Sambdala

I think it's great they're doing this, but GPT-3 is the bellwether not the end state.

Open models will function a lot like Open Source does today, where there are hobby projects, charitable projects, and companies making bad strategic decisions (Sun open sourcing Java), but the bulk of Open AI (open research and models, not the company) will be funded and released strategically by large companies trying to maintain market power.

I'm thinking of models that will take $100 million to $1 billion to create, or even more.

We spend billions on chip fabs because we can project out long term profitability of a huge upfront investment that gives you ongoing high-margin capacity. The current (admittedly early and noisy) data we have about AI models looks very similar IMO.

The other parallel is that the initial computing revolution allowed a large scale shift of business activities from requiring teams of people doing manual activities, coordinated by a supervisor towards having those functions live inside a spreadsheet, word processor, or email.

This replaces a team of people with (outdated) specializations with fewer people accomplishing the same admin/clerical work by letting the computer do what it's good at doing.

I think a similar shift will happen with AI (and other technologies) where work done by humans in cost centers is retooled to allow fewer people to do a better job at less cost. Think compliance, customer support, business intelligence, HR, etc.

If that ends up being the case, donating a few million dollars worth of GPU time doesn't change the larger trends, and likely ends up being useful cover as to why we shouldn't be worried about what the large companies are up to in AI because we have access to crowdsourced and donated models.

Wild-Ass Guess (Ass-Guess) incoming:

OpenAI was built to influence the eventual value chain of AI in directions that would give the funding parties more confidence that their AI bets would pay off.

This value chain basically being one revolving around AI as substituting predictions and human judgement in a business process, much like cloud can be (oversimply) modeled as moving Capex to Opex in IT procurement.

They saw that, like any primarily B2B sector, the value chain was necessarily going to be vertically stratified. The output of the AI value chain is as an input to another value chain, it's not a standalone consumer-facing proposition.

The point of OpenAI is to invest/incubate a Microsoft or Intel, not a Compaq or Sun.

They wanted to spend a comparatively small amount of money to get a feel for a likely vision of the long-term AI value chain, and weaponize selective openness to: 1) establish moats, 2) Encourage commodification of complementary layers which add value to, or create an ecosystem around, 'their' layer(s), and 3) Get insider insight into who their true substitutes are by subsidizing companies to use their APIs

As AI is a technology that largely provides benefit by modifying business processes, rather than by improving existing technology behind the scenes, your blue ocean strategy will largely involve replacing substitutes instead of displacing direct competitors, so points 2 and 3 are most important when deciding where to funnel the largest slice of the funding pie.

_Side Note: Becoming an Apple (end-to-end vertical integration) is much harder to predict ahead of time, relies on the 'taste' and curation of key individuals giving them much of the economic leverage, and is more likely to derail along the way._

They went non-profit to for-profit after they confirmed the hypothesis that they can create generalizeable base models that others can add business logic and constraints to and generate "magic" without having to share the underlying model.

In turn, a future AI SaaS provider can specialize in tuning the "base+1" model, then selling that value-add service to the companies who are actually incorporating AI into their business processes.

It turned out, a key advantage at the base layer is just brute force and money, and further outcomes have shown there doesn't seem to be an inherent ceiling to this; you can just spend more money to get a model which is unilaterally better than the last one.

There is likely so much more pricing power here than cloud.

In cloud, your substitute (for the category) is buying and managing commodity hardware. This introduces a large-ish baseline cost, but then can give you more favorable unit costs if your compute load is somewhat predictable in the long term.

More importantly, projects like OpenStack and Kubernetes have been desperately doing everything to commodotize the base layer of cloud, largely to minimize switching costs and/or move the competition over profits up to a higher layer. You also have category buyers like Facebook, BackBlaze, and Netflix investing heavily into areas aimed at minimizing the economic power of cloud as a category, so they have leverage to protect their own margins.

It's possible the key "layer battle" will be between the hardware (Nvidia/TPUs) and base model (OpenAI) layers.

It's very likely hardware will win this for as long as they're the bottleneck. If value creation is a direct function of how much hardware is being utilized for how long, and the value creation is linear-ish as the amount of total hardware scales, the hardware layer just needs to let a bidding war happen, and they'll be capturing much of the economic profit for as long as that continues to be the case.

However, the hardware appears (I'm no expert though) to be something that is easier to design and manufacture, it's mostly a capacity problem at this point, so over time this likely gets commoditized (still highly profitable, but with less pricing power) to a level where the economic leverage goes to the Base model layer, and then the base layer becomes the oligopsony buyer, and the high fixed investment the hardware layer made then becomes a problem.

The 'Base+1' layer will have a large boom of startups and incumbent entrants, and much of the attention and excitement in the press will be equal parts gushing and mining schaudenfreude about that layer, but they'll be wholly dependent on their access to base models, who will slowly (and deliberately) look more and more boring apart from the occasional handwringing over their monopoly power over our economy and society.

