I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…
Nobody seems to remember how the Segway was going to change our world, backed by many of the VC power figures at the time + Steve Jobs.
The engineering behind it was really quite nice, but the hype set it up to fail. If it hasn’t been talked up so much in the media, the launch wouldn’t have felt so flat. There was no way for them to live up to the hype.