Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data in AI, including DNA
theregister.com
theregister.com
High compensation can be offset by the risk a position entails.
Example: CISOs are feeling a lot of pressure these days
The "E" in CEO is to listen to a room full of noncommittal, hedging, sycophantic people and then chart a course based on their weak signals.
Arguably the CEO needs all of the talent of a dart thrower; but they're the one that takes the stand, or fall, of the decisions made.
I agree they're replaceable. I don't agree that they're not needed. :)
In a more enlightened society, one not prone to misusing information to persecute one another, he'd arguably be right.
It's likely much simpler: Larry thinks the solution to (his) immortality - or longevity at the very least - may be contained in Americans' collective DNA, and AI may be able to tease the answers out.
Mapping DNA is just another part of that schema.
I wish the billionaires were doing this. Instead they are hoarding wealth like angry dragons and comparing piles.
* You become that rich only if hoarding money brings you joy and is your key driver
* You can buy a lot of things, thus one of the few challenges is becoming richer than the peers
"Risk-averse" (really, wealth loving) people, uh, loving amassing wealth.
Examples: Melinda French Gates, MacKenzie Scott
Even after climbing the mountain, they can’t stop, they can’t help themselves. It’s just how they’re wired. They don’t know what enough is or feels like.
Those are basically the same thing though. Acquiring extreme wealth filters out people with empathy; they either never had it or lost it.
they're just a well managed brand, and you, nor anyone else reading this, has any insight to what they're actually doing.
like, can you prove they didn't drop $10 million, quietly, on The Donald's campaign via TrumpCoin? cuz they could have, and we can't prove shit.
He's Indian so not many on HN will know about him.
Obviously.
We're talking hundred's of billions of dollars here; $20 million is already a big fortune where 2% interest gets you $200,000.
These people (on paper) have 5 orders of magnitude (100,000x) more. At that point you aren't doing all the questionable things it takes to get there for the money. IMO you have to be broken in some way, shape or form to do what it takes to get there.
The USA system is made this way. There are other systems in the world (namely the scandinavian countries) that don't allow individuals to accumulate that amount of wealth.
And to be fair though, the players do make the game too.
However, in a democracy, all citizens are players.
This is a common misconception. The Scandinavian model has changed rapidly the last few decades. Sweden now ranks higher than the US in number of dollar billionaires per capita, even if none are at Ellison level yet.
Edited to add: in fact, the Scandinavian model has always been more about equality of income, rather than wealth. There are, and has been throughout the 20th century, wealthy dynasties as well as industry tycoons who has largely been left alone by the social democratic system, and indeed viewed more as an important part of the system than anything else. Since the 90s, though, it has changed rapidly, such that today there is no tax on wealth, inheritance, gifts or real estate, as well as a low corporate income tax.
1. Scandinavian countries impose higher taxes on their rich VS the US. It does not have to be a wealth tax. Think effective tax rate. 2. Income inequality is lower there compared to the US.
It is a very different system than the US, it's frankly strange to have to argue that.
Let's hate the dude too :)
> For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
Take his stock. Distribute to the people who built the empires.
> We're talking hundred's of billions of dollars here; $20 million is already a big fortune where 2% interest gets you $200,000.
$20 million at 2% interest is $400k a year
> These people (on paper) have 5 orders of magnitude (100,000x) more.
Musk's wealth ($200B+) would be 4 orders of magnitude (10,000 times) higher
It seems the real trick is changing who you are, and realizing that, counter to what you may have learned as a child, lying to everybody, especially your friends, is actually a good thing. We only hear about these stories because they get told. Far more mysterious is the lottery winner who got $20 million who calls up Dave Ramsey and asks what to do with it so their son doesn't become a waiter. That is, someone just waiting for their parents to die and get their inheritance. You'll never hear about their boring life where they lived comfortably and gave money to causes they believed in and helped people they know anonymously and didn't cause a scene.
If it's possible for money not to change a person, we wouldn't hear about it, almost by definition, so we can only conclude that it does.