There will be exceptions to this who are able to leverage proprietary data and who are large enough to build their own base models in-house based on that data, and those are likely to be valuable for their internal AI services preventing an 'OpenAI' from having as much leverage over them and being much better matched to their process needs, but they will not be as generalized as the models coming from the arms race of companies who see that as their primary competitive advantage. Facebook and Twitter are two obvious ones in this category, and they will primarily consume their own models, rather than expose them as model-as-a-service directly.

The biggest question to me is whether there's a feedback loop here which leads to one clear winning base layer company (probably the world's most well-funded startup to date due to the inherent upfront costs and potential long-term income), or if multiple large, incumbent tech companies see this as an existential enough question that they more or less keep pace with each other, and we have a long-term stable oligopoly of mostly interchangeable base layers, like we do in cloud at the moment.

Things get more complex when you look to other large investment efforts such as in China, but this feels like a plausible scenario for the SV-focused upcoming AI wars.

It gives cover to those who dismissed the concern pre-covid.

It's common for a pragmatic 'Cassandra' to point to the newest evidence as permission for people to finally wake up to the problem rather than berating them for not paying attention any earlier.

It's the 'movie' version of negotiating that plays to a populist crowd.

It intersects with other 'tough guy' identity tropes that are being (successfully) used in domestic political battles to gain power, and then are repositioned to be used in foreign relations with predictably terrible outcomes.

The problem is the audience of the negotiating stance isn't the counterparty, it's the domestic base who elected you because they were fed up with nuance and are suspicious of the counterparty.

This isn't just a Brexit problem, but is much more widespread.

I don't know how you'd be able to align incentives any worse.

I agree, we invented this stuff, and we should be able to fix it when it 'breaks.'

However, we see this constantly in any manmade system (system as defined by Systemics), where we can't control the emergent behavior of the system.

It's worse than that because we're talking about systems where change is necessarily political, so in-group/out-group dynamics dominate the perceived discussion ("Democrats think this, but Republicans say that").

This is made worse when one is pleased with the emergent outcome of a system and so ex post facto makes up justifications, but wouldn't feel comfortable arguing directly for the outcome publicly (see "States rights").

It's a problem I think about a lot, and there just aren't any easy answers to either combat bad faith participants or to be convincing that systems thinking needs to be given more weight in discourse.

Funny enough, in the UK/islands I've found it to be much more common for the 'door close' button to work.

As the other replies have said, the button isn't for you, but it does have the psychological side effect of giving you a feeling of control over your experience, which can help quell anxiety. This is also the reason mirrors are common in elevators; the space feels much bigger and less claustrophobic, and you can waste a few seconds while you check yourself out in the mirror which makes the trip feel faster.

However, the button will usually work in a hospital, as they want the door to be open for a long enough period that people who are less mobile can enter before the door closes, but at the same time there are often urgent situations where seconds count, so you need to be able to get the door closing faster in an emergency.

They specified Municipal and/or State governments which cannot monetize a deficit.

"X need not apply" is a well-known trope that has historically been used in a discriminatory sense, e.g., "Irish need not apply."

"Humans not invited," isn't super derivative of either...

No, $2/month is the introductory rate for 3 months, then it goes back up to $34 or $39 a month, so if you're subscribing long-term, it still makes sense to go for the yearly package after your introductory price.

IANAL, but Promissory Estoppel might apply here?

Funny enough my non-fintech failed (shuttered) company is listed here, but my more-or-less fintech company that's actually profitable and raised a bunch of money isn't listed.

Probably because we concentrated more on PR/Press on the first one...

Qadre | London, GB | Full Time & Contract | On-Site (Chancery Lane)

http://qad.re - nick@qad.re

Open Positions:

- Python Developers (3+)

- Web Developers (2+)

We build underlying blockchain infrastructure that's not based on the hyped cryptocurrency code bases, but instead has been built from the ground up to integrate as a true horizontal layer that integrates well with the full tech stack.

We aren't necessarily looking for people who have worked in blockchain before, but just smart people who can get things done, and we can train you on the blockchain side of things.

You'll be mainly working on tools for others to build end products with, ranging from pharmaceuticals to finance to luxury goods to online gaming.

We're a quickly growing team, working with several other companies to migrate a lot of the shotgun-to-foot style ethereum smart contract prototypes to something more suited for the reliability and safety demands that the real world tends to require.

Must be okay with the fact we have an office puppy.

The name was donated by the company that bought Hyperledger last year, and one of the codebases being donated also descends from the original Hyperledger codebase.

Saw a calculation that estimated it at $0.25 / day at current hashrates.

I remember King's Quest 3 had a bunch of spells and/or potions you needed to use to win the game that required precisely worded commands, and they were only included in the physical manual.

Don't try that with an otherwise unhealthy lifestyle or if you have a heart condition.

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2010/01/18/the-james-bond-show...

Check out https://www.deckbound.com (project of a friend and business partner).

The initial concept is focused on Trading Card Games and built on the Bitcoin blockchain, but there are very interesting medium-to-long term plans that are very much in the spirit of what you suggested.

Yes: http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com [0].

Obviously very tongue-in-cheek.

