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Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

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Re: Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

#51

Post by twoodfin »

programjames wrote: post #42
gwern wrote: post #11

> So why quit? Three reasons. First, I’ve felt for a few years now that the startups I’m seeing don’t seem so much like progress as just shopkeeping. This isn’t a dig: there’s money to be made razoring a thin slice off a huge market, and there’s certainly less risk in that than there is building a market from scratch. But it’s just not that interesting. The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understa…

But most of the AI startups are just razoring a thin slice off a huge market. They're making robo-receptionists for the doctor's office, or integrating LLMs into your IDE. Very few are building new markets from scratch, like photonic neural networks or brain-computer interfaces.

This is obviously survivor bias in the extreme, but Amazon started out by razoring a slice of the (relatively, at the time) huge market for paper books.

Re: Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

#52

Post by DavidPiper »

> The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understand everything there was to know about computers, because this was something that could radically improve people’s lives, I just don’t get anymore.

Confirmation bias on my part: this feels like the core point.

Maybe I just grew up at the right time: the Internet was becoming ubiquitous; the iPhone hit right in my teens; social media - for better or worse - slightly earlier.

Technology was radically radically changing and improving peoples' lives and that was inspiring.

I don't see it doing that anymore. And so goes the inspiration too.

Re: Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

#53

Post by chipdart »

DavidPiper wrote: post #52

> The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understand everything there was to know about computers, because this was something that could radically improve people’s lives, I just don’t get anymore. Confirmation bias on my part: this feels like the core point. Maybe I just grew up at the right time: the Internet was becoming ubiquitous; the iPhone hit right in my teens; social media - for better or wors…

> I don't see it doing that anymore. And so goes the inspiration too.

I believe our collective technological progress still has a lot of low-hanging fruits to be picked that radically improve people's lives. I just think that the feedback loop for those in the technology field is not as immediate as it was a few years ago.

It was not so long ago that a determined kid with a cursory knowledge of HTML was able to single-handedly deliver the web presence of a whole company.

Things have progressed a bit since then and the barrier is now set much higher, but the potential to serve user and customer needs on mere cents per user per month is still there.

Every time you help a person achieve their goals (buy something, access a service, deal with a complaint, fill out a bureaucratic requirement, etc) with a mere click of a button, you are making the world a better place.

For example, life changed radically for the whole world once people were able to call a cab or order food with a press of a button in their smartphone. We even have services helping to reduce waste by connecting shops with soon-to-be-expired goods with potential customers who love a good deal. That is a small gesture that serves everyone.

The potential is still there. Just don't expect to get a medal for it.

Re: Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

#54

Post by chrisdirkis »

mizzao wrote: post #36
chrisdirkis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, he's not just investing in startups, but investing in ones that have a factor that is either unknown or unknowable. That's a different strategy from YC's "Invest in promising founders" or the typical VC "Invest in early stage startups with good metrics".

It must have been "promising founders working on an idea with an unknown or unknowable factor", right? I can't imagine it working out so well without that qualifier.

Most likely, I'm just passing on what's noted in the post. There's likely a lot more nuance to the actual decision-making :)

Re: Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

#55

Post by tonypace »

tsimionescu wrote: post #35
fragmede wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be an application for VR goggles, and it seems Adobe has Medium for that. https://www.adobe.com/products/medium.html

No, VR goggles can't scan an object and generate precise enough measurements of it to create a basic 3D model that can attach to it. And they don't particularly help in refining this base model afterwards either, because they don't help in any way with the hardest part about 3D interactions, which is not the visualization, but the actual editing/interaction part, especially for fine details.

What you need is a feedback system between your coarse measurements from a low precision system such as a ruler or goggles and the prints that you make. Does the tab you printed fit into the latch? What part fails to fit?

Re: Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

#56

Post by greesil »

pdimitar wrote: post #50
greesil wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably this is easier to do now with multimodal LLMs. I say this as someone who is skeptical of the hype around the utility of LLMs. But it can probably catalog your fridge. Was that worth boiling the oceans?

