those platforms can be disrupted with LLMs;

Yeah agree with this, these seem like genuine moats for now (we'll see whether this is still true in 6-12 months)

Right, but all of those examples are - if you’re already big and established, that’s your moat.

Maybe hardware? Agents workflow design? Faster/more accurate models? Using our preferences to decide what to build and our agency to actually do it (poetically speaking, being the gradient in the agent optimisation process) ?

I don't know! But maybe that's how it feels like to be far from excellence again; maybe that's how it feels like to be out of our depth again, just like we were at the beginning of our career?

I don't want to risk stretching the analogy too far, and it might be that agents make all cognitive work obsolete. But surely there'll be something that defines a capability frontier? The alternative position is to believe that there just won't be a frontier anymore (I guess that's the RSI/AGI/ASI position :shrug)

100%. Any ideas we have to spin up a new artwork game, analysis, or software - how long until someone says: copy that and change it 1% and now it's mine.

To those who sing the lullaby "AI has bad taste": You can tell it what to make. Your taste or any hypothetical taste can modulate everything it makes. There's no taste-moat here, folks.

Right, so, although taste is an advantage, the time you have to exploit your first mover advantage has decreased dramatically to almost nothing.