dalbasal

Our one dominant model of technology-driven economic progress is the industrial revolution. Manufacturing.

As Ai companies argue for market cap based on projected economic output... I'm increasingly thinking this model can be badly misleading.

It's very rare that the PC Revolution and or the internet Revolution are used as a primary model to explain technology and how it affects the economy.

Network enabled PCS are administrative powerhouses. They really did permeate all aspects of administration. But... The number of employees in administrative adjacent roles is higher, not lower. Accountants, university armin. HR. Project management. Etc.

It's very unclear how to quantify economic output/product. From this ambiguity , everything downstream is also vague.

The web also totally exploded in use. Web companies got huge revenue, even huger your profits.

It's very hard to draw lines, and apply economic reasoning that describes who gains what.

Users get to use Facebook, google and whatnot. Customers/advertisers get to advertize. The tech companies business model is based on network effects, momentum and whatnot.

What value is being created? Who is capturing how much of IT? These questions are almost philosophical. You just cannot apply reasoning like you would to the economics of mass produced cars.

Dopamine fracking , financial arbitrage racking, sales fracking... As a phenomenon, I think these occur in places where competition between firms is most intense over something that isn't correlated to external value.

Before advertising bands, cigarette companies were ad fracking. Tobacco is a commodity. Producing cigarettes is trivial. The only thing differentiating a billion dollars Tobacco Company from a million dollar Tobacco Company was the recognizability of their brand.

Government suppliers, or urban real estate can get to a point where the main driver of success, is lawyers.

A lot of industries went through a gradual process, as they matured... Where the domain of competition is decreasingly relevant to external value. The digital industries often start here or reach this point quickly.

Is manufacturing actually the exception?

Bingo.

This is the literal answer to "why." Also bans on various casino hacks.

Can anyone bring this down to earth for me?

What's the actual state of these "ML compilers" currently, and what is rhe near term promise?

So...

Bodybuilders do this thing called "bulking and cutting." The best way to add muscle fast is to overeat. Work out lots. Sleep lots. Eat lots.

You get fat, but you also get muscular because food is never a limiting factor.

Then, they lose the extra fat with a crash diet.

Google, FB and such are such money machines that they never have to cut. They can just bulk. The others... they want some of that rapid growth potential too, but can't afford to add fat forever.

Corporate bulking and cutting.

Yiooo!

What makes this hard to read/follow is the grandiose moral vision... and the various levels of credulity it's met with.

If it's words from Ilya, Sam, the board... the words are all about alignment, benefiting humanity and such.

Meanwhile, all parties involved are super serious tycoons who are super serious about riding the AI wave, establishing moats, monopolies and the next AdWords, azure, etc.

These are such extreme opposite vocabularies that it's just hard to bridge. It's two conversations happening under totally different assumptions and everyone assumes at least someone is being totally disingenuous.

Meanwhile, "AI alignment" is such a charismatic topic. Meanwhile, the less futuristic but more applicable, "alignment questions" are about the alignment of msft, openai, other investors and consortium members.

If Ilya, Sam or any of them are actually worried about si alignment... They should at least give credence to the idea that we're all worried about their human alignment.

>Many corporations work like this also.

One of those things that are widely true, but rarely admitted to. It seems to be very much a maturity thing. The older,larger and more governed an org is, the more likely such a pattern is.

Habits become precedents. Precedents become rules. A pattern emerges is everyone operates within rules. Staying within the ruleset, represents known safety. Even if something is dubious.. as long as it's within the rule set you are safe.

Is shaky principle tentatively applied once.. it doesn't have that kind of safety. That means it's less likely to be stretched and made absurd.

There is a logic to trimming unused budgets. not perfect, but it wouldn't surprise me if it worked well enough, often enough. If a department keeps going over budget, well.. they need more budget.. or maybe less work. Where is that budget going to come from? Departments without enough budget.

