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Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

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Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#271

Post by sangnoir »

tim333 wrote: post #261
JamesBarney wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donating to a http://www.givewell.org/ recommended charity is probably a more scalable way to make the world a better place.

Trouble with giving to charities is it's not very personal. Ok you may increase the world's anti malaria budget from $1.5bn to $1.50001bn but you can't turn around and say look at this cool thing I built.

Building a cool thing and changing the world are two very different things. Some individuals sincerely believe that working on any startup is intrinsically altruistic and 'changes the world' - Silicon Valley (the TV show) lampoons this and correctly so. You are not "making the world a better place through minimal message-oriented transport layers"

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#272

Post by brendyn »

Σ$0.02: Perhaps a way to contribute to the world would be to figure out how to get rid of Facebook: https://stallman.org/facebook.html

Σ$0.04: Mark Zuckerberg mentions talk on the threat of AI as fear mungering, however, https://intelligence.org/ (MIRI) argues that advanced AI is a legitimate existential threat. Note that when MIRI speaks of "AI", they are not talking about fancy neural networks, but the fact that since humans are no where near any kind of upper bound on intelligence, and the space of possible Turing machines and self modifying algorithms is overwhelmingly large, plus reams of other arguments you , humans will eventually be able to produce computer programs with the capability of destroying civilisation. N.B: This is my brief summary of what their stance seems to be, and isn't a direct quotation or paraphrasing of MIRI's official opinion.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#273

Post by stepanhruda »

lossolo wrote: post #100
stepanhruda wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're giving away so many billion, you might as well oversee yourself how they are going to be spent. What sketchiness do you see here? It was already his money.

He still could oversee it in non-profit organization. This is not an argument at all.

Non-profits are regulated so it's transparent what they do with the money other people give them. In this case, it's Mark's own money. Even if he executed the sketchiest imaginable scheme, he's only wasting his own money. He is free to start a commercial company with it instead, but he decided the goal should be to do some good.

The time this will become a problem is the second the company accepts money from other people. Then I will join in picking up pitchforks.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#274

Post by tedmiston »

davidivadavid wrote: post #270
tedmiston wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when Peter Thiel talks about "secrets" in Zero to One, he's referring to truths you hold that aren't (yet) generally accepted. > What important truth do very few people agree with you on? > Recall the business version of our contrarian question: what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are…

Yep. And presumably such secrets (or "ideas" for some value of the word "idea") are incredibly valuable. Which, of course , is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to point it out. That's the thing with "ideas don't matter, it's all about execution." It's either true by definition (every company has to execute something at some point…

> Which, of course, is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to point it out.

It seems stupid to us, but I run into people every few weeks who "have the next big idea if only they can find a dev" but are hesitant to share more than a two-sentence pitch of fear that their coveted idea would get "stolen".

Fixed mindset vs growth mindset is still a battle for many people, especially (would be) first time non-technical founders.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#275

Post by HiroshiSan »

dineshp2 wrote: post #258

Interesting interview, but I felt Sam could have asked more probing questions (for the lack of a better phrase) and I don't mean the controversies from the early days of Facebook. What was the thinking behind acquiring WhatsApp for such a large amount of money and how will they monetize the platform? How is WhatsApp going to be an important part of the future? Facebook's mission is to connect the world, but in the ca…

Seems like a lot of those questions and deeper probing were off the table before the interview even started. Considering Sam Altman was doing the interview and the content was geared towards ycombinator, it was very startup focused.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#276

Post by k__ »

dang wrote: post #199
k__ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some people believe in charity, some in socialism. I'm more for a democratic guided way to spend money beneficial, than one rich person deciding what needs to be done with it.

"Charity" here doesn't refer to philanthropy, but to the principle of responding to the strongest plausible version of an argument: http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html . We're likely going to add this principle to HN's site guidelines.

Ah, sorry.

"Charity" was used as "Philanthropy" in the parent post.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#277

Post by elmar »

z3t4 wrote: post #99
tedmiston wrote: post #49

Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working. > Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?" > Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on i…

If it takes 100 years for one man, it will only take a month for a company or community ... Some problems can't simply be fixed by one man alone. And it's better to own little of something then all of nothing ... Look at for example Elon Musk. He only owned like 5% of the companies he started once they where sold. Also Facebook only had a few thousand users when Zuckerberg started to bring more people in to work on i…

One of many real world examples.

"In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated Barnaby’s output as 42-man years."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#278

Post by elmar »

z3t4 wrote: post #269
ben_jones wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Elon Musk (and for the record others like Mark Cuban) something tells me you don't make billions of dollars without a (from a modern perspective) massively disproportionate ownership share. Zuckerberg gets off from this because FB is an outlier in terms of it's value, he didn't need as large a percentage to make as much, but Musk does not.

Musk owned like 11% of Paypal once it sold for 1.5B, while Zuckerberg owned around 20% of Facebook when it IPO:ed for like 5B. The takeaway though is that it's better to own 10% of one Billion then 90+% of nothing. And great things can only be achieved while working together.

Zuckerberg was lucky with a big jump on valuations on Series B Peter Thiel didn't invest because of the runaway valuation, later he regretted [1], and being a "Solo-Founder" :) if standard funding history with 2 co-founders Zuckerberg should have IPO with 5%~10% stake.

[1] "Biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook," http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiels-bad-investment-2...

Equity in Startups - Cap tables at IPO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134116

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#279

Post by qaq »

shklnrj wrote: post #204
qaq wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today people get an order of magnitude bigger rounds with 0 users :)

Hmm...that can happen, but does that happen for a 19 year old college guy? That happens today but mostly with experienced founders.

After FB any 19 year old with a product that has 100K users and is growing at a rate of FB I would guess would be showered with money (I am not a VC so my guess might be very wrong).

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#280

Post by qaq »

z3t4 wrote: post #232
qaq wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) right so every public company can just double sales/marketing spending and it would double their revenue :)?

There will always be diminishing returns ... But lets say you are spending money on Pay Per Click Advertising ...

As long as I am tiny player yes it would work as soon as I am meaningful in size after a short time it will just affect the PPC
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