This is IMO a comical, absurd, Beeple NFT type situation, which should point us to roughly where we are in the bubble.
But if he's getting real, non-returnable actual money from Meta on the basis of a back of envelope calculation for his own startup, from Meta's need to satiate Mark Zuckerberg's FOMO, then good for him.
This bubble cannot burst soon enough, but I hope he gets to keep some of this; he deserves it simply for the absurd comedy it has created.
Professional athletes get paid on that scale, CEOs get paid on that scale. A top researcher in a burgeoning technology should get paid that much. Because bubbles dont mean every company fails, it means most of them do and the winner takes all, and if someone thinks hiring this guy will make them the winner than it's not remotely unusual.
I'm not a conspiracy person, but it's hard not to believe that some cruel god sent us crypto just a few years before we accidentally achieved AGI just to mess with us. So many people are confident that AGI is impossible and LLMs are a passing fad based to a large degree on the idea that SV isn't trustworthy -- I'd probably be there too, if I wasn't in the field myself. It's a hard pattern not to recognize, even if n~=2.5 at most!
I hope for all of our sake's that you're right. I feel confident that you're not :(
Dude, LLMs are a very sophisticated autocomplete with a few tricks down their sleeve. From that to AGI or Zuck's "superintelligence" is just light years... LLMs are a dead end for "intelligence".
We are talking about the promises of the same crop of people who brought you full Autopilot on Tesla (still waiting since 2019 when it was supposed to happen), or the Boring Tunnel, the Metaverse, and their latest products are an office suite and "study mode".
This is EXACTLY the same as NFTs, Crypto, Web3, Mars. Some gurus and thought leaders talk big talk while taking gullible investors' money and hope nobody asks them how they plan to turn in a profit.
My edgy prediction is that blunder after blunder (Metaverse, LLAMA, the enshittification of whatsapp, instagram losing heavily to tiktok and facebook having mostly dead accounts) and now giving 250M in vapor-money to youngsters, this is Meta's last stab in the dark before they finally get exposed for how irrelevant they are. Then no amount of groveling to Trump or MMA would be able to save the Zuck from being seen for what he really is: an irrelevant morally bankrupt douche (I could say the same about Elon as well) just trying out random stuff and talking big.
Nuclear is actually a great example. It's a major scientific accomplishment but pretty much the least cost effective method of energy generation. Nuclear allowed us to generate huge amounts of energy to waste on whatever we like when the real focus should be on massively decreasing energy demands. But of course that doesn't make anyone money.
Decreasing energy demands isn't going to happen though, and energy should not be thought of as a profit generator. You can spend all your effort trying to do something that isn't going to happen without forcing people to do it, and you can lament that public needs don't make profits, or you can deal with the reality of the situation and accept that things aren't ideal.
> and you can lament that public needs don't make profits, or you can deal with the reality of the situation and accept that things aren't ideal.
Ah, so we have to "deal with the reality of the situation and accept things"? You know who also was being told that? French peasants and middle class, by their king Louis XVI, who told them that they had to accept plummeting living standards and wages. You know how it ended up, right? The king had to deal with the reality of a guillotine.
Some people might accept being used and abused by the capitalistic system as a "natural order of things", but there are people who can envision a world where not everything is about profit, and there are such things as public goods, services, resources, housing, benefits, etc.
> Decreasing energy demands isn't going to happen though, and energy should not be thought of as a profit generator
Says who? Not everything is about profit. The fact that so many in today's society are thinking of capitalism is the natural order of things doesn't make capitalism less fragile, especially if it continues not serving society. When something doesn't serve society, society gets rid of it (usually violently) and replaces it with something else. Many CEOs and oligarchs nowadays forget that, just like the kings before them, until a Luigi comes and reminds them.
> lament that public needs don't make profits,
Whatever the public needs, eventually the public will get, with or without profits involved, and with or without the agreement of the "ruling" class.
That whole comment comes off as unhinged and has nothing to do with development of energy infrastructure for a world population that has growing energy needs.
Please use an LLM and prove it yourself. Then use an LLM and prove the opposite. That's how much weight your "proofs" have.
In fact, buy a premium subscription to all the LLMs out there (yes, even LLAMA) and have them write the proof using the scientific method, and submit the papers to me via a carrier pigeon.
Other than the rockets and Starlink, I do not trust anything from Musk. Mainly because while everyone whose opinion I trust about rockets says "LGTM", everyone whose opinion I trust on all the other things he does says as per https://xkcd.com/2030/
I don't trust Zuckerberg. Bad vibes about everything Facebook ever since I went to one of their developer conferences in London a bit over a decade ago, only gotten worse since then. I wouldn't even pay for ads on their system, given the ads I see think I want dick pills and boob surgery, and are trying to get me to give up a citizenship I never had in the first place while relocating to a place I've actually left. Sometimes they're in languages I don't speak.
