Ecosystems that allow mechanistic emergence have to hit a certain critical mass.

· Bits and Bobs 3/10/25
  • Ecosystems that allow mechanistic emergence have to hit a certain critical mass.
    • A user's use case is mechanistically met by the ecosystem if it can sift through everything that everyone has done before and find a good analogue to answer this user's question.
    • These require significant critical mass to get going.
    • It only works for a given use case if either
      • 1) some subset of the users are willing to do quite a bit of work, which can then be used for the rest of the ecosystem.
      • 2) someone else that came before the user already had almost exactly the same problem.
    • LLMs lower this floor, because they are like a semantic lubricant.
    • They allow fuzzier matches to prior experiences to be viable.
    • Sometimes LLMs can give a good enough answer even for the very first user.

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