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Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

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Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#381
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we could generalise your law for all of AI work: you can solve arbitrarily hard tasks and yet be nowhere near real general intelligence.

A half-joking prediction: at some point we'll solve all arbitrarily hard milestones for AIs and yet find ourselves 'nowhere near having real general intelligence'. At that point we might start questioning our assumptions about intelligence.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/91177/how-our-eyes-see-e...

Until we can understand and correct unconcious inferences, how can we ever understand intelligence.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>bonuses in the millions Hundreds of millions. As part of breaching his employment agreement by stealing trade secrets, Levandowski had to pay back one of his bonuses, which was $120 million . I mean, part of paying this type of comp is to retain talent. How much more should Google have paid to retain him? Or was this even preventable?

>I mean, part of paying this type of comp is to retain talent. As with ever increasing CEO compensation, it has been frequently pointed out that this may be less an issue of performance and more a sort of internal cronyism with tightly connected people being excessively compensated. Given the mythology around tech founders/talent it's not surprising. As long as the companies grew it was fine, but I honestly think the…

Like shareholders have any real say.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." ― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

Yes and there's no socialist country that has produced Amazon, Google, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX to name a few. This platform, keyboard, routers in the middle are all US made. And there's a good reason for that

You mean no socialist country that hasn't been under constant attack by the majority of non-socialist countries.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#384
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A half-joking prediction: at some point we'll solve all arbitrarily hard milestones for AIs and yet find ourselves 'nowhere near having real general intelligence'. At that point we might start questioning our assumptions about intelligence.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/91177/how-our-eyes-see-e... Until we can understand and correct unconcious inferences, how can we ever understand intelligence.

  In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat
  hacking at the PDP-6.  "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.  "I am
  training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe."  "Why is the
  net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.  "I do not want it to have any
  preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes.  "Why do you
  close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.  "So the room will be
  empty."  At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that in his case the bonus was paid based on Project Chauffeur hitting certain milestones. They retained him until the project hit the milestones, and then he left. Which is fair and square. And by the way, Chris Urmson and Sebastian Thrun did the same. It's just that Google did not understand the Goodhart law of self driving, which states that you can hit arbitrarily hard milestones and yet get nowhere near r…

I suspect we could generalise your law for all of AI work: you can solve arbitrarily hard tasks and yet be nowhere near real general intelligence.

hard task: generate a pile of money in short time.

If an AI accomplishs this task, I don't care whether it is general intelligence or not.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two things aren't necessarily in opposition. For example we can choose to have sympathy and empathy for Kanye West during his public struggles. (Or not. I'm not telling anybody what to do. I don't have strong feelings about the guy myself.) We can recognize that yes, clearly, the man is struggling with something. We can also simultaneously refrain from hamfistedly trying to figure out what, specifically, he's s…

So in your view noting that someone has some issues that they need help with is not the same as remote diagnosis?

In your view, are those merely different degrees of the same thing? I mean, yeah, I guess. I suppose "that guy is struggling" is something of a diagnosis in and of itself.

For me, the clear differentiator is that "that guy is struggling" is a "diagnosis" I think just about anybody would be qualified to make. We have all struggled. And people generally don't go on Twitter posting sprees of alternating jumbled, grandiose, and vaguely worrisome thoughts when they're doing well. Nor do they make tearful public appearances, etc. And his wife confirms he's struggling. So assuming he's not putting on an elaborate ruse - I think your average layperson is qualified to say he's struggling.

Being more specific than that would require a level of training and direct contact with him that, obviously, a layperson doesn't have. And mental diagnoses are rather uh, fuzzy even when handed out by qualified professionals under ideal circumstances.

It's like the difference between me saying, "my car won't start" (a thing I'm qualified to say!) and "the fuel injector controller is faulty; Honda screwed up the design and Nissan's version of the same thing is much more robust." (a thing I just made up, and am not remotely qualified to say)

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#387
post #342
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don’t need thousands, let alone millions, of employees labouring for you. Name a company with a billion dollars in revenue that is, or could be, operated solely by someone with a laptop and programming skills.

Previous poster didn’t claim billion dollars in revenue - just that to become a billionaire. Take Facebook acquisitions for example - WhatsApp, Oculus - low headcount (less than 500) for multiple billions.

> low headcount (less than 500)

Indeed. There's a big difference between 1 person and a team of hundreds.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting that recipes are not art but rather fact. The same with fashion. I think that SpaceX has trade secrets rather than patents because there is nothing stopping China using the information in a patent whereas a trade secret is obfuscated.

But what happens if someone else independently invents the same things and protects them in a patent? Does SpaceX lose their technology?

So, given current US patent law, if SpaceX has some system/method/etc that is patentable material, but that they've chosen to retain as a trade secret, and someone else comes along and rediscovers the thing and patents it, then absolutely, SpaceX may then be in violation of that patent.

That's because, as of 2011, the US (and basically the rest of the world) works on a first-to-file basis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inv...

Meaning: "In a first-to-file system, the right to the grant of a patent for a given invention lies with the first person to file a patent application for protection of that invention, regardless of the date of actual invention."

Obviously this is not without controversy! The upside is it drastically simplifies patent filing, litigation, etc, since there can be no debate about who was the first to file a patent for an invention. But, as you point out, there are significant downsides.

I would claim FITF ultimately encourages patenting and thus public disclosure of inventions, which is overall better for the world than one dominated by protections with trade secrets. But I can't claim to have put a lot of thought into that position...

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#389
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don’t need thousands, let alone millions, of employees labouring for you. Name a company with a billion dollars in revenue that is, or could be, operated solely by someone with a laptop and programming skills.

There are a lot of trusts out there that operate with no full time employees and make billions in revenue. Maybe getting returns on investments isn't really a company, but it's also hard to say something like a hedge fund isn't a company.

Those trusts earn their money by investing it in enterprises that actually create value through the use of many employees.

I definitely would not describe myself as a socialist (I have an academic background in economics) but it's pretty clear that the labor theory of value is not contradicted in the slightest by citing examples of lone rent-seekers.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and there's no socialist country that has produced Amazon, Google, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX to name a few. This platform, keyboard, routers in the middle are all US made. And there's a good reason for that

You mean no socialist country that hasn't been under constant attack by the majority of non-socialist countries.

Please create your socialist utopia and make it work. Why change US and other successful countries?
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