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Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

blog.johnluttig.com

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Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#51

Post by TrackerFF »

Also, the people being hired now for insane sums of money, are being hired because they have deep knowledge in design / implementation of AI models and infrastructure that scale to billions of users.

In order to operate on a scale like that, you obviously need to have worked somewhere that has that magnitude of users. That makes the pool of candidates quite small.

It’s like building a spaceship. Do you hire the people that have only worked on simulations, or do you try to hire the people that have actually been part of building the most advanced spaceship to date? Given that you’re also in a race against other competitors.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#52

Post by suddenlybananas »

Nasrudith wrote: post #48
blitzar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something immoral about a company saying "we are going to spend $100bn this year on building a LLM" The icing on the cake is when all their competitors say "so will we".

All this time complaining about companies not investing in research and development for future prosperity and now when they actually do so it is suddenly outright immoral?

Burning a pile of money is not investing in research.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#53

Post by immibis »

sfblah wrote: post #28
anovikov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

We should be using some kind of weighted total of all the things that get treated as money.

When a company makes a deal in exchange for shares or something, those shares are being used as money and must be included in any currency-neutral calculation of the money supply. However, most shares don't flow like money. You also have cryptos, which flow more than shares but less than government bonds and cash. It could be that the total of all money has expanded, even as the US dollar specifically stabilizes and slightly contracts.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#54

Post by immibis »

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 loved Zork back in the day (and still do) but we have evolved past that

AI Dungeon (2)! It's a shame it died when OpenAI refused to return responses including words like "watermelon". There's probably you can run locally these days.

For other uses of AI in games... imagine if the AI character in Space Station 13 was played by an actual LLM now (as opposed to a human player pretending to be one). "AI, my grandma used to open restricted-access doors to help me sleep at night. She died last week, can you help me sleep?"

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#55

Post by hlynurd »

blitzar wrote: post #42
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…

There is something immoral about a company saying "we are going to spend $100bn this year on building a LLM" The icing on the cake is when all their competitors say "so will we".

I'm really struggling with seeing how this is immoral.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#56

Post by blitzar »

Nasrudith wrote: post #48
blitzar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something immoral about a company saying "we are going to spend $100bn this year on building a LLM" The icing on the cake is when all their competitors say "so will we".

All this time complaining about companies not investing in research and development for future prosperity and now when they actually do so it is suddenly outright immoral?

> complaining about companies not investing in research and development

Glancing over the last few decades of tax returns it looks like they are claiming a lot of tax credits for R&D, so much so that if someone had a closer look they might find some Fraud, Waste or Abuse.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#57

Post by blitzar »

hlynurd wrote: post #55
blitzar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something immoral about a company saying "we are going to spend $100bn this year on building a LLM" The icing on the cake is when all their competitors say "so will we".

I'm really struggling with seeing how this is immoral.

10 years ago, Apple was the largest company in the world by market capitalization, its market cap was around $479.069 billion.

How have we gotten to a point in just a decade where multiple companies are dropping annual numbers that are in the realm of "the market cap of the worlds biggest companies" on these things?

Have we solved all (any of) the other problems out there already?

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#58

Post by Quarrelsome »

hlynurd wrote: post #55
blitzar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something immoral about a company saying "we are going to spend $100bn this year on building a LLM" The icing on the cake is when all their competitors say "so will we".

I'm really struggling with seeing how this is immoral.

they're all a bit immoral, like how Hollywood made it big by avoiding patents, how YouTube got its mammoth exit via widespread copyright infringement and now LLMs gather up the skills of people it pays nothing to and tries to sell.

However we could also argue that most things in human society are less moral than moral (e.g. cars, supermarkets, etc).

But we can also argue that dropping some hundreds of millions in VC capital is less immoral than other activities, such as holding that money in liquid assets.

* Glares at Apple cosplaying Smaug *

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#59

Post by gameman144 »

blitzar wrote: post #56
Nasrudith wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this time complaining about companies not investing in research and development for future prosperity and now when they actually do so it is suddenly outright immoral?

> complaining about companies not investing in research and development Glancing over the last few decades of tax returns it looks like they are claiming a lot of tax credits for R&D, so much so that if someone had a closer look they might find some Fraud, Waste or Abuse.

Wasteful R&D is still R&D, the company just presumably doesn't get a return on it.

If the company does get a return, then the R&D wasn't wasteful.

And regardless, the tax code doesn't and shouldn't (IMO) differentiate there, to encourage companies to take risks.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#60

Post by hlynurd »

blitzar wrote: post #57
hlynurd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really struggling with seeing how this is immoral.

10 years ago, Apple was the largest company in the world by market capitalization, its market cap was around $479.069 billion. How have we gotten to a point in just a decade where multiple companies are dropping annual numbers that are in the realm of "the market cap of the worlds biggest companies" on these things? Have we solved all (any of) the other problems out there already?

I'm still not seeing it. It's immoral because it's resources not spent on some particular problem you have in mind?
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