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Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

blog.johnluttig.com

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Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#11

Post by bix6 »

“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!”

Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there.

We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff.

Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega VC time!! Adios early stage, we’re doing $200M Series Seed pre revenue! Mission aligned! Giga power law!

This is just M2 expansion and wealth concentration. Plus a total disregard for 99% of employees. The 1000000x engineer can just do everyone else’s job and the gigachad VCs will back them from seed to exit (who even exits anymore, just hyper scale your way to Google a la Windsurf)!

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#12

Post by Kapura »

zer00eyz wrote: post #8
Kapura wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 to…

I am not sure what point you're trying to make here; none of the games you mentioned contain the famous "arrow to the knee" line.

Dwarf Fortress, in fact, shows just how much is possible by committing to deep systemic synthesis. Without souped-up chatbots Dwarf Fortress creates emergent stories about cats who tread in beer and cause the downfall of a fortress, or allow players to define their own objectives and solutions, like flooding a valley full of murderous elephants with lava.

My original point is that papering over important affordances with AI slop may actually work against the goals of the game. If they were good and fun, there is no reason a company like Microsoft couldn't have added the technology to Starfield.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#13

Post by goopypoop »

zer00eyz wrote: post #8
Kapura wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 to…

procedurally generated content is the most onanistic form of art

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#14

Post by ehnto »

goopypoop wrote: post #13
zer00eyz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 to…

procedurally generated content is the most onanistic form of art

It is no coincidence that the most popular procedurally generated games feature highly systemic gameplay.

These are systems sandboxes, places for players to explore a world and build their own stories. There are not many examples of popular games where the story is heavily procedural, and I think the reason is obvious. Players notice the pattern very quickly and get bored.

Stories are entertainment and are meant to entertain you, but systemic games are different, they are designed for you to entertain yourself with your own creativity. The proc gen just helps paint the background.

I think it's important to look at procedural generation in games through that lens, otherwise you're likely criticising proc gen for something it's not really used for that much. Proc gen content is rarely the cornerstone of a game.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#15

Post by seanp2k2 »

harimau777 wrote: post #7
ythiscoyness wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

Ladies and gentlemen, the problem with The Valley in 2025.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#16

Post by anovikov »

bix6 wrote: post #11

“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!” Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there. We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega…

Ironically, there's no M2 expansion going on since Covid days and M2 to GDP is back to what it was pre-Covid and overall didn't even increase much at all even since GFC. It's only 1.5x of what it was at the bottom in 1997 when cost of capital was much higher than today. I think this concern is misplaced.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#17

Post by alganet »

> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns, why shouldn’t the same apply to talent? Our natural egalitarian bias makes this unpalatable to accept, but the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obMRztklqU

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#18

Post by danieltanfh95 »

These "talent wars" are overblown and a result of money having nowhere else to go. People are banking on AI and robotics for human progress to take off and that's just a result of all other ventures fizzling out with this left for capital to migrate to.

If you talked to any of these folks worth billions they arent particularly smart, their ideas not really interesting. it took us a few years to go from gpt-3 to deepseek v3 and then another few years to go from sonnet 4 to kimi k2, both being open source models on way lower funding. This hints at a deeper problem than what "hypercapitalism" suggests. In fact, it suggests that capital distribution as of its current state is highly inefficient and we are simply funding the wrong people.

Smart AI talent aren't going to out there constantly trying to get funding or the best deals. They would want to work. Capital is getting too used to not doing the ground work to seek them out. Capital needs to be more tech savvy.

VCs and corporate development teams don't actually understand the technology deeply enough to identify who's doing the important work.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#19

Post by woah »

harimau777 wrote: post #7
ythiscoyness wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

These companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to train these models and (hope to) make billions from them. The researchers are the people who know how to do it. These aren't guys cranking out React buttons.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#20

Post by the_precipitate »

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #18

These "talent wars" are overblown and a result of money having nowhere else to go. People are banking on AI and robotics for human progress to take off and that's just a result of all other ventures fizzling out with this left for capital to migrate to. If you talked to any of these folks worth billions they arent particularly smart, their ideas not really interesting. it took us a few years to go from gpt-3 to deeps…

I think one of the main issue is that the 10x or 100x talents in AI have not yet really show their value yet. None of these AI companies are making any money, and they are valued over highly successful and profitable companies out there because of their "potentials". ARR is nothing if you sell goods valued at 1 dollar for 90 cents.
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