It's hard to get more legible, than last year's expenditure as the starting point for the next years budget. Nothing very notable about birthing this "principle."

I'm sure it makes sense, often. At least in the sense that it's the easiest, good enough method.

If there's a new management, using old methods is helpful. They don't know enough.. and this just gets the job done. If budgets become contentious, sticking to "principles" helps smooth things.

That is the point though.. whether it's a big-hype management method like agile.. or some unofficial budgetary principle that happened to work before these are principles. We like to be principled, especially when we don't really know what to do.

There's a literary trope of a bone casting seer. It takes a wise person to cast bones. It's an art and science. Sure, you have to know what all the bones mean. But, you also have to figure out it's a good idea to fight to fight this particular battle, build a town in that particular place... And also to understand the role bone casting plays in this particular case.

Bones must be cast, because we like external validation. It helps to bring everyone together, and calms underconfident, overwhelmed, or underunited leadership.

Knowing when to cast them, why, all the different implications.. how to define the question, how to approach the answer.. those are jobs for the seer, not the bones themselves.

Things are better when soldiers watch the stones, and chieftains watch the seer. If and when that flips, the paradigm is not at its best.

Precisely.

Sure, considering the platform-game paradigm different products sources cross subsidize one another a different stages of their life cycles. This is just how firms work, and is often mostly a matter of accounting.

Yes...

Investors and executives.. everyone in 2023 is hyper focused on "Thiel Monopoly."

Platform, moat, aggregation theory, network effects, first mover advantages.. all those ways of thinking about it.

There's no point in being bing to Google's AdWords... So the big question is pathway to being the adWords. "Winning." That's the paradigm. This is where big returns will be.

However.. we should always remember, but the future is harder to see from the past. Post fact analysis, can often make things seem a lot simpler and more inevitable than they ever were.

It's not clear what a winner even is here. What are the bottlenecks to be controlled. What are the business models, revenue sources. What represents the "LLM Google," America online, Yahoo or a 90s dumb pipe.

FYIW I think all the big text have powerful plays available.. including keeping powder dry.

No doubt that proximity to openAI, control, influence, access to IP.. all strategic assets. That's why they're all invested an involved in the consortium.

That said assets or not strategies. It's hard to have strategies when strategic goals are unclear.

You can nominate a strategic goal from here, try to stay upstream, make exploratory investments and bets... There is no rush for the prize, unless the price is known.

Obviously, I'm assuming the prixe is not AGI and a solution to everything... That kind of abstraction is useful, but I do not think it's operative.

It's not a race currently, to see who's R&D lab turns on the first super intelligent consciousness.

Assuming I'm correct on that, we really have no idea which applications LLM capabilities companies are actually competing for.

It's all very abstract, and hard to narrow objectively, considering considering that we don't really know what a "memory" or skill is. The mechanism.

Ok...

So the alternative to great man theory, in this case, is terrible man theory... I'm not following.

If focusing on control over openai, is great man theory... What's the contrary notion?

Objective in what way? What claim are you rejecting?

Anyway.. if you want to have a conversation about childhood, parenting, suburbs.. quantifications and statistics (assuming that is what you're looking for) are allowed.. but the conversation will be fundamentally subjective.

There's no other way, that isn't meaningless, to have this conversation.

If you want to narrow down, to a specific point that can actually be settled in such a way.. that's great. A great point in the conversation. Not the conversation itself.

There is no way to quantify or settle this debate.. with published social studies. The complex relationship between parental culture, modern childhood, screens, neighborhoods... There is no reason to think this will be modeled out in a comprehensive,"objective" way.

You can make a data centered argument, that is fine. It is not possible to do this honestly, well being both broad and tight.

Iregardless, OP's point stands. "It's the screens."

Trying to isolate kid culture, school culture, parents, parenting.. it can't be done. It's a complex. It is now a complex operating in a highly computerized world. The way to think of it is as one major aggravating factor.. that changing material culture.. and how it is affecting the complex that is parenting-childhood-culture. Every element of that complex is co-evolving tightly interrelated.

