This thinking is wrong. For IT jobs, the work is pre-defined and you go find people who can do the job. For product development this is sometimes the case, but for truly innovative products, such as AI models, this is not the case. You have to hire the best in the world and give them the resources they need, as opposed to defining the project upfront and hiring people "who can do the job".
I wrote my first neural net in the late 90s. Based on nothing but an old geocities post some rando put up about training a model to only unlock a pet door for their cat.
I implemented the same and it worked.
Where you see true innovation I see run of the mill. OpenAI, Google, etc are propping up data center rental business they came to rely on to titillate biology with whatever spaghetti that sticks. That's it.
The interesting science isn't happening anywhere close to big tech.
The mathematics of LLMs exists in textbooks from 1950s. Your entire comment chain here is little more than reciting propaganda.
Why aren't we using it, if that's all the world needs?
If your powers of analysis were worth anything you would be running the world not copy-pasting hype straight from CNBC and Big Tech PR
As you are not running the world your analysis is worthless. As such I say; good day, sir.
"Why is it important Google exists?" is a more interesting question.
(I’m not opposed to immigration at all but it was transparent how for decades the industry resisted any change which would make it easier for a skilled H1-B worker to take a better job)
Sorry, this is 100% false. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta etc. do not hire H-1Bs in order to depress wages. That does happen, but not at these companies. It typically happens when hiring IT workers.
So software engineer salaries have gone up dramatically in the last 35 years H-1B visa has been around. In fact, the H-1B visa is the reason the salaries have gone up. Without it the industry would be stagnant, just like non-tech S&P 500 companies and most companies in Europe in the same time period.
As others have said, H1-B has been good for companies, and bad for American workers. The same companies who were found to be colluding to keep wages down.
Europe is stagnant because of regulation, not because of immigration.
I am saying the reason silicon valley exists is because of the immigration of the smartest people from around the world. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US.
Consider the seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need"). It was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration been bad for American workers? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, without them the center of tech would be Beijing.
That H1B labour allowed other firms to build tech, which kept those firms competitive, creating a deeper economy and experienced bench.
That depth then enabled more advanced tech firms to be born.
At least thats what I think they are saying.
The analogy would be that China took over low tech manufacturing, and then because of that were able to develop expertise to move up the value chain.
At the same time, supply demand curves are real. If you have more workers, it should result in competition that drives down wages. (ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL)
There was a distinction being made between Tech and IT, which I am not too sure about.
Sort of a meaningless statement when all things are definitely not equal.
If there are 5 million people in a country, or 200 million, the theory of too many workers means the 5 million people country should be paying everyone vastly more.
But that is trivially untrue.
Economies grow and shrink and adapt around the number people.
> Sort of a meaningless statement when all things are definitely not equal.
Hey, don’t look to me for a defense of the weaknesses of economic models.
At the same time you can’t really discuss complex systems like economies where one part affects another, without holding some of the factors in stasis.
Centris paribus does extreme amounts of heavy lifting.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who really lived up to the idea that the best in the world were coming here—I’ve known a few of them myself—but that there were a much greater number of people who were not in that class and it wasn’t exactly a secret that their managers knew they could be imposed on more than their equivalently-skilled colleagues.