sethbannon

The overarching message is that builders should deeply consider the impact of what they're building on civilization.

"Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."

Therefore builders "bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility" because "every design choice reflects a vision of humanity."

The questions shouldn't just be 'can we build it?' or 'will people want this?'

We need to also ask 'should we build it?' and 'will this make humanity better?'

The encyclical calls on us to “join forces in building up the common good.”

This is a message we need right now.

Fifty Years is VC firm that backs founders making something civilization needs. Think companies curing disease, combating the climate crisis, ending aging, accelerating science.

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We also run a founder foundry that helps scientists and engineers start startups: https://www.fiftyyears.com/5050

We're hiring for many roles:

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4/ Opportunistically for other roles as well.

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Amazing. Also neat that we may actually learn to treat human infections better after this discovery.

"Erik Frank. Laurent Keller also adds that these findings 'have medical implications because the primary pathogen in ant’s wounds, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is also a leading cause of infection in humans, with several strains being resistant to antibiotics'."

Love imagining leading scientists from big pharma rushing to investigate the compound cocktails ants are using to make the next blockbuster drug.

If we could have solved the really big problems that remain with SaaS apps, we probably would have already. We're really good at building them. Most of the really big problems the world is facing require really hard solutions. Often this involves commercializing core research (like the foundation model companies) or building in atoms and not just bits. The sheer amount of talent and money going into SaaS feels like a massive misallocation of resources.

So this is a common argument against longevity -- that dictators would remain in power for even longer.

A simple counterpoint: imagine a world were we all did live until 500 years old. And there were some bad dictators in that world. If you lived in that world, would you suggest cutting everyone's lifespan to 80 years old to diminish the power of those dictators?

This is huge. Yes it's in dogs but for the first time the FDA has said lifespan extension is an acceptable endpoint for a therapeutic! This could help open the floodgates for longevity therapeutics and will be written about in the history books.

This is why for domains like science, tools like Elicit are so needed [1].

They've been doing some interesting work on factored cognition to avoid these sort of hallucinations [2].

1: https://elicit.com/ 2: https://blog.elicit.com/factored-verification-detecting-and-...

Thanks for helping me catch a 10 year old typo!

True. And you're likely to lose your team's trust to. If employees see a leader telling white lies to potential customers (or to anyone) they're likely to ask "I wonder what white lies they're telling me?"

Great example of how sacrificing integrity to potentially cut corners is long term self-defeating.

Fwiw I published this post when my startup was falling apart because of my mistakes and I had no idea how to save it (and in the end couldn't).

I'm the author of the post. Happy to answer any questions anyone has! So many lessons learned the painful way.

Post author here. If a customer asked "and I'll be able to upload my own data?" and the response was "absolutely" even though that functionality didn't exist yet because we knew we could build it before they launched, that's nothing approaching fraud. I don't believe we ever once didn't have a feature like this that a customer wanted before they actually launched. The disagreement is whether it's ok to just say "absolutely" or whether it's important to say the full "just to be clear, the product can't do that today but we can build it before you launch." 10 years later I'd take the latter approach.

Post author here. We did work out a repayment plan for some taxes. Payroll taxes are generally "if you have the money in the account, you have to pay immediately" though, so we wrote a large check for those as soon as we discovered the error.

I felt like folks were getting too optimistic in the early days and now I feel folks are getting way to pessimistic. We don't know if any of these failed replication experiments actually made the same LK-99 the Korean team did. The only way of knowing for sure if LK-99 is a room temp superconductor is if outside labs test the samples the Korean team has made. It's entirely possible that the exact impurities in their material caused by their exact manufacturing process are required for superconducting properties to emerge. Seems like that will be done in the next few weeks. Still betting against it working but keeping my fingers crossed.

One of my favorite things about the Hacker News community is the unexpected popularity of things like this, about the welfare of non-human animals. As someone who cares deeply about this issue, it's heartwarming and gives me hope.

I do wonder why this community seems to disproportionately care about this. Anyone have any thoughts?

There's something indescribably magical about visiting a site that's only been visited by ~8k people max and hasn't been updated since 1998. Like landing on a secret world.

http://warriorguyver.com/gfa/oldsite2/INDEX1.HTML

Perfect combination combining the wonders of youth (video games) with the wonders of adult age (understanding and building technology).

I was curious about the booty bumping of ecstasy comment.

https://goaskalice.columbia.edu/answered-questions/plugging-...

Should have also said that I agree with your overarching point and thought the post was great!

He writes that "no business is safe at this point." I disagree and actually wrote my first blog post in 8 years today explaining why:

https://www.sethbannon.com/p/defensibility-in-the-age-of-ai

https://archive.is/GGXnP

All VCs should be doing this. Sadly, many aren't.

https://twitter.com/sethbannon/status/1634934773377294336

This post makes me extremely hopeful. It's great to see optimism and caution hand in hand like this -- a full acknowledgment of the potential for good and the potential for harm, and some clear principles as to how to navigate that. Very curious to see how they flush out the "training should be audited" bit in the future.

I was able to see LaMDA in action about 1.5 years ago. It was just as awe-inducing as ChatGPT. Google is not behind in this race, they're simply slower to roll out new functionality. And maybe rightly so? Some of the things I saw ChatGPT say would have been multi-day international bad headlines for Google, if a Google AI had said them instead of an upstart startup.

I was able to see LaMDA in action about 1.5 years ago. It was just as awe-inducing as ChatGPT. Google is not behind in this race. They're simply slower to roll out new functionality. And maybe rightly so? Some of the things I saw ChatGPT say would have been multi-day international bad headlines for Google, if a Google AI had said them instead of an upstart startup.

Jack Ma considered himself a failure at 30. Failed college entrance exam 3 times. Applied to 30 jobs (including fast food restaurants) and was rejected from them all. Never wrote any code. And then at 35 founded Alibaba. He's now worth $25B. You'll be fine!

I guess 2 should be a copy editor! :-)

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Worth noting that they were able to treat osteoarthritis in mice using transplanted mammalian cells engineered to photosynthesize. They also posit that this can be used to treat common degenerative diseases in humans by enhancing cell anabolism (the process by which cells utilize energy to build molecules and other things like proteins and lipids from smaller molecules). Though still much work to be done there.