181–190 of 238 posts
The question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending? It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance…
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Whatsapp provides tremendous utility. I remember paying far more “economic tax” before Whatsapp to communicate, with basically anyone in the world. Facebook Marketplace also provides me with quite a bit utility.
What "economic tax" was imposed by the Web, email, Usenet, and forums?
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The problem with this is people investing their time/expertise/money/energy into the common good and then have a small number of people ruining the benefit for their own ends, knocks the well-meaning out of the most positive people. The common good only works well when everyone wants the common good.
Ah, then my second wish will be for everyone to want the common good.
People have very different, often contradictory opinions what the "common good" is.
I would even claim that this question is a special case of the millennia-old philosophical problem of defining what "good" actually means (i.e. defining ethics), which has resulted in myriads of different opinions:
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The consequences are different this time because why? Seems like an even bigger opportunity to inject ads, influence thought, and scrape user information.
The potential upside in positives is actually there. New cures, personalized really good medicine, breakthroughs in every scientific field, etc. The people are there because they are betting on AGI, not chatbots that make software engineering go faster.
Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs a…
> the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it This is untrue. Spend is about 2% of GDP.
Look, we have 37 other YC companies paying for our product it's so popular and successful. Hits different if you view it as a single company, imagine AT&T promoting their internal customer service software, used by 37 divisions of AT&T it must be good!
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> too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. Honest question: where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Nearly all suitable-looking, "smarter" ideas that come to my mind will bring less revenue/profit in expectation than, for example, letting them maximize ad impressions. I of course wish we lived in a "more intelligent" world…
> where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Anywhere else. Ads are a net negative to society and provide no value. ANY activity outside of pushing ads is a better contribution to society as a whole.
Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs a…
I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. We are still dealing with the consequences…
When there's nothing good being invested in, "the smartest people" are simply underutilized. They do things that they think are good instead.
"The smartest people" have never sought maximum capital accumulation, and have not historically been driven by "highest wages" jobs.
The computer industry formed out of WW2 because a bunch of smart people ran into each other and did what they thought was really cool and had realized was suddenly possible. Von Neuman literally met one of the other guys and discussed computers as a theory at a train station and that meeting was influential on the future industry. They did not try to make billions of dollars. They had fairly average jobs that paid average. Often working for the government itself.
"The smartest people" did not work on targeting ads at people, and while some of them may have been involved with early transformer work, they certainly would be disillusioned with LLMs by now and would not be working at companies burning trillions on them.
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Not to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are. Edit: a…
You can, right now, find out how to synthesize VX or sarin, or how to weaponize anthrax. You can and have been able to acquire this knowledge without the use of AI. Knowledge is not the obstacle to proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. It's hard to set up the infrastructure. See Aum Shinrikyo.
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If I had one wish, it would be to make 'common good' more incentivizing than 'maximize revenue/profit' but sadly it's not the world we live in.
The problem with this is people investing their time/expertise/money/energy into the common good and then have a small number of people ruining the benefit for their own ends, knocks the well-meaning out of the most positive people. The common good only works well when everyone wants the common good.
For example, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work illuminating design principles illustrated by long enduring common pool resource institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#%22Design_princi...