Lasers, satellites, really accurate rifles, decade-long life extensions, industrial meat production without a nervous system, advanced optics, cheaper / better sensors, swarm AI.

In contrast Facebook is largely just a couple of web forms and some Big O problems at scale.

>> In contrast Facebook is largely just a couple of web forms and some Big O problems at scale.

Yes, and Steph Curry is just a guy shooting a ball in a basket.

I don't think parent meant to say that the technology behind Facebook is trivial. Just that it's trivial when contrasted with a bunch of technologies that are at best in prototype stage.

A decade-long life extension or growing meat without animals would both probably involve more "Hard Tech" style innovation than building Facebook.

Other observations are IMO less pat. E.g. designing cheaper/better sensors could be either harder or significantly easier than building a Facebook. Depending on the type of sensor and the cost improvement.

A lot of the FB tech circa 2010 seemed to be reinvented versions of things ex-Google FB staff used. They've done a lot of innovation since then though.

Which is absolutely true if there were no such thing as the NBA. Being good at Donkey Kong is also difficult.

You must find it puzzling that FB is arguably the world leader in AI research right now.

Really? Tomorrow night, Google's DeepMind is probably going to mop the floor with a 9-dan Go professional for the third game in a row. What's Facebook doing for fun these days?

Facebook's building a Go playing AI too. They're just a bit behind.

Yeah, well, just wait until my new Go AI is up and running. Those other guys had better run and hide. Real soon now.

'A' leader. Not 'the' leader. Or is there something very specific that makes you say that?

But it wasn't when it started. Which is the point.

>In contrast Facebook is largely just a couple of web forms and some Big O problems at scale.

Facebook is doing more than that. Mark recently claimed that they are working on "a world-class News Feed, and a world-class messaging product, and a world-class search product, and a world-class ad system, and invent[ing] virtual reality, and build[ing] drones".

FB may be trying to do more than that.

Based on the glaring flaws in the base product, I'm unconvinced it has the smarts to do any of those things well.

Although I agree with you, if they can do it "good enough", it'll take off, and I'm scared they might

To me, "Hard Tech" is more science oriented, like the Space Shuttle material that you can hand hold at 1500 degrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

Stuff that's non-obvious but amazing and makes you think sci-fi... DARPA does a lot of this kind of stuff.

Definitely non-trivial problems, most likely hardware, maybe materials science or something in the other science fields. Maybe new math, or solvers that take days to run on thousands of CPUs. Stuff that might take thousands of man-hours to develop.

Not sure how YC would be involved here, as this is expensive to develop, but DARPA has a funding model.

Hard Tech means nontrivial problems in all varieties, but Altman is particularly "excited about AI (both general AI and narrow AI applied to specific industries, which seems like the most obvious win in all of startups right now), biotech, and energy."

(edit: okay, okay, maybe the article isn't clear.)

I didn't find it to be clear, otherwise I wouldn't have asked.

SV has its own jargon, and not being from SV, I think it's fair to want to clarify what is meant by a capitalized phrase like "Hard Tech" in case there is a deeper meaning known to those inside SV.

Fair enough. But I don't think "Hard Tech" is being used as SV jargon here. The first paragraph defines what is meant by "hard technology" mainly in the negative -- critics who say "SV isn't doing hard technology", for whatever value of "hard technology" they mean.

If the article was clear, it would have replaced "hard" with "difficult." Hard is ambiguous, especially when talking about technology.

Yes. My reading of the headline was "hard" in the sense of "hardware" because hardware tends to require larger investments and more time--and it's often much harder to advance to a viable point incrementally. To be sure, these characteristics also mean that hardware tends to be more difficult than many types of software but the terms don't mean the same thing.