I certainly can’t. Out of all the top reasons why companies fail, “because some other guy stole their idea” never seems to be at the top of their list.
Usually it’s just because they suck at what they do. When a company is protective of its secrets, the real secret is that they don’t want other people to know how much they suck.
Someone I know had a tech company that provided support to the FAANG companies, something like digital infrastructure support. At some point they figured out how to do it themselves and there went his company.
I’m gonna go with no matter how hard he could have tried to protect his precious idea, others would have figured it out anyway. Meaning that it wasn’t that good of an idea in the first place.
Didn’t Apple basically steal their GUI from Xerox?
Meanwhile in the opposite direction, Excite failed because they didn’t steal Google for $1 million at first, then $750,000.
Xerox is still in business, I would say their decline is mostly because they bought that one pension consulting firm I mean just kidding it’s because nobody freaking uses paper anymore.
those twins that started facebook…
Also McDonalds actually started out by some guy who stole the entire concept from a smaller restaurant who didn’t want to scale up. I’m assuming that small business got crushed.
Hedge funds, for instance, are extremely secretive for a reason. You can literally kill a hedge fund by stealing their ideas because then the market will correct and eliminate the advantage.
Almost all AI based firms could go bankrupt by having the “weights” to their neural nets revealed. Imagine if you could get all the weights for chatgpt. That’s literally the entire business right there.
You could ask ChatGPT.
I had a small venture for years, reselling ads to insurance and financial companies, on financial blogs. I set it up not to make money, but so the bloggers would showcase my website in theirs. I’m sending them money every month and hey, would you do a promo for me? Everyone said yes lol.
Turns out I made like 80k a year from it, no work involved. Did that for years, then one day Google let advertisers select what websites they wanted to advertise on specifically, and I was toast overnight.
But don’t let that stop me lol. My dev is currently setting up the same system, but for a different ad venue that. Google will never touch. And after a few months of my sending money to the bloggers, guess what I’m going to ask?
“When you gonna lemme tap dat?”
Don’t I remember seeing that the Excel file containing the modeling for GPT2 is freely available?
Weights have to be updated frequently, a process which is extremely expensive. A company that just uses some other company’s weights and isn’t willing to commit to research will always be behind.
The smaller restaurant probably sucked. I say this because there are plenty of mom n’ pop restaurants that are doing just fine and aren’t being crushed just because Mickey D’s exists.
Is ChatGPT at the point where it can create the necessary code to update the weights?
I’m gonna say, the Winkelvii probably just sucked. Facebook was not a new or unique thing and if the twins had it in them, they would have immediately gotten themselves another programmer to compete with Zuck and crush him. Actually I think they did just that and failed spectacularly. They just didn’t have it in them.