I think a much more probable reason for Meta’s falling behind is that it took a series of painful hits early on, and eventually became noncompetitive as a result of the damage of those hits compounding. Suppose an alternative model to your own, in which engineers sought out companies based solely on their prestige and their expectation of future prestige. Would that world have been any more favorable to Meta’s prospects?
Likewise, I think a lot of Anthropic’s success can be chalked up to having a competent business strategy. They decided that they were going after the enterprise coding market, and they built around that very purposefully. Having some kind of clear goal makes every part of an organization more efficient—you know what you’re working for, you have some vague idea of what to evaluate, and you can use market success as a reliable crowdsourced proxy for the ‘vibes’ of how good your system is. Compare this to OpenAI, which had no clear target market, and sort of flailed around, first looking like it was going to become a sort of R&D division for Microsoft and then belatedly, desperately pivoting to serving ads to kids looking to cheat on their homework in the middle of an already unfavorable news cycle.
I think a much more probable reason for Meta’s falling behind is that it took a series of painful hits early on, and eventually became noncompetitive as a result of the damage of those hits compounding. Suppose an alternative model to your own, in which engineers sought out companies based solely on their prestige and their expectation of future prestige. Would that world have been any more favorable to Meta’s prospects?
Likewise, I think a lot of Anthropic’s success can be chalked up to having a competent business strategy. They decided that they were going after the enterprise coding market, and they built around that very purposefully. Having some kind of clear goal makes every part of an organization more efficient—you know what you’re working for, you have some vague idea of what to evaluate, and you can use market success as a reliable crowdsourced proxy for the ‘vibes’ of how good your system is. Compare this to OpenAI, which had no clear target market, and sort of flailed around, first looking like it was going to become a sort of R&D division for Microsoft and then belatedly, desperately pivoting to serving ads to kids looking to cheat on their homework in the middle of an already unfavorable news cycle.