Hot take: a flagship silicon valley startup built on hype and overzealous ambition crashing and burning in 2026 is exactly what the industry needs right now.
839 karma · joined June 3, 2022
They are spending more money than they are bringing in. This means they are losing money.
I feel like I'm watching a tsunami about to hit while literally already drowning from a different tsunami.
When did I say that? Of course you look at a human's experience when you judge the quality of their output. And you also judge their output based on the context they did their work in. Newton wouldn't be Newton if he was the 14th guy to claim that the universe is governed by three laws of motion. Extending the example I used above, I would be more impressed if an art student aced a tough calc test than a math student, given that a math student probably has spent much more time with the material.
"Intelligence and "thinking" are abstract concepts, and I'm simply putting forward a way that I think about them. It works very much outside the context of AI too. The "smartest" colleagues I've worked with are somehow able to solve a problem with less information or time than I need. Its usually not because they have more "training data" than me.
Do you think someone who has only ever studied pre-calc would be able to work through a calculus book if they had sufficient time? how about a multi-variable calc book? How about grad level mathematics?
IMO intelligence and thinking is strictly about this ratio; what can you extrapolate from the smallest amount of information possible, and why? From this perspective, I dont think any of our LLMs are remotely intelligent despite what our tech leaders say.
Smartphones can be useful and valuable in many ways separate from the ways they can be used harmfully. Guns exist only for physical violence (or to threaten physical violence).
You really don't think we can just fund people to go into healthcare or teaching? You understand that there is no real reason for those professions have to be chronically underpaid and overworked, right?
- OpenAI's mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.
- Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
- Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.
Lets just take these three companies, and their self-defined mission statements. I see what google and openai are after. Is there any case for anyone to make inside or outside Meta that AI is needed to build the future of human connection? What problem is Meta trying to solve with their billions of investment in "super" intelligence? I genuinely have no idea, and they probably don't either. Which is why they would be laying of 600 people a week after paying a billion dollars to some guy for working on the same stuff.
EDIT: everyone commenting that mission statements are PR fluff. Fine. What is a productive way they can use LLMs in any of their flagship products today?
I see your point, but is it an achievement? Is there not some amount of civil rights abuse or a breakdown of society that would warrant discussion on all possible spaces?
I say this as someone that feels conflicted to see a daily twitter feed of tech leaders celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM breaking some new record when citizens and residents are being detained or discriminated against in violent and appalling ways... sometimes just meters from a fancy tech office!
Theres plenty of things that are worth investing in, and can easily sustain jobs for people...
There are so many things we can be doing with our time, and moving objects from a left-bin to a right-bin simply does not need to be one of them. The real question is if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else before they feel too much pain in the near term.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/1iwgb19/a_dark_factor... [2] https://www.fortna.com/ [3] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-vulcan-ro... [4] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/10-years-of-amaz...
Claude code has only been generally available since May last year (a year and half ago)... I'm surprised by the process that you are implying; within a year and a half, you both spent 70k on claude code, and knew enough about it and its competition to switch away from it? I dont think I'd be able to due diligence even if LLM evaluation was my fulltime job. Let alone the fact that the capabilities of each provider are changing dramatically every few weeks.
The question about "what should be reported on more" is really about "which thing is worth spending more resources / attention / publicity" on, and I personally would put that towards a preventable disease that far too many people are dying of.
Why is homicide inherently more newsworthy than "people get heart attacks"? It completely depends on how much homicide is happening, how many heart attacks are happening, and what we as a society think is reasonable for either fatality. Given how few people are dying with homicides, how many people are dying from a preventable disease -- which is what the main article here says -- I think there can absolutely more attention put on the preventable disease. Particularly at a moment in time when funding for healthcare by the government is being dramatically reduced.
It is very reasonable to think that our attention (in the form of editorialized reporting, or funded initiatives) is being spent on actual material problems affecting most people, and this article is claiming this is a gap here... which I, and maybe many others think is valuable.
> how many times can you write the same thing "american's are fat"?
Until its less of a problem? Like any difficult problem in the world, you can keep coming at it from different ways, use the latest / most effective tools of the day, look for new opportunities, etc, etc.
They do not need it. Arguably no one needs it. I am at best luke-warm on LLMs, but how are any sane people rationalizing these requests? What is the opportunity cost of spending a billion or even a hundred billion dollars on compute instead of on climate tech or food security or healthcare or literally anything else?!
As someone who moved to the UK from the states recently, this has not been my experience at all. Any paperwork i've had to do with the government (immigration, NHS, drivers license, car tax) has been incredibly smooth. On top of that, the city council in the area I live seems great -- they put on a ton of events, and have lots of services that seem to get used well.
Most of the incompetence i've seen is from private companies (e.g. banks and real estate).
> Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful
At the very least, google has some responsibility in helping out web archivists...
No one is defending the NIH or Fauci or the math department at UCLA in a way that makes sense to a majority of Americans... Why these are even under attack in the first place is beyond me.
I can maybe digest the fact that it helped prototype and ship a bit more code in a shorter time frame... but does that warrant in enough new customers or a higher value product that would justify $100k a month?!
Cars as a shared service (shuttles, Uber, Waymo) absolutely solve traffic compared to personal vehicles. Shared cars have much higher utilization and require a lot less space.
I agree that trains are a fantastic way to move large groups of people, but a world with more shared cars (which may be brought about faster with Waymo) is a good thing for most cities.