Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does M2 expansion mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply I.e. "printing money"
Thank you
Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
181–190 of 256 posts
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#182“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…
Fwiw universities are producing less talent. They have been getting hammered with budget shortfalls thanks to Trump cutting research funding and this manifests into programs accepting fewer students and professors being able to fund fewer students.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#183I find the current VC/billionaire strategy a bit odd and suboptimal. If we consider the current search for AGI as something like a multi-armed bandit seeking to identify “valuable researchers”, the industry is way over-indexing on the exploitation side of the exploitation/exploration trade-off. If I had billions to throw around, instead of siphoning large amounts of it to a relatively small number of people, I would…
> If I had billions to throw around, instead of siphoning large amounts of it to a relatively small number of people, I would instead attempt to incubate new ideas across a very large base of generally smart people across interdisciplinary backgrounds.
I had an interesting conversation with an investor around the power vs knowledge dynamic in the VC world and after a few hours we'd basically reinvented higher education with reverse tuition. Defining a general interest or loose problem space and then throwing money over a wall to individuals excited about exploring the area seems wasteful until you look at the scale of failed projects.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Speed of development of something important isn't necessarily good. Humans are bad at absorbing a lot of change at once and it takes time to recognize and mitigate second-order effects. There's plenty of benefit to the systems that disruptors operate within (society) to not moving as fast as possible... of course since our economic systems don't factor in externalities, we've instead turned all of society into a comm…
People said the same thing about the printing press. When you look across human history it's tough to make a moral case that slowing down technology development was ever a net positive. We can't reliably predict or prevent the problems anyway and it's pointless to even try. Just move forward and deal with the actual problems (which are usually different from the expected problems) as they arise.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speed of development of something important isn't necessarily good. Humans are bad at absorbing a lot of change at once and it takes time to recognize and mitigate second-order effects. There's plenty of benefit to the systems that disruptors operate within (society) to not moving as fast as possible... of course since our economic systems don't factor in externalities, we've instead turned all of society into a comm…
People said the same thing about the printing press. When you look across human history it's tough to make a moral case that slowing down technology development was ever a net positive. We can't reliably predict or prevent the problems anyway and it's pointless to even try. Just move forward and deal with the actual problems (which are usually different from the expected problems) as they arise.
I don’t really disagree with you. I think there really is no stopping progress. For better or worse, it’s happening and there ain’t no slowing down.
But, I wish people would shut up about the printing press in these discussions already. AI disrupting literally everyone’s job at the same time is not the same as a printing technology disrupting the very niche profession of scribe. Or electric lamps putting some lamp lighters out of work.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is just M2 expansion and wealth concentration. I just want to point that there's no scientific law that says those two must move together. A government very often needs to print money, and it's important to keep in mind that there's no physical requirement that this money immediately must go to rich people. A government can decide to send it to poor people exactly just as easily as to rich. All the laws forbid…
All true of course, with a clarification: even if all the newly printed money is put in the hands of the poor, the resultant inflation raises the prices of hard assets which are overwhelmingly held by the rich (fueling wealth inequality)
You can say that they fail to dilute the value of hard assets, yes. So they don't really "punish" the extra-rich. But they only inflate prices by the amount of money you print, you can't make the poor poorer by giving them money.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Why people here brandish Communism when someone critics Capitalism? It’s like we’re still in the coldwar. Those two views have many sub-categories and there’s others in-between and on the sides. Just a few in the last decades: - socio-democratic countries are the norm in Europe, namely Norway, Denmark and Sweden. - Ordoliberalism: Germany, Switzerland - cooperative economics: Japan, Spain - market socialism: China, h…
What a weird comment, so disconnected from reality. Norway is fully capitalist with income inequality similar to the USA. China, despite being nominally run by communists, is actually a fascist dictatorship. And "Ubuntu" isn't a real thing: South Africa is a failed state run by kleptocrats who can't even keep the lights on.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#188“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 you're targetting $200M, then I guess each round is to hire one or two engineers for one year lol
I'm curious if you're one of these AI engineers getting 100m, do you quibble over the health insurance? I mean at that point you can fully fund any operation you need and whatever long term care you need for 50 years easily.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#189Also, 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…
> These mega offers aren’t about “talent”, they are about “experience”
I'm sorry, but what's the specific distinction? When the Lakers pay Lebron $54MM per season, is that for his innate talent, or is it for the 20k hours he's spent perfecting his game?
This is a lot of hand-wringing over nothing. We've seen people paid outrageous sums of money for throwing a ball for DECADES without any complaints, but the moment a filthy computer nerd is paid the same money to build models, it's pitchforks time.
The only thing wrong with the current compensation kerfuffle is that it happened so late. People like Einstein, Von Neumann, Maxwell, Borlaug, etc should have been compensated like sportsball stars, as well.
Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
oh, the real world changes will be nuanced.
but they'll start happening because of the new incentive.