There was a thought experiment posted on Reddit and I think was from elsewhere. Something like:
Imagine you get $1 million dollars a day. You can't keep it -- it's all gotta get spent. You can invest it, sure, but those holdings aren't going to go up as much as, like, another $1 million the next day. And you have to spend it
So at some point you're going to start doing stuff basically on a whim. You're going to get 3 Lambos in different colors -- because you can. You already have the harem, you already have donated to most causes you care about. You've already got a house (houses, really), so now you start thinking about political causes you're mildly interested in, on top of ones you strongly are. And then you can get petty; if you don't like person X? Take out ads on billboards... cuz you can. Or fund their lawsuit against Gawker, cuz fuck em. etc. etc.
When they do, you don't hear from them/about them as much! Chuck Feeney gave away his billions, but he's hardly ever mentioned.
Though, there's also the argument that making that kind of money makes you even weirder, and having seen glimpses of that through someone I know getting rich, that might also be true.
Put another way, what kind of a sicko keeps going and amasses 20000x "fuck you money"?
I agree with you for someone that has a miserable client-service job, such as an investment banker that is still slaving away so he can keep up with the Joneses.
But Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison can do whatever the fuck they want. They don't need to take shit from anyone, and they get to build products and shape the world.
Musk, for example, wants to get humans to Mars. To the extent he cares about money anymore, it's in service of that goal, which does require a LOT of resources.
You’re stuck with standard experiences that any plebeian can buy with money.
"Standard experiences any plebian can buy with money" includes things like westward solo circumnavigation which is a more elite group than humans who have walked on the moon. And you don't really even need that much money to do it. More money wouldn't really make you any more likely to succeed. So not everything comes down to money, you can do some incredible things without much.
The reality is that it takes absurdly few resources to make a normal and well adjusted human happy. Happiness doesn't come from money, though unhappiness can come directly from poverty. If you are fed, housed, and have enough free time to explore your interests, and have sufficient social connections, that's usually all it takes. The way quality scales also means that unless you are playing dumb ideological games like "Getting the best", you will have satisfaction beyond your dreams at a 2X price point from the basics. Eating steak every day isn't that much more expensive than eating beans and rice every day, and certainly doesn't require taking home $100k more than the US average.
Even in a high cost of living port city in a liberal place that embraces weirdness and hasn't built a new housing unit in a decade, $150k total before taxes gets you the ability to outbid most other people looking for housing, enables you to afford buying the expensive eggs just because you feel empathy for chickens, allows you to buy beef when it's not on sale as a regular experience because it's more convenient than finding recipes using cheaper meats, allows you to buy a very nice car and pay exorbitant parking for it, gets you more healthcare than you can use, gets you an overpriced getaway vacation a year, and still putting plenty of money into retirement accounts and a savings account, pays for cheaper colleges, allows you to afford an overpriced gaming computer AND consoles, allows you to buy a new VR headset you never use etc. With a small increase in pay or an ability to live away from the city center, you can raise kids with good expected outcomes. Kids are expensive but the people insisting on $50k a year private schooling are literally insane.
If you are still not satisfied with "stuff" at that point, the problem is not money, the problem is you.
The hedonistic treadmill (and more importantly, normalcy bias) does NOT imply that already rich people will seek more wealth. It implies that people who seek wealth will never be satisfied by the amount of wealth they currently have. People who don't seek wealth but still get it will be satisfied with that amount of wealth. If you are happy with your minimal needs met, you will still be happy as a millionaire, and if you are not happy with your needs met, you will continue being unhappy as a trillionaire.
Some broken people have "I need more money" as a trait. We shouldn't build society to optimize around them.
The moment you breach a billion dollars net worth, you should only be allowed to be paid in teams of psychologists dedicated to finding out your fucking issue.
No, I'd imagine if you had $200B we'd see your name everywhere.
One such story may be that Timmy is working hard at your company to help his sick grandma and he needs to stock price to increase 10% this year in order to do so. If you don’t deliver then his grandma will die. Multiply the that by 1000 Timmies with 1000 grandmas and I could see why it might be hard to say no.
When Larry shows some for me, I’ll show some for him. Only one of us is in a position to cause the other harm.
I don’t think empathizing with a Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos is going to get me anywhere. Normal people? Sure, I’ll be a giver.
- Larry Ellison
I don't like these videos, little benefit. Only thing here: If he wants to start surveillance we should start on him and he should publish it all, so we can monitor him (incl. publication of all financials so we can monitor for financial crimes as well)
It's time America take our billionaire national resource seriously and implement basic sane/intelligent protections. For the good of society.
