What stands out to me in your recounting is: the duration between change and full impact keeps getting smaller.
Broad strokes:
Consciousness -> 100,000 years
Civilization -> 10,000 years
Industrial Revolution -> 100 years
Digital Revolution -> 50 years
AI Revolution -> 10 years
Singularity -> 1 year
Kurzweil’s main point that I recall from his book is that the rate of change is shrinking and eventually becomes near zero so that change happens so fast there is no non-change normal.
This is really cool. I work in the plant industry, and most people don't know this but huge numbers of the plants bought in the U.S. are grown from tissue culture. I would guess it could be in the ballpark of half of all small and medium-sized plants (< 10" diameter), because it brings some benefits when propagating at scale for certain genera. For others, it's too difficult to grow a stable plant from tissue culture, so they need to be propagated vegetatively.
Advertising makes up only 9% of Duolingo's revenue and is also usually a small part of the revenue of most mobile games. Mobile games rely on "whales" (people who pay a lot, like a casino) and Duolingo makes almost all of its revenue on subscriptions. Both require sticky retention but advertisers don't drive the business model or executive decisions at these companies.
Absolute percentage of revenue (or for that matter, profit) is irrelevant. If employees are able to justify their salary/promotion by increasing a metric such as ad impressions or "engagement", you're gonna see more advertising, even if it affects long-term profitability or even kills the product.
You could use Greg [0] to learn how to grow plants. Disclosure: I'm one of the co-creators :). There's also a thriving community [1] that has become honestly surprisingly healthy/supportive. Think "Strava for growing plants".
We're still early, any feedback is appreciated. We raised our seed round [2] last year, check out that announcement for more info on our long-term mission.
App looked really cool until I read it has Tinder Engineering DNA. What a heap of trash app Tinder turned out to be over the past couple years, but maybe Greg will be good for a few early years like Tinder was until it turns into a gamified dark-pattern botany app.
Just imagine, we have to buy Greg Gold to access additional plants beyond grass or weeds, purchase water-boosts to unlock the next time we have to water plants (or they die). Maybe even have a hidden ELO system on our plant pics where the less healthy our plant condition looks the more we have to pay for Greg credits so it'll dish out the plant-care advice we rely on to prevent our entire garden from dying.
Greg (https://greg.app/) is a plant app for people who find plant care mysterious and want their plants to thrive. Unlike wading through Google search results, Greg is personalized and makes growing healthy plants as easy as tying your shoes.
Our mission is to continue expanding our AI to eventually become the "Jarvis" of helping humans grow plants. Imagine if Mark Watney (from the Martian) had an AI guiding him on Mars :). We believe plants are at the heart of many of the existential challenges we face today, like food insecurity and collapsing ecosystems. Understanding/engineering our relation to plants will be key in the decades ahead. We're a Public Benefit Company with a legally-binding charter that we've published online: https://greg.app/charter/.
Before co-creating Greg I was a Director of Engineering at Tinder, where I founded the Growth and Trust & Safety teams (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexross8/). Our team is 7 people right now and we're hiring 10+.
We just closed our seed funding round (unannounced - top 5% amount, we're well-capitalized) and our job postings aren't online yet. We're looking for engineers passionate about ecology, protecting the planet. If you think what we're building is interesting, I'd love an email at alex (at) our website.
We also have a unique equity model, where each teammate owns a (virtually) equal share of the company. This is because we believe our team will be the primary reason we're able to achieve our long-term mission, and we need very strong individuals in every role. We also believe early-stage startup equity is mostly broken for non-founders and non-investors, and we believe it's possible to do better.
"a cool database where you can filter by those factors" => this is one of the inspirations for Greg, the plant care community I've been helping to build after leaving Tinder.
Think Waze, for plants. We're about to launch on ProductHunt and HN, if you're interested you can check us out at https://greg.help.
Broad strokes:
Consciousness -> 100,000 years Civilization -> 10,000 years Industrial Revolution -> 100 years Digital Revolution -> 50 years AI Revolution -> 10 years Singularity -> 1 year
Kurzweil’s main point that I recall from his book is that the rate of change is shrinking and eventually becomes near zero so that change happens so fast there is no non-change normal.