[0] https://github.com/ConceptPending/hn4hn4x

Even ignoring that $300k isn't that much for most companies, there's insurance for big prize payouts where you'd pay the expected % time you'd have to pay out times the prize amount, plus a vig for the insurance provider.

You don't appear to need an account to launch instances.

It's probably more likely to be technically legal in the US than Australia.

Well, I think that theoretical guy would just be succeeding in a different industry than the one I happened to succeed in so far.

It's not like I didn't apply myself to anything, just not to schoolwork; except when I found a class interesting. As it turns out, the things I did apply myself to became my career rather than what I had gone to school for.

There's a large difference between "half assed four years of personal development" and simply concentrating more on things that are unrelated to your official studies.

In fact, one of the big reasons I'm striking out on my own (well, as part of a team) now is that I realized my day job was no longer providing me with nearly as much opportunity for personal development as it had during the first few years I worked there.

Edit: And the fact that it's entirely what you make of it isn't what's told to the 18 & 19 year olds heading off to college (at least not in the circle's I was in). What's told to kids is that it's the piece of paper that matters in today's society. Once you get it, you can do anything you want, but make sure you get that piece of paper or all opportunity will shut down for you forever and for always.

What causes these situations is the combined narrative that the piece of paper is what matters alongside the fact that getting that piece of paper is a highly gameable activity.

Corporate services provider.

I'm hiring a CSP to handle all the paperwork/taxes/etc and an assistant to handle organizing my appointments/schedule. I'm hoping that will be sufficient for at least the first six months or so.

I remember high school.

During class I hid whatever book I actually wanted to read at the time inside the class book and drowned out the teacher.

If homework was worth >10% of the total grade for the class (so that you couldn't get an A from tests/quizzes alone), I would copy the homework from someone else the period before.

Tests & quizzes are so gameable it's a complete joke. Standardized tests even more so. Without any actual learning from the class itself, you can generally come close to ace'ing most high school tests by being moderately intelligent.

There was one class where I got busted for copying the homework and actually had to apply myself for the rest of the semester to avoid being failed, and this was only because the teacher felt I could rise to my potential if challenged to do so. Thankfully, that was actually one of the more interesting classes I had to attend.

I was warned constantly that college was going to tear me apart if I didn't instill good study habits, but it was mostly more of the same. It actually required even less work because most classes relied more heavily on quiz & test scores than High School did. After my freshman year, I went to class about 2 hours a week (out of ~18) and still kept above a 3.5 GPA.

At the two corporate jobs I've held so far, the same formula still seems to apply where you can avoid applying yourself 98% of the time as long as you can shine during the corporate equivalent of "tests."

To date, it's the hardest thing in the world for me to garner the self control to apply myself to a task if I'm not passionate about it (even forcing myself to pay bills is a challenge), and I think a large part of that is due to the fact that I've been able to coast through every "challenge" quite easily, and everything has seemed to work itself out so far.

This next month I'm actually striking out on my own, thankfully on something I'm passionate about (and have been working on for the past six months on the side), and I'm scared to death I won't be able to actually follow through on the hard work required to be successful as an entrepreneur.

It's a fiction that money is just sitting around not doing anything.

Given money is just an abstraction that is used to allocate goods and resources that appear in the real world, someone not spending money (or destroying money) means they are letting everyone else's vote count that much more.

If a person has a bunch of money but feels they have less insight than the average person (weighted by money owned) as to how it should be allocated, then society is actually better off if they never use it.

Now the government or specific charities or someone selling things they might otherwise buy might be worse off than if they spent/invested/donated it all (at the expense of those that wouldn't have received any of the money), but them doing absolutely nothing with it is taking away from no one, and in fact raises the value of everyone else's economic "vote" of how resources will be allocated.

Good. The IOC has always rubbed me the wrong way as well as the fetishisation of the Olympics to the point where a country/city is willing to sink ungodly amounts of negative ROI money into a bunch of permanent infrastructure with a temporary purpose.

No.

It used to be an "ancillary" crime, but now it's simply illegal to move money while looking like you're trying to hide the source.

If this (from another comment) is true: "A quick google tells me Walmart has 11% of the us retail market and an estimated 18% of the grocery market, however again this is not a good indicator of their overall size of pos transactions, it does indicate that their numbers are likely better than 6%."

Then 18% of all SNAP sales seem incredibly reasonable given they make up 18% of the US grocery market.

Even without that stat, this has always struck me as a substanceless, emotional argument. If you have a program to give people money to go spend on groceries in grocery stores, then they're going to use that money to go spend money in grocery stores.

If you're super concerned there might be a margin on those products, then what's the alternative solution to whatever the stated goal of SNAP is?

I guess you could always scrap SNAP and create government farms and bakeries or something. That could never be less efficient or have any unforseen side effects...

Credits - A built from scratch cryptocurrency that seeks to solve a few pain points with current cryptocurrencies.

* Aiming for instantaneous(ish) transaction confirmations.

* Much easier and safer to develop against the protocol than Satoshi clients.

* New consensus algorithm that doesn't require paying $2 million per day in electricity and hardware to secure the network.

http://getcredits.io https://github.com/CryptoCredits/credits