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Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#71

Post by radlad »

bluGill wrote: post #64
raincole wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids. Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."

They say that, but when you point out that they could have that if they accept a lower standard of living they lose interest (and if possiple downvote or otherwise try to shout you down)

I think the problem is that you are proposing a false dichotomy: that if they do not want one consequence of the current system, they should eschew the entire system.

But in actuality, I like some parts of how society is organized, and dislike some other parts. I don't want to leave society - I want society to be better.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#72

Post by daedrdev »

I think too many people starting companies dream of getting bought rather than running a profitable business. They care far more about financial games rather than the complex details of say their products manufacturing that matter most (instead relying on a third party in china who arguably is the more important partner). I don’t know how saas relates to this problem.

This is HN though so my complaints are ironic for sure

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#73

Post by Tade0 »

rangestransform wrote: post #37
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? - Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades l…

> - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?

TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer.

Sure, without this investment the pace of development wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely the same, only somewhat slower.

Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#74

Post by tavavex »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #53
thewebguyd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part. All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society. We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companie…

> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)

Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothing to stop their inevitable abuse for the sake of value extraction.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#75

Post by ako »

thevillagechief wrote: post #55
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.

Agreed, and that is why big countries should also be broken up. No more countries over 50m citizens. Many people in Europe don’t want the EU, but there’s really no alternative when competing with large countries like China and US.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#76

Post by aleph_minus_one »

radlad wrote: post #66
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)

I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.

> I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.)

You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#77

Post by hearsathought »

thevillagechief wrote: post #55
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.

> Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.

In what way is china "bullying" europe. It's more like the EU trying to bully china on the US's behalf and failing miserably.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#78

Post by jmyeet »

cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

> The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network

For the record, this system where AT&T was broken up between long distance and regional local companies (called the Regional Bell Operating Companies or RBOCs) was a terrible solution to anticompetitive behavior and is one of many examples (some of which you also quote) about how the US is terrible at breaking up monopolies.

The problem is the RBOCs simply became regional monopolies and regional monopolies aren't really any better than national monopolies. By the 90s the RBOCs could become long distance providers by meeting certain criteria and of course the whole system was gamed.

What needed to happen is the exact same thing that needs to happen with national ISPs today: municipalities need to own, maintain and build last-mile infrastructure.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#79

Post by woah »

thewebguyd wrote: post #48
rangestransform wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? - Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades l…

Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part. All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society. We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companie…

> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project

You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding.

I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#80

Post by DSingularity »

raincole wrote: post #56
rangestransform wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? - Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades l…

Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids. Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."

It’s naive either in the way you put it or at the very least in your eyes. There is a lot to be said about the narcissism of innovators radically rethinking anything and everything traditional just because we think we can do better by our current metrics.

If things continue to be advanced haphazardly just because these companies have budget capacity what’s to say that in a hundred years the bulk of humanity will have lost capacity for independent critical thought? Is that really the world you want to create?

It’s not just a “ChatGPT will replace you”. Our humanity is potentially at stake if we don’t deliberately evolve this tech.

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