If you want to think of this objectively (in a pragmatist sense), which outside (the complex) change is the primary driver. Suburban design, or screens.. a computerization of culture.

True. Arguably, work and social life have also gotten more difficult, at least for some.

Meanwhile.. it's also not overwhelmingly true that administration, and other things heavily affected by computerisation are "better," more efficient or productive.

That's easy to see in non-commercial space. It's also true in commercial space. Government. Universities. Education.

This is all tightly coupled with op's point. Digitization, computerization, networking... These really were major revolutions. They impacted and totally reformed everything. However, this has been more of a change than an improvement in many applications. Slightly better in some ways, slightly worse and others, ambiguous, mixed... complex.

The computerization of social life, entertainment.. childhood experiences. Etc. There are long causality chains.. and we don't really understand the consequences of everything.

But in any case.. I think you're absolutely right on TCs and administrative life.

Technology made it easy to have more, more complex paperwork. That allows us to produce a lot more paperwork. A handwritten contract with two lawyers present.. is a marginal cost. Even a sign here, take-it-or-leave-it contract (EG financing, or opening an account) representing some marginal cost.

Computerization makes this whole thing more efficient. Automated emails, tick-to-agree pop-ups... Those allow humanity to create many more contracts than previously possible.

That's efficiency, of a sort. If you consider contracts themselves to be an output... The efficiency gains a greater than Henry Ford's entire lifetime.

I think we've learned something. Technological change, and it's proliferation does not necessarily aggregate in an idealic way.

I think the fear of paperclip maximizing AIs.. I think this is more of an analogy to our experience with recent tech shifts.. beyond its veracity as a danger vector for AI specifically.

Perhaps, but that is a seperate debate.

Arguably everyone has always been in the bubble of our own life. OP had an intention, using the term. He's not talking about stereotypes or extremes. He's talking about the normal life of of most parents reading hn. Even if not, he just gave an example from his life.. demonstrating why he thinks that screens>suburban planning as factors.

Then in commeth the recycled meme version of this conversation. Memes of 7-year-olds taking their dirt bikes to the hardware store. Reddit class politics. Second hand TED arguments about parents not letting kids be free.

I take all the points, but a whole variety of social conditions play.. now and in the past. Also coevolving parenting culture. Also suburban planning, the actual topic of the article.

There's nothing unreasonable about OP's point. That the main factor is screens. It's arguable, and it would be interesting & reasonable to argue a contrary point too. Good faith would be to assume that he/she is someone up to date with the meme version.. as most of us are.

Instead, he gets a snarky, internet-bubble suggestion that parental reticence is at the heart. It is, quite honestly, typically internet.

A 15-year-old analysis, that "went TED" 10 years ago. Went viral 5 years ago.. and jammed into this thread.

This is in fact, a good demonstration of how digital culture prevails. It is aloof from normal life. Allowing children freedom is one thing. Getting them to exercise it, in practice, is the primary challenge most parents see and face. They don't want to go explore. Run wild with their friends. They want screen time. You have to force the little bastard outside

Anyway.. from here the word bubble is the conversation.. and since someone mentioned the word suburb.. Reddit class politics.

We really need to do better on this. These conversations are making us dumber, not smarter.

>Parents, meanwhile, can either work to balance the easy sources with...

It's possible to some extent. Different parents will have different levels of ability and success.

This is relevant (but difficult) advice for individual parents, but it's a minor point if we're discussing society. People (parents and kids) exist in an environment. "Just going out to play," isn't part of the world/environment/culture. The way kids/parents did thing differently in the past was by existing in a different culture.

Easy Vs hard stimulation is one paradigm, but you can't just view everything through this lens. Life is more complex. There are looping and knotting causal relationships and we can't know all of them. It's a complex.

