Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Doom Justifies the Valuation

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 161 posts

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#21

Post by scarmig »

jrflowers wrote: post #8
panarky wrote: post #3

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats. But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same ti…

I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”

There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored.

However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#22

Post by sublinear »

panarky wrote: post #3

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats. But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same ti…

> Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful... It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.

I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid.

LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea.

What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#23

Post by dodu_ »

panarky wrote: post #3

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats. But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same ti…

[dead]

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#24

Post by prasadjoglekar »

ajyoon wrote: post #18

I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.

Setting up for the eventual bailout. Remember - "we can't let banks fail or it'll be a depression"?

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#25

Post by jrflowers »

bigyabai wrote: post #12
jrflowers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”

"I cannot be contradicted because I can hold conflicting viewpoints" was Chomsky's bit, HN can only take credit for imitating it.

“Dario Amodei doesn’t seem like he can tell the future” - Simple. Pedestrian. The roughshod cogitation of a country oaf.

“Maybe he can” - Complex. Divine, possibly? A breathtaking filigree of nuance, like an Alex Grey painting of conceptual allemande.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#26

Post by _aavaa_ »

ajyoon wrote: post #18

I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.

*why would they warn if it they didn’t believe it.

2 words: regulatory capture.

Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).

Bad open weight model (can’t let people escape the subscription model).

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#27

Post by coolThingsFirst »

drc500free wrote: post #14
lukeify wrote: post #7

I stopped taking this guy seriously after he proposed "just" digging canals to bring desalinated ocean water into the U.S. desert.

Even in this article, he claims COVID wasn’t a big deal because, essentially, only a million people died in the US instead of everyone. No one ever claimed 100% mortality.

Yet the measures taken far exceeded the damage than if we had let the virus take its course.

The problem wasn't the mortality rate, it's the fact that the media can cleverly turn something in a huge deal by talking endlessly about it. During COVID, there was no other news except the virus on news for 24/7.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#28

Post by coolThingsFirst »

_23sd wrote: post #16

What's the evidence that the doom narrative is connected to valuations? It seems more like a marketing/recruiting strategy. As the post points out, institutional investors generally think the idea of mass unemployment is BS, and they are investing accordingly.

Dumb thing to ask tbh.

Dangerous new tech with military applications sounds harder to ignore than AI that spits out text.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#29

Post by scarmig »

dodu_ wrote: post #23
panarky wrote: post #3

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats. But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same ti…

[dead]

Regardless of whether you believe in doom or not, it's this kind of wild, willful misunderstanding that makes people roll their eyes and dismiss you. Yes, people at Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter!) really, genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#30

Post by chongli »

ajyoon wrote: post #18

I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.

Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?

The whole point of the article is to answer this question, and here's the answer:

Because all the AI doom fear-mongering is driving sky-high valuations. The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.

Post reply on HN