What's your point? That some actual improvements to the lives of people will accelerate climate change, and thus we should not pursue it? If so, OK, let's find another way that doesn't consume 300+ watts per GPU for thousands of GPUs. Again, let's go -- let's see some actual technical progress. But we don't have that. We're stuck. And that's what the original article says and I support its thesis.

What's your point? What's my point?

Re: Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

#57

Post by nis0s »

stonogo wrote: post #9
nis0s wrote: post #5

> The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understand everything there was to know about computers, because this was something that could radically improve people’s lives, ... it’s just maintaining the current status quo. It just feels, I don’t know, done. How can anyone say this when there’s so much amazing research happening in most universities, especially in computer science and engineering. It cou…

Your argument would benefit from some examples of amazing research. Most of what I see is better implementations of the status quo. While I am excited about CHERI and similar efforts, they're hardly revolutionary.

I am excited about human augmentation, and I don’t see much work, research or funding in this space outside of work in genetics. If I get the time some day, I may do a blog post on the topic.

Re: Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

#58

Post by bbor »

fragmede wrote: post #31
bbor wrote: post #26

Fantastically written article by someone who doesn’t realize (or articulate?) that they were part of a terribly unique, terribly exploitative movement that is reaching its natural conclusion. And, of course, I was lucky. Two of the fifty companies I backed are now among the 30 largest software companies in the world. And my IRR from inception has been consistently above 50% per year…for fifteen years. Of course, my s…

Earlier in the letter, he writes: > Two of the fifty companies I backed are now among the 30 largest software companies in the world. And my IRR from inception has been consistently above 50% per year…for fifteen years. But then he also writes: > Right now I have enough money to do what I want. I don’t have enough money that other people do what I want. I don't know Jerry Neumann's financial situation better than he…

I naturally interpreted that comment in terms of servants, drivers, cleaners, etc., but on second reading, I think you’re right that it’s about companies.

It sounds like he wants to be somewhat safe/financially secure without needing to work more, so I took that to mean “I have $2-6M USD in the bank”, which is the rough FIRE target (last I checked?). You could start a company with that of course, but it would be risking your nest egg to a serious degree, especially at a time where any serious person should be planning for—if not expecting per se-a stock market recession in the next few years.

Compare that to someone with, say, $100M. That’s enough money to build a team of $200-$400K/year engineers, open an office (or a zoom subscription!), and really take an honest swing at some product or other. $50k could hire you a contractor for a bit, but that’s just an addendum.

Re: Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

#59

Post by dangus »

tsimionescu wrote: post #34
dangus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you and the parent comment to you are not quite there. It really isn’t exciting because the technological shifts have already happened. The “Industrial Revolution” has ended. There’s no remaining industry that isn’t served by plenty of software and hardware solutions. The Internet is done, it exists. Smartphones are done, computers are done, cloud computing is done, and that’s about as good as it gets. AI is jus…

As an LLM-skeptic, I still think this is too pessimistic as an outlook for the future. I do think there is a good chance that LLMs as they exist will not change anything nearly as significantly as the hype is predicting. But I think there is scope for the technology, if it continues developing, to significantly help people. The most interesting and clear AI-based product I can imagine is a true personal assistant, th…

This solution seems like the kind of stuff that only Apple, Google, and maybe one or two other companies likd Microsoft will actually have any foothold in.

Nobody else is going to be the central point for enough data to make this kind of AI useful.

Example: Atlassian can’t make a product like this because they only have access to a small piece of your personal data in the first place. They don’t have access to your work calendar, emails, chat, conference calls, etc. Many companies who use Atlassian don’t even want to use them for source control or pipelines despite those products being a part of their suite.

Same deal with companies like Slack: they don’t have access to your email or your ticketing system. Notion doesn’t have access to your emails, conference calls, etc.

So realistically, truly helpful AI is going to be gated behind giants like Google and Microsoft, while the companies fighting for LLM scraps are going to all make their ShitGPT support chat bots.

The ultimate death knell for AI is that it’s such a unique technology that the average CTO can’t even conceptualize how it works and what it can do. I think they didn’t have that problem with previous tech industry hype trains.

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