Life is just very screen based. Ours and theirs.

They study via screens, and don't really know how to "do school" analogue. Social life is, largely through screens... and increasingly part of the media spectrum. Work will, eventually, be screened-based. So are life's administrative tasks.

The bubble op referred to is not a particular place or lifestyle.

The bubble, in this context, is the average/representative lifestyle and parenting depicted in lifestyle journalism/blogging space. The proverbial TED abstraction.

Obviously physical circumstances are vary, but that didn't start in the smartphone era.

Is the alternative theory that the ownership, control and leadership of OpenAI is immaterial?

I'm not criticizing these projects, their current legal structure.

What I mean is that these were created as public goods and functioned as such. Each had unique way of being open, spreading the value of their work as far as possible.

They were extraordinary. Incredible quality. Incredible power. Incredible ability to be built upon.. particularly the WWW.

All achieved things that simply could not have been achieved, by being a normal commercial venture.

Google,fb and co essentially stole them. They built closed platforms built a top open ones. Built bridges between users and the public domain, and monopolize them like bridge trolls.

Considering how part of the culture, a company like Google was 20 years ago this is the treason.

Joining a corporate behemoth like Microsoft and all the complications it brings with it will mean a massive reduction in the freedom and innovation that Sam is used to from OpenAI (prior to this mess).

Well.. he requires tens of billions from msft either way. This is not a ramen-scrappy kind of play. Meanwhile, Sam could easily become CEO of Microsoft himself.

At that scale of financing... This is not a bunch of scrappy young lads in a bureaucracy free basement. The whole thing is bigger than most national militaries. There are going to be bureaucracies... And Sam is is able to handle these cats as anyone.

This is a big money, dragon level play. It's not a proverbial yc company kind of thing.

Well written. Well done. Early hn vibes.

A lot more in here, that actually helps to understand what's going on with openai, and what might happen next in the space.

I think the last paragraph is a key point/question.

"Ultimately, though, one could make the argument that not much has changed at all: it has been apparent for a while that AI was, at least in the short to medium-term, a sustaining innovation, not a disruptive one, which is to say it would primarily benefit and be deployed by the biggest companies. The costs are so high that it’s hard for anyone else to get the money... ..This, in the end, was Nadella’s insight: the key to winning if you are big is not to invent like a startup, but to leverage your size to acquire or fast-follow them."

Use models like innovative disruption with caution. Look to their assumptions.

How this plays out is not going to follow the pattern of web 2.0 or Kodak digitization.

The road to AGI is one thing. The road to 1 billion market caps.. not necessarily that same thing.

The road to victory, or definition of victory, are very vague still.

IDK. Let's proceed with caution in gauging intentions and interests. Altamans', Microsoft's, the Jedi council's.

"Humanity's interest at heart" is a mouthful. I'm not denigrating it. I think it is really important.

That said, as a proverbial human... I am not hanging my hat on that charter. Members of the consortium all also claim to be serving the common good in their other ventures. So do Exxon.

OpenAI haven't created, or even articulated a coherent, legible, and believable model for enshrining humanity's interests. The corporate structure flowchart of nonprofit, LLCs, and such.. it is not anywhere near sufficient.

OpenAI in no way belongs to humanity. Not rhetorically, legally or in practice... currently.

I'm all for efforts to prevent these new technologies from being stolen from humanity, controlled monopolistically... From moderate to radical ideas, I'm all ears.

What happened to the human consortium that was the worldwideWeb, gnu, and descendant projects like Wikipedia... That was moral theft, imo. I am for any effort to avoid a repeat. OpenAI is not such an effort, as far as I can tell.

If it is, it's not too late. Open AI haven't betrayed the generous reading of the mission in charter. They just haven't taken hard steps to achieving it. Instead, they have left things open, and I think the more realistic take is the default one.

>There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles...

That's a slightly flamboyant reading.. but I agree with the gist.

