Comment by seu 2 days ago
These changes in direction (spending billions, freezing hiring) over just a few months show that these people are as clueless as to what's going to happen with AI, as everyone else. They just have the billions and therefore dictate where money goes, but that's it.
But always remember, it's not technically a monopoly!
Boy am I tired of that one. We desperately need more smaller companies and actual competition but nobody seems to even be trying
Many of us in the antitrust/competition law community are trying. One issue, specific to digital markets, is that the field has very few people who are both legally and technically literate. If you're a technical person looking for a career shift, moving into legal policy/academia has the potential to be quite high impact for that reason.
Gods I would love to work more in a policy space, tho my background is entirely technical.
A friend of mine has been trying to get into law school for a few years; she's technically competent and plenty intelligent, but it's been hard going for her to get in, plus multiple years of education to even attempt the bar. All of that sounds like far too much sunk-cost to me to dally in and figure out if it's a path I would truly enjoy.
What ways could I engage with policy coming from a technical background that would serve as a useful stepping stone to a more policy based career, but doesn't require such an upfront cost as a law degree?
The allocation of capital is not even close to a monopoly. There are plenty of VC firms looking to fund almost any idea.
The point of VC, specifically, is to grow software monopolies - but it's very easy to pick up VC funding if you happen to live in the Bay Area.
Yes and: As a more palatable form of carbon tax?
Yes, mosedef, I'm all in.
Please post/share any news or tips you find. TIA.
Well, clearly he should stick to physics. Even if it's likely that AI would replace them soon, a lot of people would likely die unnecessarily if we ran overly low on radiologists by ending the pipeline too soon. They're already overworked and that can only go so far. It's not a bet we should make.
Author Ted Chiang is the only celebrity AI kibitzer pundit I wholly agree with.
Paraphrasing: Capital will use / is using AI to further bludgeon Labor.
The media always says AI is the biggest technological change of our lifetime.. I think it was the internet actually.
The media was saying nfts are a reasonable investment and web3 is the future, so I am not sure if they have any remaining credibility.
We are at the awesome moment in history when the AI bubble is popping so I am looking forward to a lot of journalists eating their words (not that anybody is keeping track but they are wrong most of the time) and a lot of LLM companies going under and the domino crash of the stocks of Meta, OpenAI to AWS, Google and Microsoft to Softbank (the same guys giving money to Adam Neumann from WeWork).
Can I ask why you would be looking forward to the stock market crashing? Vindication?
Who benefits from high stock prices?
Certainly not people regularly buying stocks or stock ETFs/Funds.
With stock prices divorced from reality, the ones who benefit are the having the funds to buy in volume, the gamblers, and the ones hyping the stocks and creating the illusion of profitability and growth. Years ago it would have been unthinkable to have so many unprofitable companies with unclear path to profitablility having such a high valuation, but we have normalized frenzied gambling as a society.
The current absolute balloon of a market is about to pop, and sadly, the people who hyped the stocks are also the ones knowing when to jump ship, while the hapless schmucks who believed the hype will most likely lose their money, along with a lot of folks whose retirement investment funds either didn't due their diligence or were outright greedy.
In a way, as a society we deserve this upcoming crash, because we allow charlatans and con people like Musk, Zuck and Sam to sell us snake oil.
I’d say that the social media revolution had a bigger effect than AI has at this point.
I guess we will know when we are in the Facebook era when my parents start using it.
That is a genuinely fair take. I agree
Social media was a quality of life upgrade where it wasn't promising too much, and it delivered on what it promised. (maybe a little too much)
AI on the other hand just like blockchain feels like hype.
Social Media is basically what enabled me to actually be social during the Friendster/Early Myspace era. It helped me get to know people I'd met in real life, and meet other people within the city I lived in.
Now if you're not on linkedIn, people question whether you are a real person or not.
I hope AI ends up like blockchain. It's there if you have a use-case for it, but it's not absolutely embedded in everything you do. Both are insanely cool technologies.
That's one interpretation, but nobody really knows. It's also possible that they got a bunch of big egos in a room and decided they didn't need any more until they figured out how to organize things.
you think folks that have experience managing this much money/resources (unlike yourself) are clueless? more likely it's 4D chess.
When your track record includes a lot of losses, the scale points more and more toward "clueless" and away from "4D chess".
And like VR?
And like...LLAMa?
Maybe also like adding ads in WhatsApp cause we gotta squeeze our users so we can spend on... AI gurus?
Meta has not had a win since they named themselves Meta. It's enjoyable to watch them flail around like clueless morons jumping on every fad and wasting their time and money.
Like everything but acquisitions since the original product?
Zuck is fantastic at transferring wealth. Not so great at creating wealth.
Yes, yes I do. How much practical experience does someone with billions of dollars have with the average person, the average employee, the average job, and the kind of skills and desires that normal people possess? How much does today's society and culture and technology resemble society even just 15 years ago? Being a billionaire allows them to put themselves into their own social and cultural bubble surrounded by sycophants.
This is a structural problem with our economy, much larger than just Facebook. Due its large scale concentration, the allocation of capital in the economy as a whole has become far less efficient over the last 20 years.