Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars • Hacker News Board

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#161

Post by adventured » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

emsign wrote: post #150

hlynurd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What bubble? If anything it's 10x too small for the value it'll provide over the next century.

The same exact premise was proclaimed about the Internet circa 1999-2003 (boom and bust). Then the entire global economy and nearly all electronic communication was rebuilt on top of the Internet.

For the coming century AI is more important than the Internet.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#162

Post by beng-nl » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

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 feel left out too, friend

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#163

Post by ta1243 » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #152

blitzar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That was before pandemic inflation and rampant money printing to bolster the fake numbers.

Apple market cap

Jan 2010: 174b

Jan 2020: 1400b (23% growth per year)

Today: 3200b (18% growth per year)

The S&P as a whole grew about 12% a year from 2010 to 2020, and 12.5% a year from 2020 to today

Meanwhile the median wage from 2010-2019 grew 3% a year, from 2019-2023 7% a year

Seems whatever happened in 2020 was good for workers, in that they aren't falling behind owners as much as they were.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#164

Post by ta1243 » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

runlaszlorun wrote: post #77

> The French had a uniquely high Gini coefficient before the Revolution. I feel like this one line captures the elephant in the room that the author is trying hard to convince himself isn't there...

French aristocrats didn't have trillion dollar industries brainwashing the population to be on their side, nor did they have AI powered armies to defend them when the people rose up.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#165

Post by renewiltord » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

dmbche wrote: post #153

renewiltord wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, modern English uses “this is immoral” to mean “I don’t like this”. It’s a language quirk. It’s good that you’re asking the whys to get somewhere but I might as well just get to it. “Immoral”, “should not exist”, “late-stage capitalism” are tribal affiliation chants intended to mark one’s identity. E.g. I go to the Emirates and sing “We’re Arrrrrsenal! We’re by far the greatest time the world has ever seen…

Fairly cynicial aren't we?

What an immoral comment.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#166

Post by jldugger » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

> But why didn’t pricing for top talent run up sooner?

Because before ChatGPT, nobody on a board of directors saw the possibility. Now, it's all they can think about.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#167

Post by bluefirebrand » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #130

bluefirebrand wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think its as simple as calling them immoral. Rather the immorality comes on them being poorly regulated I think if behavior needs to be regulated by government in order to be moral, then it's immoral behavior by default The regulation doesn't make it moral, the regulation only limits the damage by limiting how immoral you're allowed to be

The regulation is what makes it worth while for people to invent/write. Patents/copyrights have been a net benefit for society with a smaller negative downside.

I don't see how this disagrees with what I said

Patents and copyrights don't cause people to create things

They prevent people from stealing things that other people created

The immoral behaviour being regulated is the IP theft not the IP creation

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#168

Post by v5v3 » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:53 PM UTC

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…

What does M2 expansion mean?

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#169

Post by lukas099 » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

I think it's unfortunate that the term "capitalism" has been captured by the left to mean the bad kind of capitalism, where regulation is only used as a moat for the established players. Capitalism as a whole is the least bad economic system for prosperity, but the least bad version of capitalism is something like the Nordic model, with good taxation and redistribution policies and consumer protections. But the term itself is poisoned, at least in U.S. politics, to where social democrat/liberal capitalists like Bernie call themselves socialists instead.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#170

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

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?

[deleted]