Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
blog.johnluttig.com
Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
1–10 of 256 posts
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#2> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns
The fact that the author brings this up and fails to realize that the behavior of current staff shows we have hit or have passed peak AI.
Moores Law is dead and it isn't going to come through and make AI any more affordable. Look at the latest GPU's: IPC is flat. And no one is charging enough to pay for running (bandwidth, power) of the computer that is being used, never mind turning NVIDA into a 4 trillion dollar company.
> Meta’s multi-hundred million dollar comp offers and Google’s multi-billion dollar Character AI and Windsurf deals signal that we are in a crazy AI talent bubble.
All this signals is that those in the know have chosen to take their payday. They don't see themselves building another google scale product, they dont see themselves delivering on samas vision. They KNOW that they are never going to be the 1% company, the unicorn. It's a stark admission that there is NO break out.
The math isnt there in the products we are building today: to borrow a Bay Area quote there is no there there. And you can't spend your way to market capture / a moat, like every VC gold rush of the past.
Do I think AI/ML is dead. NO, but I dont think that innovation is going to come out of the big players, or the dominant markets. Its going to take a bust, cheap and accessable compute (fire sale on used processing) and a new generation of kids to come in hungry and willing to throw away a few years on a big idea. Then you might see interesting tools and scaling down (to run localy).
The first team to deliver a model that can run on a GPU alongside a game, so that there is never an "I took an arrow to the knee" meme again is going to make a LOT of money.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#3https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e3...
> Blitzhires are another form of an acquisition.. not everybody may be thrilled of the outcome.. employees left behind may feel betrayed and unappreciated.. investors may feel founders may have broken a social contract. But, for a Blitzhire to work, usually everybody needs to work together and align. The driver behind these deals is speed. Maybe concerns over regulatory scrutiny are part of it, but more importantly speed. Not going through the [Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Act] HSR process at all may be worth the enormous complexity and inefficiency of foregoing a traditional acquisition path.
From comment on OP:
> In 2023–2024, our industry witnessed massive waves of layoffs, often justified as “It’s just business, nothing personal.” These layoffs were carried out by the same companies now aggressively competing for AI talent. I would argue that the transactional nature of employer-employee relationships wasn’t primarily driven by a talent shortage or human greed. Rather, those factors only reinforced the damage caused by the companies’ own culture-destroying actions a few years earlier.
2014, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/should-tech-work...
> A group of big tech companies, including Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel, recently settled a lawsuit over their "no poach" agreement for $324 million. The CEOs of those companies had agreed not to do "cold call" recruiting of each others' engineers until they were busted by the Department of Justice, which saw the deal as an antitrust violation. The government action was followed up by a class-action lawsuit from the affected workers, who claimed the deal suppressed their wages.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#4> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns The fact that the author brings this up and fails to realize that the behavior of current staff shows we have hit or have passed peak AI. Moores Law is dead and it isn't going to come through and make AI any more affordable. Look at the latest GPU's: IPC is flat. And no one is charging enough to pay for running (bandwidth, power) of the computer that is be…
> The first team to deliver a model that can run on a GPU alongside a game, so that there is never an "I took an arrow to the knee" meme again is going to make a LOT of money.
"Local Model Augmentation", a sort of standardized local MCP that serves as a layer between a model and a traditional app like a game client. Neat :3
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#5> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns The fact that the author brings this up and fails to realize that the behavior of current staff shows we have hit or have passed peak AI. Moores Law is dead and it isn't going to come through and make AI any more affordable. Look at the latest GPU's: IPC is flat. And no one is charging enough to pay for running (bandwidth, power) of the computer that is be…
> the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact.
Plenty out there who want authors like this believing it enough to write it
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#6> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns The fact that the author brings this up and fails to realize that the behavior of current staff shows we have hit or have passed peak AI. Moores Law is dead and it isn't going to come through and make AI any more affordable. Look at the latest GPU's: IPC is flat. And no one is charging enough to pay for running (bandwidth, power) of the computer that is be…
> The first team to deliver a model that can run on a GPU alongside a game, so that there is never an "I took an arrow to the knee" meme again is going to make a LOT of money.
this feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how video game dialogue writing works. it's actually an important that a player understand when the mission-critical dialogue is complete. While the specifics of a line becoming a meme may seem undesirable, it's far better that a player hears a line they know means "i have nothing to say" 100 times than generating ai slop every time the player passes a guard.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#7> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns The fact that the author brings this up and fails to realize that the behavior of current staff shows we have hit or have passed peak AI. Moores Law is dead and it isn't going to come through and make AI any more affordable. Look at the latest GPU's: IPC is flat. And no one is charging enough to pay for running (bandwidth, power) of the computer that is be…
> the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact. Plenty out there who want authors like this believing it enough to write it
Obviously the specifics are going to depend on exactly how a team pegs story points, but if an average engineer delivers 10 story points during a two week sprint, then that would mean that a 1000x engineer would deliver 10000 story points, correct? I don't see how someone can actually believe that.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#8> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns The fact that the author brings this up and fails to realize that the behavior of current staff shows we have hit or have passed peak AI. Moores Law is dead and it isn't going to come through and make AI any more affordable. Look at the latest GPU's: IPC is flat. And no one is charging enough to pay for running (bandwidth, power) of the computer that is be…
> The first team to deliver a model that can run on a GPU alongside a game, so that there is never an "I took an arrow to the knee" meme again is going to make a LOT of money. this feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how video game dialogue writing works. it's actually an important that a player understand when the mission-critical dialogue is complete. While the specifics of a line becoming a meme may seem…
> this feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how video game dialogue writing works.
Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft.
There are plenty of games where the whole story is driven by cut scenes.
There are plenty of games that shove your quests into their journal/pip boy to let you know how to drive game play.
Dont get me wrong, I loved Zork back in the day (and still do) but we have evolved past that and the tools to move us further could be there.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact. Plenty out there who want authors like this believing it enough to write it
Obviously the specifics are going to depend on exactly how a team pegs story points, but if an average engineer delivers 10 story points during a two week sprint, then that would mean that a 1000x engineer would deliver 10000 story points, correct? I don't see how someone can actually believe that.
1000x revenue not 1000x developer productivity is possible sometimes. There are lots of jobs where developers also decide on the roadmap and requirements along with the execution instead of just being ticket monkey and a good idea executed well could easily be worth 1000x changing button colours and adding pagination to an API
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact. Plenty out there who want authors like this believing it enough to write it
Obviously the specifics are going to depend on exactly how a team pegs story points, but if an average engineer delivers 10 story points during a two week sprint, then that would mean that a 1000x engineer would deliver 10000 story points, correct? I don't see how someone can actually believe that.
impact != story points