Comment by seu
2 days ago
These changes in direction (spending billions, freezing hiring) over just a few months show that these people are as clueless as to what's going to happen with AI, as everyone else. They just have the billions and therefore dictate where money goes, but that's it.
This is a structural problem with our economy, much larger than just Facebook. Due its large scale concentration, the allocation of capital in the economy as a whole has become far less efficient over the last 20 years.
But always remember, it's not technically a monopoly!
Boy am I tired of that one. We desperately need more smaller companies and actual competition but nobody seems to even be trying
Many of us in the antitrust/competition law community are trying. One issue, specific to digital markets, is that the field has very few people who are both legally and technically literate. If you're a technical person looking for a career shift, moving into legal policy/academia has the potential to be quite high impact for that reason.
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The allocation of capital is not even close to a monopoly. There are plenty of VC firms looking to fund almost any idea.
The point of VC, specifically, is to grow software monopolies - but it's very easy to pick up VC funding if you happen to live in the Bay Area.
World would benefit greatly if EU went ahead with tech tax. It's crazy how much IT companies get away with that would be the end of any other business.
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This is why I ignore anything that CEOs say about AI in the news. Examples, AGI in a few years, most jobs will be obsolete, etc.
CEO's were never credible to begin with, but what about Nobel laureate in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton, telling us to stop training radiologists? Nothing makes sense anymore.
Well, clearly he should stick to physics. Even if it's likely that AI would replace them soon, a lot of people would likely die unnecessarily if we ran overly low on radiologists by ending the pipeline too soon. They're already overworked and that can only go so far. It's not a bet we should make.
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Geoffrey Hinton believes a little too much in his baby.
Author Ted Chiang is the only celebrity AI kibitzer pundit I wholly agree with.
Paraphrasing: Capital will use / is using AI to further bludgeon Labor.
The media always says AI is the biggest technological change of our lifetime.. I think it was the internet actually.
I believe it's the biggest change since the Internet but what will be bigger will probably remain subjective.
I’d say that the social media revolution had a bigger effect than AI has at this point.
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The media was saying nfts are a reasonable investment and web3 is the future, so I am not sure if they have any remaining credibility.
We are at the awesome moment in history when the AI bubble is popping so I am looking forward to a lot of journalists eating their words (not that anybody is keeping track but they are wrong most of the time) and a lot of LLM companies going under and the domino crash of the stocks of Meta, OpenAI to AWS, Google and Microsoft to Softbank (the same guys giving money to Adam Neumann from WeWork).
Can I ask why you would be looking forward to the stock market crashing? Vindication?
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That's one interpretation, but nobody really knows. It's also possible that they got a bunch of big egos in a room and decided they didn't need any more until they figured out how to organize things.
you think folks that have experience managing this much money/resources (unlike yourself) are clueless? more likely it's 4D chess.
Just like the metaverse?
sometimes you lose
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Anti-aging startups is 5D chess, the 4th dimension is the most fickle so it's very hard to make it to a 4D intercept when your ideas are stupid.
Zuck is fantastic at transferring wealth. Not so great at creating wealth.
I think the use of "4d chess" was your downfall.
I do however think that this is a business choice that at the very least was likely extensively discussed.
Yes, yes I do. How much practical experience does someone with billions of dollars have with the average person, the average employee, the average job, and the kind of skills and desires that normal people possess? How much does today's society and culture and technology resemble society even just 15 years ago? Being a billionaire allows them to put themselves into their own social and cultural bubble surrounded by sycophants.