Artificial Intelligence

From billable hours to SaaS per seating pricing. AI will disrupt.

admin@example.com — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 12:11:51 +0000

I still remember some decades ago when SalesForce were pushing their new motto:

SalesForce.com Success. Not Software.

Back then almost all bespoke developed software included all the hassle of software maintenance and support typically charges at both 12% and 10% per annum of the total build . So it was disruptive in that sense. Never mind the thousands upon thousands of man days required to build the bespoke software and those of us building a supporting it did well.

For more than a decade I've tried to distance myself from billable hours and let's be a little honest with myself from those pesky timesheets. I had little re-lapse (but I had good reasons) a yet all along I also rang the warning bells of this out-dated business model. With the combination of AI and low-code / no-code tooling announcing the slow death to billable hours in software development.

It never really made sense for companies that sold you billable hours to also push for efficiencies and a large chunk of the AI revolution is focused on those efficiencies.

But it's potentially getting even more interesting or bleak if you're not a disruptor! As David Heinemeier Hansson brought to our attention in his opening keynote at the 2024 Rails World at the 28:33 mark, Cloud is creating an incredible markup and SaaS providers are doing it all over again on top of that cloud infrastructure.

So where does SalesForce come into this? Well at AgentForce they've announced they're moving away from per seat licensing towards a per consumption model. Bottom line? SaaS will not be able to compete when pricing models are based on value provided which in turn is closer to ROI.

Ideas that come to mind as I'm inspired but what happens around us.

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Can we find a corner that has not been polluted?

admin@example.com — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:33:24 +0000

I am truly blessed to be able to travel quite a bit but something really hit home earlier in May during our trip to Punta Seca, Sucre 🇨🇴

Despite staying at a 2km stretch of beach that was only accessible via a 8 minute motorboat ride we found plastic pollution on the beach. Not much but still very much present.

Bear in mind we're staying at a private stretch of beach which only has 20 homes of which probably 2 more max were occupied during our stay.

But how remote? Well our uber to the airport was booked for 3:30am for 5am flight followed by more than 2 hrs drive + the last boat trip which means we arrived at 13:00 or 9.5 hours after leaving home. So it's fair to say that it's fairly remote.

And if you stay at a large beach resort the story is pretty much the same. Despite having dozens of workers cleaning the beach every morning about the same amount of rubbish slips their net and you only have to stray off the manicured resort beaches 10 mins to find remote but truly polluted beaches.

And today we learn that AWS estimates that 57% of all Internet content is now AI-generated. Mix that with the fact that AI models will collapse when using AI generated content as training data and we're facing our very microbeads pollution moment. And as much as plastic bottle manufacturers are being forced to keep their caps attached to their bottles we can imagine how this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I see several issues in had right now:

Labelling content produced by humans and otherwise
Making sure we continue to produce high quality content
The ethics surrounding both otherwise our techbro overloads will rape us before we realise it with their own intrinsic biases

It's time to recognise that we're going to have to think about cleaning our beaches and doing our active piece to solve this puzzle as part of our holidaying. We simply can't consume without contributing back.

In once sense I miss the days of Web 2.0 and even the innovation behind BitTorrent which encouraged participating by default as intrinsic to taking.

ps: I recommend reading the Open Access paper on https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493. it's just a shame it's a little to early days for www.alphaxiv.org as the authors have not claimed it no are there any comments on it yet https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v3

Ideas that come to mind as I'm inspired but what happens around us.

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The natural constraints of the finite

admin@example.com — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 16:30:15 +0000

As is frequently the case I'm inspired by the often missed smaller details in life and right now that takes form in a coffee grinder. You see our barely 2 year old electric grinder packed up and the daily morning brew grind is now powered by moi.

Don't get me wrong, I've always really enjoyed my morning brew ritual which most days consist of a single coffee so I really do not mind additional extra effort that goes into around 60 seconds of manual grinding for a single dose. But I can see this becoming an issue if you have around 5+ coffees a day or even two of you have 3+. Come think of it the power rating of my grinder back in Colombia is 120W which is probably overkill.

And let's be honest as much as I like cars and internal combustion engines can be a marvel but they're not efficient any shape or form and the Citroen Oli is an example of a 248 mile range EV out of a 40kWa battery. Just review the Citroen press release:

...oli signals an exciting leap forwards. Rather than being a 2,500kg ‘palace on wheels’ filled with screens and gadgets, oli proves that more can be achieved with less, and showcases how inventive use of responsible materials and a sustainable production process can lead to inexpensive yet desirable zero-emission vehicles that meet multiple lifestyles.

Whether it be the power rating of your grinder, the horse power of your car or the compute it requires to resolve our AI power hungriness. We're not used to paying the price of friction, waste or inefficiencies.

And all of this takes me back to a weekend I spent at a farm of some friends some years ago in Chiquinquirá, Colombia. They had chosen the countryside rhythms of life in contrast to the busy frantic city. And they built a farm they were much more intuned with natural rhythms present to all of us under the concrete jungle. A cow cannot produce milk 12 months of the year if it's ever going to re-produce a calf. They can't feed off land without rotation. And as much as a they would have loved to buy a machine to milk the cows quicker every day at 4am the farm had taught them simple basic finances which would question even the cost of the wear and tear of the belt.

And yet their day was mainly finished by late morning so where was not the ever present pressure to squeeze more out of the day.

Many of us have grown accustomed to elaborate and complex abstractions removing us from natural constraints. Many modern bean counters have elaborated complex financial systems and yet have little grasp of the cost of maintenance of the belt to automate the milking of cows.

So my challenge for all of us today is to question:

Do we understand the true cost of the compute and resources being used in AI?

It's taken us decades to understand that the fabulous cost efficiency of Cloud frequently does not add up and many tech-companies are now migrating back to bare metal servers to save money.
Is the industry subsidising and hiding the true compute cost? Do they benefit from have us hooked on their new gold rush supply?
Are we subsidising their business while they scrap and rape the finite data to feed their models? Is it sustainable once we no longer produce any new human generated content?
Good grief should I even mention governments where this can easily spiral out of control? Where is now new found independent 21st century freedom?
Where can we embrace the beautiful constraint of the finite in our every day?
How can we architect a future that leverages the finite? A future that understand and encourages sustainability?

Not all is doom and gloom. There's plenty of disruption boiling up in not so visible spaces.

Ideas that come to mind as I'm inspired but what happens around us.

More Brain Waves

Million Dollar Whooper

admin@example.com — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 14:44:42 +0000