211–220 of 506 posts
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> My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action" lol, that works well until a big issue occurs in production
That assume big issue don't occur in production otherwise, with everything having gone through 5 layer of approvals.
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One of the eternal struggles of BigCo is there are structural incentives to make organizations big and slow. This is basically a bureaucratic law of nature. It's often possible to get promoted by leading "large efforts" where large is defined more or less by headcount. So if a hot new org has unlimited HC budget all the incentives push managers to complicate things as much as possible to create justification for more…
Pournelle's law of bureaucracy. Any sufficiently large organization will have two kinds of people: those devoted to the org's goals, and those devoted to the bureaucracy itself, and if you don't stop it the second group will take control to the point that bureaucracy itself becomes the goal secondary to all others. Self preservation takes over at that point, and the bureaucratic org starts prioritizing its own surviv…
The bureaucracy crew will win, they are playing the real game, everybody else is wasting effort on doing things like engineering.
The process is inevitable, but whatever. It is just part of our society, companies age and die. Sometimes they course correct temporarily but nothing is permanent.
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sometimes they manage to meld it into one goal, because money is power.
> sometimes they manage to meld it into one goal, because money is power. Money is a measure of power, but it is not in fact power.
See https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma
or the fact that John D. Rockefeller was furious that Standard Oil got split up despite the stock going up and making him much richer.
It's not so clear what motivates the very rich. If I doubled my income I might go on a really fancy vacation and get that Olympus 4/3 body I've been looking at and the fast 70-300mm lens for my Sony, etc. If Elon Musk changes his income it won't affect his lifestyle. As the leader of a corporation you're supposed to behave as if your utility function of money was linear because that represents your shareholders but a person like Musk might be very happy to spend $40B to advance his power and/or feeling of power.
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sometimes they manage to meld it into one goal, because money is power.
> sometimes they manage to meld it into one goal, because money is power. Money is a measure of power, but it is not in fact power.
Because the AI works so well, or because it doesn't? > ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios. That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.
"Each person will be more load-bearing" "We want to cut costs and increase the burden on the remaining high-performers"
From a quick online search: - OpenAI's mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. - Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. - Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible. Lets just take these three companies, and their self-defined mission…
Why are you asking questions about their PR department coordinated "Company missions"? Let me summarise their real missions: 1. Power and money 2. Power and money 3. Power and money How does AI help them make money and gain more power? I can give you a few ways...
The questions in the original comment were really about the "how", and are still worth considering.
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I just assume they over hired. Too much hype for AI. Everyone wants to build the framework people use for AI nobody wants to build the actual tools that make AI useful.
They’ve done this before with their metaverse stuff. You hire a bunch, don’t see progress, let go of people in projects you want to shut down and then hire people in projects you want to try out. Why not just move people around you may ask? Possibly: different skill requirements More likely: people in charge change, and they usually want “their people” around Most definitely: the people being let go were hired when s…
But it is just a little toy, Facebook is looking for their next billion dollar idea; that’s not it.
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I mean, it's a path to "profitability", isn't it?
Hardly, they are burning money with TikSlop, they don't even know how to monetize it, just YOLO'd the product to keep investors interested. Even the porn industry can't seem to monetize AI, so I doubt OpenAI who knows jack shit about this space will be able to. Fact is generative AI is stupidly expensive to run, and I can't see mass adoption at subscription prices that actually allow them to break even. I'm sure folk…
The previous couple of crops of smart people grew up in a world that could still easily be improved, and they set about doing just that. The current crop of smart people grew up in a world with a very large number of people and they want a bigger slice of it. There are only a couple of solutions to that and it's pretty clear to me which way they've picked.
They don't need to 'keep the economy running' for that much longer to get their way.