A slim chance of total right off doctor off.. that was always the case. This decision does not affect it much. The place in the risk model, where most of the action happens... Is less dramatic effects on more likely bans of the probability curve.

Msft cannot be kicked off the team. They still have all of the rights to their openai investment no matter who the CEO is.

Meanwhile, is clearly competing, participating, and doing business with openai. The hierarchy of paradigms, is flexible... Competing appears to have won.

I agree that direct financial returns, are the lesser part of the investment case for msft.. and the other participants. That's pretty much standard in consortium-like ventures.

At the base level, openai's IP is still largely science, unpatentable know how and key people. Msft have some access to (I assume) of openAI' defendable IP via their participation in the consortium, or 49% ownership of the for-profit entity. Meanwhile, openai is not so far ahead that pacing them from a dead start is impossible.

I also agree, that this represents a decision to launch ahead aggressively in the generative AI space.

In the latter 2000s, Google have the competence, technology, resources and momentum to smash anyone else on anything worldwideWeb.

They won all the "races." Google have never been good at turning wins into businesses, but they did acquire the wins handily. Microsoft wants to be that for the 2020s.

Able to replicate everything, for the new paradigm OpenAI's achievments probably represents.

The AI spreadsheet. The LLM email client. GPT search. Autobot jira. Literally and proverbially.

At least in theory... Microsoft is or will be in a position to start executing on all of these.

Sama, if he's actually motivated to do this.. it's pretty much the ideal person on planet earth for that task.

I'm sure takes a lot to motivate him. Otoh, CEO of Microsoft is it realistic prize if he wins this game. The man is basically Microsoft the person. I mean that as a compliment.. sort of.

One way or another, I expect that implementing OpenAI-ish models in applications is about commence.

Companies have been pleading chatbot customer support for years. They may get it soon, but so will the customers. That makes for a whole new thing in the place where customer support used to exist. At least, that is the bull case.

That said, I have said a lot. All speculative. I'll probabilistic, even where my speculations are correct. These are not really predictions. I'm chewing the cud.

I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially.

Thanks for the breakdown. Unfortunately, you have just made things too saucy for me to take that advice :-)

Also, the rumors and machinations are a pretty big part of this story.

This is obviously a power struggle, for control over, potentially, the highest potential company/technology/IP of the current moment.

Power structure in the modern corporate/tech space.. it has become normal to charter a company such that ownership and control are effectively separate... call it overiding the defaults of incorporation and company law.

FB and Tesla are the big publicly traded examples. OpenAI, is the most significant private example. It is also illegible, at least to me, considering the structural complexity. Non-profit, for profit & capped-profit entities in a subsidiary loop. Separate arrangements for ownership, control, and sometimes IP across the mesh of entities...

Openai is like some abstract theory of company law..

For Tesla and FB, the CEO is central to the paradigm. Barring crisis, Zuck or Elon's control over FB & TSLA just is. They have cash flows, market caps to protect. Ongoing operations. Shareholders have no real interest pursuing shareholder control or any kind of coups.

OpenAI.. totally different game.

The IP (protected or otherwise), technology, team, momentum... These are all that matter. Product and revenue.. direct financial return on investments, and such.. these are not driving factors. Not for msft or other parties. Rare.

Everyone just wants to leverage OpenAI's success, to compete with their own partners. Mutual benefit, it's dubious right now.

This is not the www or most other tech/science consortiums.. imo. It's not about fooling resources, pushing the industry forward or going beyond the blue sky scope of individual company r&d.

It may have been that initially, but that changed with gpt3.

There's no point in being the bing to Google's AdWords... And that's the kind of game it is now.

So.. there is a ton well very interesting stuff going on here. My ears are certainly pricked.

Absolutely agree on the need to completely change views as this saga progresses. None of these dogs are mine.

Tweaking and twiddling with pricing structure... It's just what happens in a mature market.