And while I can't say that I have any negative vibes from Altman, I've learned to trust all the people who do say he's a wrong 'un, as they were right about a few other big names before him.
And I wouldn't invest in any of the companies making LLMs, because I think the whole "no moat" argument is being shown to be plausible by way of how close behind all the open models are.
But LLMs are, despite all that, obviously useful even if you see them as only autocomplete. They're obviously useful even if you think they're just a blurry JPEG of the internet. They're obviously useful even if they're never going to meaningfully improve.
LLMs are not like NFTs. Might be like Mars, though.
Well, if LLMs were the next coming of Christ, where is the impact of them on open source?
Everyone claims they are awesome and super powerful in their own toy projects or in their private source. Where is the actual impact of LLMs superior power on OSS?
Woah, a whopping 0.5%. That's like working 12 minutes more every week. I waste much more time every day because of how slow and sluggish Windows 11 is.
0.5% across all the world's population would be a significant achievement. The fact that you spend this much time in Windows 11 is actually a crime against humanity.
0.5% of USD 100 trillion per year, with a usual accounting I've seen being that you can count that boost for the next 20 years, is worth 0.5% * $100T/year * 20 years = USD 10 trillion.
Now, we don't have a single investor making this investment nor getting the reward for the investment, but that's the kind of overall shape of the reasoning behind why people are willing to invest so much in AI.
It would be trivial for most of Europe to improve productivity by 0.5% or even 5% but they’re too busy drinking nice wine outside a cafe in the sunshine most of the day.
There is no guarantee that Meta or OpenAI would capture that increase in productivity as opposed to open models or otherwise driving the profits on the AI itself to zero.
As LLM's get smarter and more capable on smaller and smaller computers Anthropic, Google, Grok, OpenAI, and Meta (is there an acronym, like FAANG, for the giant AI companies? MOGGA? GOMAG?) will have to get creative with profit-drivers, when consumers will have a very capable LLM built-in to their computing device(s), and it can easily be worth the cost to a business to invest in the computing power to provide on-device LLM's to their workers.
If you agree it is a bubble, you are agreeing it is going to burst. Because that is what defines a bubble.
I have two questions about this, really:
- is he going to be the last guy getting this kind of value out of a couple of research papers and some intimidated CEO's FOMO?
- are we now entering a world where people are effectively hypothetical acquihires?
That is, instead of hiring someone because they have a successful early stage startup that is shaking the market, you hire someone because people are whispering/worried that they could soon have a successful early stage startup?
The latter of these is particularly worrisomely "bubbly" because of something that people don't really recognise about bubbles unless they worked in one. In a bubble, people suspend their disbelief about such claims and they start throwing money around. They hire people without credentials who can talk the talk. And they burn money on impossible ideas.
The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates. People who would be written off as fraudsters at any other time are taken seriously as if they are visionaries and ultra-productive people, because everyone's tolerance for risk increases as they become more and more desperate to ride the train. People start urgently taking impossible things at face value, weird ideas get much further advanced much more quickly, and grifters get closer to the target -- the human source of the cash -- faster than due dilligence would ordinarily allow them.
"This guy is so smart he could have a $1bn startup just like that" is an obvious target for con artists and grifters. And they will come.
For clarity I am ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that the subject of this article is such a person. I am perfectly happy to stipulate that he's the real deal.
But he is now the template for a future grift that is essentially guaranteed to happen. Maybe it'll be a team of four or five people who get themselves acquihired because there's a rumour they are going to have billions of dollars of funding for an idea. They will publish papers that in a few months will be ridiculed. And they will disappear with a lot of money.
> The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates.
You started to sound like Dario, who likes to accuse others as intellectually dishonest and unserious. Anyway, perhaps the strict wage structure of Anthropic will be its downfall in this crazy bubble?
I am accusing no one individually or particularly. I am observing that the problem is that within a bubble, people collectively become increasingly unserious and less intellectually honest as their appetite for risk increases with their desire to get a slice of the action. Indeed, it gets worse as people begin to think it might not last forever.
The same thing happened in the dotcom era, the same thing happened in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis. Every single bubble displays these characteristics.
But if he's getting real, non-returnable actual money from Meta on the basis of a back of envelope calculation for his own startup, from Meta's need to satiate Mark Zuckerberg's FOMO, then good for him.
This bubble cannot burst soon enough, but I hope he gets to keep some of this; he deserves it simply for the absurd comedy it has created.