I have acquaintances at Meta and they literally waste tokens on bullshit tasks. They have like 10 agents running simultaneously doing some elaborate task that takes a long time. You can’t tell me this is more productive or efficient than doing actual work. Even if half of these tasks are somewhat useful and related to your project.
Yes, second-hand experience is the same, it’s a race to find the most efficient way to light money on fire.
I suppose Zuckerberg is too busy being an alien to check his own math on AI. Like the rest of the tech broligarchs, he just assumes he is right, and any pushback is just evidence that he’s “disrupting” which also reassures him he’s right.
I really don’t get this quantity-first approach. If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans. Then bet on the N most promising applications, spin them off as separate companies with premium access to your most advanced AI models and vertically integrate them into their workflows.
This would actually, sustainably achieve a foothold into these industries, disrupt and transform them long term.
Yeah, exactly. And to explain why that bottom-up value-build didn’t happen, I need to go on a tangent about information-overload hypercapitalism.
Before ChatGPT first made waves, there was an initial round of actual “visionaries” who saw AI potential and seeded it. Once there was a demonstrated cool tech demo, the hype cycle started as normal, but unlike in prior years, the story was too big to be contained by any rational limit, and every wall street and silicon valley bro had been primed with years of watching Musk, Jobs, Gates, Balmer, and Zuckerberg, and there are probably literally millions of them with aspiring billionaire god complexes. They sold themselves and each other on this being a technology that could do everything, and realized that by intensifying others’ wild plans, they would give credibility to their own.
This feedback loop became self-reinforcing, until hyperscalers were creating trillion-dollar plans that objectively were and are insane, but everyone just kind of agreed were not insane out of self-interest. That simultaneously cut off the possibility of bottom-up innovation, because now everyone’s yacht and LA mansion and third vacation island home depended on the tech doing everything short of change your baby’s diaper.
VC bought and funded the hype for a long time, but the “show me you can make money window” started shrinking from the usual years to months to weeks, and now AI startups aren’t even getting in on it anymore and even OpenAI is discontinuing products to save compute. Now, major companies are desperate to prove their hundreds of billions of dollars in spending was worth anything at all.
Which means, the rational, normal bottom-up approach you outlined can’t work anymore. There’s no time, and too much money on the line.
If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans.
I suspect they tried that, but specialists expect to be paid for their time, and expect their work to benefit the planet. Both seem to be hard stop deal breakers for the modern tech bro.
I have acquaintances at Meta and they literally waste tokens on bullshit tasks. They have like 10 agents running simultaneously doing some elaborate task that takes a long time. You can’t tell me this is more productive or efficient than doing actual work. Even if half of these tasks are somewhat useful and related to your project.
Yes, second-hand experience is the same, it’s a race to find the most efficient way to light money on fire.
I suppose Zuckerberg is too busy being an alien to check his own math on AI. Like the rest of the tech broligarchs, he just assumes he is right, and any pushback is just evidence that he’s “disrupting” which also reassures him he’s right.
I really don’t get this quantity-first approach. If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans. Then bet on the N most promising applications, spin them off as separate companies with premium access to your most advanced AI models and vertically integrate them into their workflows.
This would actually, sustainably achieve a foothold into these industries, disrupt and transform them long term.
Yeah, exactly. And to explain why that bottom-up value-build didn’t happen, I need to go on a tangent about information-overload hypercapitalism.
Before ChatGPT first made waves, there was an initial round of actual “visionaries” who saw AI potential and seeded it. Once there was a demonstrated cool tech demo, the hype cycle started as normal, but unlike in prior years, the story was too big to be contained by any rational limit, and every wall street and silicon valley bro had been primed with years of watching Musk, Jobs, Gates, Balmer, and Zuckerberg, and there are probably literally millions of them with aspiring billionaire god complexes. They sold themselves and each other on this being a technology that could do everything, and realized that by intensifying others’ wild plans, they would give credibility to their own.
This feedback loop became self-reinforcing, until hyperscalers were creating trillion-dollar plans that objectively were and are insane, but everyone just kind of agreed were not insane out of self-interest. That simultaneously cut off the possibility of bottom-up innovation, because now everyone’s yacht and LA mansion and third vacation island home depended on the tech doing everything short of change your baby’s diaper.
VC bought and funded the hype for a long time, but the “show me you can make money window” started shrinking from the usual years to months to weeks, and now AI startups aren’t even getting in on it anymore and even OpenAI is discontinuing products to save compute. Now, major companies are desperate to prove their hundreds of billions of dollars in spending was worth anything at all.
Which means, the rational, normal bottom-up approach you outlined can’t work anymore. There’s no time, and too much money on the line.
I suspect they tried that, but specialists expect to be paid for their time, and expect their work to benefit the planet. Both seem to be hard stop deal breakers for the modern tech bro.