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Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

blog.johnluttig.com

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Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#141

Post by LightBug1 »

pj_mukh wrote: post #22
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!"

Optimistic take. What's the say the application layer won't be dominated by the big players as they hoover up anything remotely promising. Leaving the crumbs on the mini-platform .. ala Apple App Store ...

Sorry, I'm pessimistic as recent experience is one of hyper concentration of ideas, capital, talent, everything.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#142

Post by thedevilslawyer »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #140
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inheritance is about coming into the world unequal.

If that's the problem, we also need to ban society - cause one can be more prosperous than other, and it disadvantages those born into the latter.

That's like your problem man. I'm not against society.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#143

Post by BurningFrog »

TFYS wrote: post #44
systemvoltage wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wealth is power. Power decides what we use our collective time and resources on. The more concentrated power is, the less we use that time and resources on things that improves the life of the average person, and more on things that matter to the few with wealth.

By far the biggest concentration of power is the US federal government.

Any power centers outside that decentralizes power.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#144

Post by BurningFrog »

parpfish wrote: post #115
TrackerFF wrote: post #51

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 peopl…

With all these mega-offers going out, I object when people saying that they’re paying for “talent”. These AI folks are good, but not orders of magnitude better than engineers and researchers already working in tech or academia. Lots of folks are capable of building an AI system, the reason they haven’t is that they haven’t been in a situation where they have the time/money/freedom to do it. These mega offers aren’t a…

I would call it "skill".

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#145

Post by joshmarlow »

Weryj wrote: post #86
hlynurd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AI will change the balance of power removing a vital counter balance against the negatives of capitalism. It will take the power away from the workers, such that there will be no power left for people to make demands. We can hope it’ll be positive, but we aren’t even involved in its creation and the incentives are there to ensure it isn’t.

I agree AI can change the balance of power but I think it's more nuanced.

When expertise is commoditized, it becomes cheap; that reduces payroll and operational costs - which reduces the value of VC investment and thus the power of pre-existing wealth.

If AI means I can compete with fewer resources, then that's an equalizing dynamic isn't it?

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#147

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

If AI is important, speeding up development of it is good.

> We can’t train more people?

Of course people are being trained at Universities. Outside of The Matrix, it takes a few years for that to complete.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#148

Post by solatic »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #117
graeme wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. University enrolment is actually set to sharply decline. It's called the Demographic Cliff: https://www.highereddive.com/news/demographic-cliff-colleges...

Off topic, but: Supply and demand says that, if university enrollment drops sharply, the price of a university education should go down. That sounds like good news to me.

University enrollment doesn't drop sharply evenly across all universities. The lowest-desirability universities will go bust while the Ivy League continues to have hyper-competitive admissions and yearly tuition increases that outpace inflation.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#150

Post by emsign »

hlynurd wrote: post #69
blitzar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 10x from 400 billion to 4 trillion in a decade didnt come from 2% inflation. It didnt come from nowhwere, or from Silicon Valleys exceptionalism - It came from changing the value of money, labour and resources. It came from everyday people, deficits and borrowing from the next 10 generations of children.

Seems like this is about something other than LLMs?

It is about LLMs because it's the trillions being sunk into this bubble instead of more important issues like climate crisis and a pressing need to address the transformation of the energy sector or tackling the wealth inequality gap. These are all causing real world osues that are much bigger than beating (or rather faking to beat) some LLM benchmarks to impress investor.
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