> During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His first project included a database for the CIA, code-named "Oracle".
(from Wikipedia)
> "I have to tell [the] AI model as much about my country as I can," Ellison said. "We need to unify all the national data, put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like," he said. "That's the missing link."
(Really it's about encouraging governments to buy a whole lot more Oracle licenses.)
Given how much of the world's information infrastructure isn't even digitized yet, this seems more like that pattern where you get executives excited about "AI" just so you can migrate off paper records!
I wish I believed that's all it was. I think Ellison really believes in an extremely authoritarian/oversight government to keep people in line. He's made plenty of statements over time to such and he runs everything he touches that way. I think he's the most dangerous type of all because he (in that tiny stone cold heart of his) really believes he is doing it for the better of people[1]. Of course the rich and powerful like him know better and don't need that, but all the riff raff like us...
[1] Reminds me of this favorite C.S. Lewis quote: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Today, these are not mutually exclusive possibilities.
Is he wrong?
I mean weren't all these billionaires hanging out at Epstein's island because of the lack of oversight? What type of government do you think can keep them in line?
Now that said, do you really think the billionaires and presidents and other top echelon of people will be monitored like us peasants? It's certainly possible, but that will (IMHO) come down to who is in power and implementing that. Even if that person has good intentions, they very well might cave once they have to beg for campaign donations...
Edit: Added an obviously needed sarcasm tag.
Obviously, there are exceptions: people with severe psychopathy, for example.
You invest $30M at the same rates, and it generates $900k/yr inflation adjusted forever. That’s the combined income of 10 median families, give or take - which means a billion dollar fortune throws off enough money to comfortably support 10 families per year forever, forever.
As it is now, the ultra rich can just steamroll everyone else to get their way.
> Should our inability to unanimously agree on something prevent us from doing anything? No. Let’s start somewhere. We can adjust if we need.
Like, why is the voting age 18 and not 17.5? Why is the drinking age 21 and not 20?
Why not allow 2 year olds to vote and drink hard liquor?
The tax brackets, and tax levels for each bracket, are another squishy thing. Always have been.
Easiest is to start with the 1944 tax rate, at 94% on taxable income over about $2.5 million in today's dollars.
We know the US survived that level.
We do have to draw a line somewhere in order to get things done, but we should be honest and aware of how arbitrary such a line is. We shouldn't just grab some random number out of our ass and say "we have to start somewhere." My point above is that argument can be used to justify anything no matter how draconian. We need a better standard than just "we have to start somewhere"
Also there is a practical difference between voting and drinking (your examples) and taxation levels (the subject matter). Most reasonable people acknowledge that somewhere around 18 to early 20s people become "adults." Everyone develops at different levels, but the main idea there is not to have children voting in horrible politicians (clearly we adults are good enough at that already, sadlol). Same with drinking. We know that young people are often irresponsible and dangerous with it, and it can damage their brains. They also aren't able to make informed rational decisions as their frontal lobes aren't complete. Compare that to "how much money is too much" and you're going to get a huge and inconsistent range of answers, compared to "at what age should people be able to vote or drink."
That's where the "how rich is too rich?" comment comes from.
That's where the "Let’s start somewhere. We can adjust if we need."
The "start somewhere" is meant to be read in good faith as something achievable.
The history of US taxation shows us that 94% on taxable income over about $2.5 million is achievable, while you have no evidence that 100% taxation above $100 per month is doable.
You can nitpick my examples, but there's plenty more I can do. Why is a 29 year old adult prohibited from being Senator? Why is 65 mph a legal speed limit but 65.1 mph illegal? Why is the reporting limit for cash payments at $10,000 and not $15,000 or $8,000?
When road speed limits for machines were first put into place, the idea wasn't to start and 1 mph and work up from there. They already had vehicles that could do 10mph, and the 4 mph limit was a good walking speed for the flag bearer.
And the recent feedback from Wales is that lowering the urban speed limit from 30 mph to 20 mph reduced the number of people who were killed or seriously injured, by 28 per cent, suggesting the limit was too high, if human lives are important.
In school the max grade we can get is 100%, and everyone seems fine with that. People don't seem to complain that there's a cap.
In videogames there tend to be max levels, or max scores. People play them knowing they won't ever hit them, and no one seems to mind.
