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Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

blog.johnluttig.com

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Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#21

Post by terminalshort »

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.

[dead]

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#22

Post by pj_mukh »

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…

I think the author should've clarified that this is purely a conversation about the platform plays. There will be 100's of thousands of companies on the application layer, and mini-platform plays that will have your run-of-the-mill new grad or 1x engineer.

Everything else is just executives doing a bit of dance for their investors ala "We won't need employees anymore!"

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#23

Post by Xcelerate »

I find the current VC/billionaire strategy a bit odd and suboptimal. If we consider the current search for AGI as something like a multi-armed bandit seeking to identify “valuable researchers”, the industry is way over-indexing on the exploitation side of the exploitation/exploration trade-off.

If I had billions to throw around, instead of siphoning large amounts of it to a relatively small number of people, I would instead attempt to incubate new ideas across a very large base of generally smart people across interdisciplinary backgrounds. Give anyone who shows genuine interest some amount of compute resources to test their ideas in exchange for X% of the payoff should their approach lead to some step function improvement in capability. The current “AI talent war” is very different than sports, because unlike a star tennis player, it’s not clear at all whose novel approach to machine learning is ultimately going to pay off the most.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#24

Post by mlsu »

The full bodied palate of this AI market mirrors the sharp nose of 2023 AI doomerism.

The argument goes: if AI is going to destroy humanity, even if that is a 0.001% chance, we should all totally re-wire society to prevent that from happening, because the _potential_ risk is so huge.

Same goes with these AI companies. What they are shooting for, is to replace white collar workers completely. Every single white collar employee, with their expensive MacBooks, great healthcare and PTO, and lax 9-5 schedule, is to be eliminated completely. IF this is to happen, even if it's a 0.001% chance, we should totally re-wire capital markets, because the _potential reward_ is so huge.

And indeed, this idea is so strongly held (especially in silicon valley) that we see these insanely frothy valuations and billion dollar deals in what should be a down market (tremendous macro uncertainty, high interest rates, etc).

AI doomerism seemed to lack finish, though. Anyone remember Eliezer Yudkowsky? Haven't heard from him in a while.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#25

Post by ngruhn »

> AI catch-up investment has gone parabolic, initially towards GPUs and mega training runs. As some labs learned that GPUs alone don't guarantee good models, the capital cannon is shifting towards talent.

So, no more bitter lesson?

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#26

Post by kilpikaarna »

woah wrote: post #19
harimau777 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They know how to train the models because they were part of a team that did it once at a competitor already. They bring with them very domain specific knowledge and experience. It's not something you can learn at college or hacking away in your spare time.

Fair enough, they're probably worth the money it takes to poach them. But trying to stretch the (arguably already tenous) "10x engineer" model to explain why is just ridiculous.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#27

Post by entropi »

Xcelerate wrote: post #23

I find the current VC/billionaire strategy a bit odd and suboptimal. If we consider the current search for AGI as something like a multi-armed bandit seeking to identify “valuable researchers”, the industry is way over-indexing on the exploitation side of the exploitation/exploration trade-off. If I had billions to throw around, instead of siphoning large amounts of it to a relatively small number of people, I would…

Agreed, and I suspect the explanation is that these plays are done not to search for a true AGI, but to drive up hype (and 'the line').

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#28

Post by sfblah »

anovikov wrote: post #16
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.

M2 is the wrong statistic for sure, but the thrust of GP's comment is accurate, IMO. Fed intervention has not remotely been removed from the economy. The "big beautiful bill" probably just amounts to another round of it (fiscal excess will lead to a crisis which will force a monetary bailout).

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#29

Post by ijidak »

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 wonder at what point this becomes like guaranteed salaries in sports, like prominent NBA players, where you work hard to get the salary. And then once you've made it, you are basically done, and it's hard to get up and motivate yourself. You've got acolytes and groupies distracting you, you're flush with cash without ever having really shipped anything or made any money. You're busy giving TED talks...

At that point, are you the 18-year-old phenom who got the big payday and sort of went downhill from there?

I imagine the biggest winners will be the ones who were doubted, not believed in, and had to fight to build real, profitable companies that become the next trillion-dollar companies.

Not that it would be bad to be Mark Cuban, but Mark Cuban is not Jeff Bezos.

And for posterity, I respect Mark Cuban. It's just that his exit came at a time when he was fortunate, as he got his money without having to go all the way through to the end.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#30

Post by systemvoltage »

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…

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