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Comment by adolph | Hacker News Reader

A baby can't be made in one month just because you had the money to hire 9 surrogates.

Many processes do not scale just because a money spigot turned on. What most often does scale as quickly as monetary availability is fraud, waste and abuse.

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Couldn't you keep hiring surrogates until you get a premature birth?

There are thousands of items on the agenda in the present day, everything from better open source LLMs to moon-base railway designs, so even if 99% of these turn out to be duds that can’t be budged, there are still sufficiently many remaining to absorb all bonafide super-geniuses on Earth several times over.

In this particular item on the agenda, chip fabs, it is not clear spending more money one time will produce a result, much less a faster result by attracting "bonafide super-geniouses." One might respond that "you can't win if you don't play" which would lay bare the gamble.

Chip fabs is just one of ‘many processes’ which was what I was replying to. It’s practically irrelevant if even 99% of all processes have this characteristic. There’s way more than enough remaining to occupy all available people who could actually speed up large complex projects by 10x.

Of course if they were somehow disproportionately forced to only ever work on chip fabs for the rest of their lives, then that would create huge waste, but this doesn’t seem likely.

That's exactly the problem. We don't have an abundant supply of supergeniuses

If there was an ‘abundant supply’ most of them wouldn’t be considered such any longer, just regular geniuses, because the population average would have been raised up.

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