Every year, you need new ideas to make business better. This is something that you can usually futz with, and maybe get a little bit of bang.

It's not necessarily about pricing template being better universally. It's just that these are factors you can move around, "optimize."

Having multiple levers is just helpful.

This is also an orthodox negotiation model. It's always helpful to negotiate multiple items simultaneously. Salary, benefits separately, pension separately from that, days off, personal days etc.

It's very common that one is a hard no, but others are not.

I know it seems to make sense to transparently aggregate everything.. but... The phenomenon exists regardless.

This is the sort of thing, we have to have an adult in the room.

When complex, confusing pricing structures exist.. fiddling with them becomes a salesman / marketers main tool. It's what they do everyday, how they operate, the wins bring to the table.

These are the knobs that they twiddle, and have for decades been producing reports quantifying the value of their work. They are now panicking, that they won't know how to do their job.. and reporting to CEOs that profits/sales in all those reports will disappear.

Irl, this is pulling a Band-Aid. You could make all service charges illegal, from cafes to airlines.. and the industries we'll have forgotten about it within weeks or months.

The majority of all argument, debates, polemics... it's all "hacks." We're all dirty tricks, if we're being honest.

Formalizing and naming templates of fallacies and dirty tricks... it's kind of a fallacious trick in itself.

Logically valid, convincing, and the way we actually think a completely different. There are places where these come together, often requiring a lot of effort.

The reality that we, all of us, way through the slush. None rise above it.

To take the least noxious example, stories work on us. Stories. Narratives. They're very central to communicating, central to how we make sense of things. Who is what in which story.

Telling the story, is unanimously agreed by all practitioners.. primary to convincing people, or even getting them to listen to you in the first place.

Is this logically sound? Is it conducive to keeping track of one's assumptions, presumptions and biases? Of course not. It is, how we work though.

The way formal logic works, and the way we think, talk and convince one another.. they are very far apart. That doesn't mean we can't grasp logic. We can. It does mean, that we don't employ it on its own very often.

The argument that would take, this post is the "central" path. The other half of this dichotomy. The assumed default state.

People say things for a lot of reasons, and then argue their way back.

Idk. Tech bubbles, hype cycles.. they're weird, sometimes unhinged.. they're not entirely irrational.

In aggregate, they are just the phenomenal of an extremely high risk high reward investment environment.

Most tech companies do not need cash to scale. There are few factories to be built. What they need is risk capital. The big successes alphabet, Facebook, Amazon.. these winds are so big, that they really do "justify" the bubbles.

Amazon alone, arguably justifies the '90s dotcom bubble. The tens of billions invested into venture, IPOs... A balanced portfolio accrued over the period, was probably profitable in the long term... Especially if the investor kept buying through and after the crash.

IDK that anyone actually invests in risky startups that way, but just as a thought device..

Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes

Jaron Lanier has some ideas about the space in between turing test and blade runner.

The first film goers, watching simple black and white movies thought that they were uncanny. A train coming towards the screen, would make audiences jump and duck. When people first heard gramophones, they reported that it is indistinguishable from live orchestra.

As we learn a technology, we learn to recognize. Get a feel for its limitations and strengths. The ability to detect that technology, is a skill. Less impressive over time.

It's hard not to be impressed when a thing does a thing that you did not think it could do.

We didn't move on to being unimpressed when the thing cannot do the thing we thought it be able to do.

How sloped are water tables, typically?

That and many other dynamics. Bullying is one. A lot is just dumbing down. Reduction to meme. Thinking by affiliation. Picking sides. Factionalism. Populism. Statements have scores. Followers. Upvotes. Retweets. Everyone is gaming some sort of algorithm.

All the problems of politics, now permeating all of society.

We think, often, how and as we speak.. as we debate. Now that the conversation, the debate has become.. what it is, I think it really does affect how and what we think. That (garbage) mode of debating is now a major mode of thinking.

It's a mess.