No one starts a job thinking they can get infinite raises. A lot of people tend to have a general idea of what the max compensation they can expect in their line of work is, and seem to be fine with that.
I think people tend to be pretty ok with theoretical or even hard limits, especially if they're far from them.
Try an experiment: the current levels of richness may be too much, and we seem to be learning that through lived experience; it may be that we have to dial down the richness and if we go too in the other way we lift the restrictions.
As it currently stands, wealth concentration is at about the same level as in the Gilded Age:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Pre-Tax_Income_Share...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...
So perhaps adjust tax rates to what they were from about 1950-70. Certainly there were other factors that helped prosperity (in the US) during that time period, but it's probably worth tweaking this variable.
Would this prevent people from working hard and being enterpreneurial? Not sure but I think not -- for 2 reasons: (i) success at that level requires more than just desire for money, because it requires pushing hard when the going is tough, and unless you care about it you will give up. we have heard this before from others (Steve Jobs?) (ii) a successfull entrepreneur will still make more money than an employee, so the financial incentive is still there, even with greater taxation.
I would fully support a 100% wealth tax for everything over $1B.
Now, of course, the implementation of such a thing would be enormously complicated. There are a million places to hide your wealth, squirreling it away behind shell companies and dark LLCs which you or a designated agent are a controlling member of.
But in concept, I cannot fathom why a human being could possibly say, "You know, $1B really isn't enough for <this>."
Rich people understand this and exploit it. And those who have the power to change this structure have NO incentive to do so… because they’re also rich.
And yet we did just that. FDR came AFTER the roaring 20s
All it takes is Americans willing to vote for someone who says "rich people shouldn't exist", but currently Americans seem ideologically opposed to that, and millions instead seem to subscribe to "rich people are the only ones able to accomplish anything" despite ample contrary evidence.
It allowed government to print $ unchecked. When new $ gets printed, it goes to the corporations/rich first, causing inflation for everyone else. This artificially creates an extremely wealthy class.
Not saying the Gold Standard is the solution - it had its own set of problems. But the untying of money from a real, hard asset is what makes the existence of the ultra-rich possible.
From CBPP, a left-leaning think tank:
"The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth slowed and the income gap widened."
Or something.
All the Buyer's Remorse isn't gonna accomplish a thing. Just gotta hope for the best for the next four years.
I don't know?
Maybe we get some better choices next time around? Probably not, but maybe?
Purges/closures/subjugations to watch out for: the press, judiciary, election officials, policing functions (FBI, local police, Attorneys general), domestic (sometimes foreign) intelligence. All of those functions have to be neutralized to hold sham elections, and have their results stand.
We agree— there will be more elections. Only one party will ever win them however. I’d be beyond pleased to be wrong about this.
It seems optimistic to imagine that you could query this DNA data in combination with the other information to get meaningful answers.
These models have proven to develop incredible abilities through pattern matching on massive text data, so I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the limits of what they could do.
Having them use specialized tools would probably be more effective (e.g. have the reasoning LLM use the DNA LLM), but in the long term with scale… who knows? The bitter lesson keeps biting us every time we think we know better.
The conclusions AI reaches don't even have to be scientifically valid, they could be nothing more than hallucinations, but that doesn't mean that it won't have impacts on your life or place limitations on your opportunities.
I was just thinking out loud what the theoretical benefits could be, if done 'properly' let's say.
Alternatively we could just avoid doing it at all! It's a horrible idea, absolutely.
It's fine. They were from Kansas City, not SV, so they didn't really matter. It created maximum value for shareholders. That's what determines the greatest possible good... right?
This isn’t surpringly coming from any person who runs a cloud infrastructure company (be it Oracle, AWS, Azure, etc).
Oracle is literally in the business of selling services to host & process data.
Of course they (or AWS/Azure/etc) want everyone to put their data into one big services they sell.
> As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.
* Bryan Cantrill, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
I'm all for stripping these morons of everything they've stolen and dropping them naked in the shark pool/general population.
Don't think that's going to happen much either.
> Of course, such a vast database system could also be the precursor to pervasive surveillance – an idea Ellison last year said he feels is desirable and would like Oracle to help facilitate.
Maybe there are cases where they want to share this information with subscribers who authenticate and have authorization over some segments of the data. But it absolutely should not be in the hands of others as the default.
We now have discrimination down to a science.