Comment by nabla9
2 days ago
Quality over quantity.
Apparently its better to pay $100 million for 10 people than $1 million for 1000 people.
2 days ago
Quality over quantity.
Apparently its better to pay $100 million for 10 people than $1 million for 1000 people.
1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person.
So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve.
If you're trying to build a bunch of Wendy's locations, it's clearly better to have more construction workers.
It's less clear that if you're trying to build SGI that you're better off with 1000 people than 10.
It might be! But it might not be, too. Who knows for certain til post-ex?
> 1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person.
I always get slightly miffed about business comparisons to gestation: getting 9 women pregnant won't get you a child in 1 month.
Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it?
The target is never "one child". The target is "10 children", or "100 children" or "1000 children".
You are definitely going to overrun your ETA if your target is 100 children in 9 months using only 100 women.
IOW, this is a facile comparison not worthy of consideration.[1]
> So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve.
This[1] is not the type of problem where the analogy applies.
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[1] It's even more facile in this context: you're looking to strike gold (AGI), so the analogy is trying to get one genius (160+ IQ) child. Good luck getting there by getting 1 woman pregnant at a time!
>> Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it?
Your designing one thing. You're building one plant. Yes, you'll make and sell millions of widgets in the end but the system that produces them? Just one.
Engineering teams do become less efficient above some size.
3 replies →
The analogy is a good analogy. It is used to demonstrate that a larger workforce doesn’t always automatically give you better results, and that there is a set of problems that are clear to identify a priori where that applies. For some problems, quality is more important than quantity, and you structure your org respectively. See sports teams, for example.
In this case, you want one foundation model, not 100 or 1000. You can’t afford to build 1000. That’s the one baby the company wants.
2 replies →
Ironically, rather than being facile the point of the comparison is to explain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law to people who are clearly not familiar with it.
Ah the new strategy - hire one rockstar woman who can gestate 1000 babies per year for $100 mil!
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In re Wendy’s, it depends on whether you have a standard plan for building the Wendy’s and know what skills you need to hire for. If you just hire 10,000 random construction workers and send them out with instructions to “build 100 Wendy’s”, you are not going to succeed.
At the scale we're talking about though, if you need a baby in one month, you need 12,000 women. With that many women, the math says you should have a woman that's already 8 months pregnant, and you'll have a baby in 1 month.
The reason they paid $100m for “one person” is because it was someone people liked to work for, which is why this article is a big deal.
One person who's figured how to make ASI is more useful than a bunch that haven't. Not sure that actually applies anywhere.
It’s me. I’ve figured it out. Who’s got the offer letter so I can start?
I'd rather pay $0 to n people if all they're going to do is make vibe-coded dogshit that spins it's wheels and loses context all the time.