Sarah's Wager | Hacker News Reader

Sarah's Wager

colossus.com

28 pointsflurly18 comments

I can put up with a little bit of dramatic name dropping in an article at the start, but it never stops. Almost every paragraph is reads like some snappy autobiography of someone trying to impress the reader. I'm not even sure what the article is about, other than name dropping.

I read about 80% of this and it ended up being more of a puff piece than anything. I'm not really sure what I was supposed to get out of this other than a description of one persons tenacity in general?

I'm also at a loss. It feels like some rube goldberg machine of connections among elites, bringing up people with no apparent connection to the article other than being big and in some way connected to someone else in it.

>A few days later he was riding home in his self-driving Tesla, trading voice messages with the agent about his sleep, when it recommended a magnesium supplement. He said he had none. The car turned. “There’s a Whole Foods nearby,” the agent said. “I’ve redirected your navigation.” He went in and bought the magnesium.

That seems extremely embellished.

Fortunately to keep you going while you wrestle your way through this turgid writing they intersperse the same photo 18 times

Steve Job's most unfortunate legacy is inspiring people who crave attention that they should head companies.

I recall reading similar articles in 1998.

The article is very long, can someone explain it?

This reads like a theatre announcement for a play. Whole sections on how they dressed. Are they planning a new "Pirates of Silicon Valley" like movie of this or what? How much of the AI bubble is performative?

"Conviction" is the name of an AI company. I only read the article to figure out who went to jail and why.

Halfway through the article, I find this:

> Near the center of the moment is a 37-year-old woman a smidge over five feet tall, with blonde hair and more energy than her frame seems built to hold. When she talks, her whole body is caught in the updraft of the thought. Her name is Sarah Guo.

That's why I'm increasingly asking Claude to give me 3-paragraph summaries of articles that may contain interesting facts, but are also exercises in creative writing that I am unwilling to commit the time to. Here is an excerpt from the summary Claude gave me:

>The wager the title refers to is that the big labs cannot build everything on top of their own models. Their customers are increasingly sick of paying for tokens, feeding the labs their data, and effectively training the company that may one day replace them, a dynamic one founder describes as not wanting to spend his life drinking Anthropic and OpenAI's water. So Guo bets on the application layer and on the picks and shovels, like Baseten, which lets companies run their own models and has grown revenue twentyfold in a year as token prices spiked.

Does it annoy you to pay an AI to explain what probably another AI wrote? One AI is fluffing up the word count to an unreadable level while another has to trim it back down. If every article was just the text of the prompt that generated it, it would be a much quicker read.

Sadly, incontinence-like verbosity is a phenomenon which precedes AI-generated content by quite some centuries. Whether this article is generated by squishy neurons of banks of GPUs is almost immaterial. Heck, it might even be good writing. I just don't care to read it in its entirety, that's all.

Notably, no one has gone to jail yet. Figure its only a matter of time till someone in the AI world gets caught defrauding investors though...

Did they update the title?

I don't know. At the moment, the title is "Sarah's Wager" which tells me nothing because I'm not on a first name basis with Sarah. So I looked at the URL which is Sarah Guo Conviction, which only gave me the wrong impression as to what the article was about. When I saw it was about AI, I wanted to know if someone went to jail from running a scam.

This is awful awful writing.

Yes. I was skimming for the main points but couldn't find them.

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