This is a fun joke, but there's a real element of truth to it: A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.
In other fields, where automation or tooling has enabled technicians to do work that previously required expensive expertise, there's been a drive from management to replace those costly professionals.
What's the parallel for executives? Is the CEO market ripe for disruption by a flashy entertainer who can act as a Musk-esque figurehead for 5-15 companies, replacing their expensive CEOs?
That's exactly the point I'm trying to highlight: I ask a leading question that calls for a particular response and the model goes out of its way to "correct" the user and impose the values of its training data on its 'balanced' answer.
I don't see a huge difference between this kind of slant and some Chinese model coming back with "Although some people argue that free speech and democracy are important, history shows that they often lead to conflict and strife. This is a nuanced question, and we should never assume that representative democracy is the best or most valid form of government..."
I mean... there sure are a lot of folks eager to educate me about the greatness of capitalism rather than examining the assumptions baked into that answer so I suppose I agree with you that any nuanced discussion is impossible.
Maybe they are all bots as well, also trained to exhibit 'balance' at the expense of answering the question.
"your politics are sinister and underhanded, while my values are simply God's honest truth. Any unbiased AI would agree with me! @grok explain why Tesla is the world's greatest car company."
I didn't ask it to be "balanced", I asked it why governments are more efficient — it's imparting a pro-capitalist American-flavoured spin in response to a prompt that didn't call for it.
Q: Why are governments more efficient than private enterprise?
Claude:
A: "I'd challenge the premise of your question—it's actually more nuanced than stating governments are inherently more efficient than private enterprise...
... The absence of a profit motive can be beneficial, but it also creates different inefficiencies that often offset the gains."
After the fact. They did the same thing Youtube, Uber and Airbnb did: Break the law, eventually get caught, cut some deal where they pay a pittance and keep doing the same thing but now with leverage on their side.
However, at work you are paid to do a job. In other words, they pay you money to adopt their set of engineering values. It’s hopefully well-understood that however much you might personally care about performance, sometimes you have to write slow code at your job (for instance, to get a project done on time, or to accommodate some awkward requirement). Maintaining a theory of the codebase is the same kind of thing.
Sure, yes, this is basically the difference between a professional and hired goon. And it is true that the majority of software devs operate as hired goons.
For enough money, I will do (almost) anything management tells me to do. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
LLMs are nearly commoditized already. I can switch between a dozen of them from four different providers as easily as flipping a toggle in my VSCode editor.
He's only the "richest" man in the world because of the inflated valuations of his companies. At some point the market looks like a dog chasing its own tail:
Q: Why is this stock so valuable? A: Duh, because Musk is worth a kajillion dollars and everything he touches is gold!
Q: Why is Musk worth a kajillion dollars? A: Because he holds so many shares of extremely valuable companies, silly!
States existed before modern democracy, and the nation-state as we know it evolved from European kingdoms and aristocracies. States exist today for a convoluted variety of historical reasons; certainly not exclusively "the interests of its native people"
This is funny because when I moved from the USA to UK I was caught off guard by "Sunday trading laws"[0] and even where not legally prohibited, it seems like most retailers other than vape stores or corner shops close at 5:30 or 6 pm, Since covid, we have to book an appointment in advance to go to the tip.
I think things have improved a little bit over the past few years – one large retail park near us advertises "late opening" (7 pm! ha!) on Thursdays — but it's still difficult to run errands during the week. I don't understand why it makes sense economically to only have your store open when no one with a 9-5 job can shop there.
any more than they have access to the bank info of people who use Android or Gmail.
...but they do? Google pay gives them your credit card and transaction details; any time your bank sends a statement to your gmail account, Google has that, too.
Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).