During the “Gold Rush” era (Wild West 1800s), there were plenty of people descending onto California to try and make their fortunes by staking out land to mine and pan for gold.
However, the first millionaire wasn’t anyone who got lucky staking out a mine. It was the largest store owner in the area selling all these prospective miners their shovels to dig with.
The “AI industry” has a lot of parallels here, but everyone wants to be the store owner, and hardly anyone has a genuine need for their tools.
It’s quite wild. He’s also considered the first to publicize that there is a gold rush, much like these modern AI companies hype up their products to no end.
The California gold rush. This was an actual, legit thing where there were more people trying to score bigtime selling supplies to prospectors and miners than there were prospectors and miners trying to score bigtime with striking gold.
It’s not a local joke, I wish it was a joke, it’s a nugget of wisdom in tech world: when there is rush for gold, sell shovels.
The biggest example today is proliferation of LLM services. There are some uses, some success stories, but a lot of companies are selling services, use my tools bro, you’ll save so much money bro, you’ll vibe-code the next Uber bro…
A few years ago it was blockchains and NFTs. There is no proven use case but so many startups selling crypto wallets and NFT services to “help customers”.
San Francisco is still relevant I guess, for being home to Silicon Valley and tons of tech companies.
This phrase has been around for much longer than the tech sector has existed as an industry. Depending on how close you need the actual phrasing to be to the currently most common wording of the idiom, it goes as far back as the 1890s and has been common parlance in investing, manufacturing, and even the practice of divorce law for a century.
What is the connection between San Francisco and shovels?
During the “Gold Rush” era (Wild West 1800s), there were plenty of people descending onto California to try and make their fortunes by staking out land to mine and pan for gold.
However, the first millionaire wasn’t anyone who got lucky staking out a mine. It was the largest store owner in the area selling all these prospective miners their shovels to dig with.
The “AI industry” has a lot of parallels here, but everyone wants to be the store owner, and hardly anyone has a genuine need for their tools.
Said first millionaire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
It’s quite wild. He’s also considered the first to publicize that there is a gold rush, much like these modern AI companies hype up their products to no end.
“prospective”
You sly dog.
The actual store owner is nvidia and they make filthy money right now
Boy, I can’t wait to buy two 5090s so I can play Starfield and make that black guy white with postprocessing.
The California gold rush. This was an actual, legit thing where there were more people trying to score bigtime selling supplies to prospectors and miners than there were prospectors and miners trying to score bigtime with striking gold.
That was 200 years ago, though… Is it still some viral local joke?
It’s a metaphor being applied to AI companies. A major one in SF has ads literally saying “stop hiring humans.”
I didn’t get this, thank you for the explanation
It’s not a local joke, I wish it was a joke, it’s a nugget of wisdom in tech world: when there is rush for gold, sell shovels.
The biggest example today is proliferation of LLM services. There are some uses, some success stories, but a lot of companies are selling services, use my tools bro, you’ll save so much money bro, you’ll vibe-code the next Uber bro…
A few years ago it was blockchains and NFTs. There is no proven use case but so many startups selling crypto wallets and NFT services to “help customers”.
San Francisco is still relevant I guess, for being home to Silicon Valley and tons of tech companies.
This phrase has been around for much longer than the tech sector has existed as an industry. Depending on how close you need the actual phrasing to be to the currently most common wording of the idiom, it goes as far back as the 1890s and has been common parlance in investing, manufacturing, and even the practice of divorce law for a century.
It’s an astute observation. I don’t watch TV except for the playoffs and they have zero ads for AI, just for AI integration services.
Which playoffs?
penis fencing
Huh, thought that was more of a double elimination tournament.
quadruple elimination if you count the judge and viewer
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Including the headline of this post, you can’t manage to figure out the context?