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Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

blog.johnluttig.com

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Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#211

Post by Quarrelsome »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #116
Quarrelsome wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

however they do result in flows of capitals feeding into otherwise unfundable enterprise like R&D; science and engineering, or culture; writing, music, art. Where's the ROI if you invest millions into R&D and your competitor invests $0 and can then just reproduce your works with their logo ontop of yours? To sack off IP and copyright would significantly narrow innovation and result in many artists, scientists and eng…

> 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

> I think if behavior needs to be regulated by government in order to be moral, then it's immoral behavior by default

Regulation is creating rules for businesses to run within. This goes back to rule of law. You can't tell a group of children to "behave" and walk away and expect good results and then call the children "bad" when they fail to behave.

Rather, you must give them systems to understand, to channel their energy, productively, in a way that matches the desires of the parent (government) and their strategies. Then you have to meaningfully punish those who intentionally break the rules in order to give those behaving the knowledge that they have chosen the good path and they'll be rewarded for it.

Free markets are not about "morality"/"immortality", its about harnessing an existing energy to make a self-sustaining system. A system a state is less good/interested at keeping going or unable to act quickly enough to move in. But part of creating that system is putting in guard rails to prevent the worst sort of crashes.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#212

Post by lukas099 »

jeeyoungk wrote: post #172
lukas099 wrote: post #169

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…

But the term itself was created and captured by the left from the beginning; Proudhon first used it; Marx popularized it; so in the history of terminologies it always had the meaning that we associate with it. I like the term "market economy" or "commercial society" more, because it does capture more of what's happening on the market and the society.

I didn't know that, thanks.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#213

Post by Quarrelsome »

hellojesus wrote: post #128
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're taking a nuanced view of fundamental thing and completely missing the point. Copyright is bad like inheritance is bad. Arguing about good and bad industrialists is missing the point.

> Copyright is bad like inheritance is bad. How is inheritance bad? Imo, estate taxes are more immoral. Why should the state be allowed a cut of my private assets? Gift taxes are also immoral. Why should I have to pay taxes for giving away assets?

> Imo, estate taxes are more immoral. Why should the state be allowed a cut of my private assets?

To prevent family dynasties from building more and more economic power over time and threatening the state in the future due to the forces of compound interest. To be fair, most family dynasties don't do this, but others can wreck exceptional havoc just by wanting to, due to the generational power they've amassed. The damage they can do is further accelarated by them lacking understanding of how people without generational wealth live.

We already see this happening in our society as most media organisations are run by billionaires or multi-millionaires. News organisations are run less and less by journalists or normal people and the headlines are set more and more by people with very keen and niche vested interests.

This specific issue is being played out in real-time in the Murdoch succession as he attempts to leave the propaganda firm in the hands of his most idelogically similar successor. Yet the majority of his children see the world differently from their father and are challenging this. On one side we have natural break up and change occuring due to generational shifts, and on the other the strong desire of the ancestor wanting their legacy to remain unspoilt after their death.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#214

Post by systemvoltage »

brendanjbond wrote: post #64
systemvoltage wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trolling. It has served me better than most heuristics. If there is something subjective and if you cannot find a critique of it, it’s usually a super power to assume the opposite is true barring obvious exceptions.

You can't find a critique of extreme wealth concentration? There are many. Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

No, I can’t find a single article praising wealth concentration.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#215

Post by UncleOxidant »

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.

> instead of more important issues like climate crisis

It's kind of worse than that: this is actually exacerbating the climate crisis as mega tech corps like Microsoft, Google and Meta are scrambling to secure more energy to power their power-hungry LLMs.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#216

Post by UncleOxidant »

adventured wrote: post #161
emsign wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a bold claim. Which AI? The current LLMs? Something else as yet undiscovered? It's not clear that "it's 10x too small for the value it'll provide over the next century" - there's no way to know that - the statement is an article of faith.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#217

Post by tristor »

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…

> 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.

That's what they want you to believe, and in some cases that's true. Many though are just grifters. They were able to:

1. Gain access to the right people at the right levels to have the right conversations.

2. Build on that access to gain influence focused on AI hype

3. Turn that access/influence into income

That doesn't necessarily imply /anything/ about their actual delivery performance or technical prowess.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#218

Post by UncleOxidant »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #58
hlynurd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

they're all a bit immoral, like how Hollywood made it big by avoiding patents, how YouTube got its mammoth exit via widespread copyright infringement and now LLMs gather up the skills of people it pays nothing to and tries to sell. However we could also argue that most things in human society are less moral than moral (e.g. cars, supermarkets, etc). But we can also argue that dropping some hundreds of millions in VC…

> But we can also argue that dropping some hundreds of millions in VC capital is less immoral than other activities, such as holding that money in liquid assets.

It really depends a lot on how those liquid assets are deployed.

I agree that Apple should have probably done something with their cash hoard like maybe buying or bolstering Intel so that they could have a domestic supply of chips, but apparently Apple has decided that there's just not much else to do with that money right now that would give them a better return? We might not agree with that assessment, but it's hard to call it immoral.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#219

Post by UncleOxidant »

BurningFrog wrote: post #147
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.

Nuclear weapons were/are important, speeding up the development of nuclear weapons doesn't seem like it would be good, though.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#220

Post by UncleOxidant »

systemvoltage wrote: post #214
brendanjbond wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't find a critique of extreme wealth concentration? There are many. Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

No, I can’t find a single article praising wealth concentration.

I can't find a lot of articles that praise genocide, either. Would you support genocide just to be contrarian?
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