The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).
It’s kinda obvious he’s a well spoken shark. Personally not an issue for me, you have to be at the top of a unicorn, but it isn’t something people in general like.
Interesting, are there any sources for the shark claims ? I recently saw an interview with Hassabis and him and thought: <well at least those are two actual scientist leading AI labs/devisions>, so that gave me some hope that what they discussed regarding security and eventual equal distribution of "AI" benefits had some genuine intention.
> if some women absolutely can't find something in their size from a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like it being "for fit people only".
This is how many brands originally blow up and grow famous. Especially in Asia.
You make clothing in sizes only extremely slim people can wear.
This is an extremely popular brand that specifically does this, and it's hardly the only one:
Lululemon famously had that 'incident' where they flat out stated their brand just wasn't suitable for fat people. Given their brand identity this makes complete sense, whilst also excluding a large group of people. Expect more of this type of edgy marketing — it is in line with the zeitgeist (consider that eugenic jeans ad).
That commercial could have been any attractive woman without changing the tone or meaning. it just drives some people crazy that a subset of humans "controls" like half the land on earth but comprises only 7% of the population, therefore everything about or having to do with that subset or the individuals therein is automatically considered "bad."
There were commercials that had jingles "bust a nut, bust a nut, just open up a can and bust a nut. you can do it in the bathroom, you can do it in the kitchen, you can do it with your best friend [...]" nearly 30 years ago. Commercials are generally in poor taste, but some people read way too much into it.
> At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.
This must be why KLOCs are considered such a great indicator of productivity and why churn is used to measure code quality /s
I've worked in multiple start-ups and more mature companies, they always slow down because producing code is easier then building a product. More code is only better when quality hardly matters, which is basically never
Right now everything put online for humans is being sucked up for the robots. If it makes you feel any better, ultimately it's benefiting the small number of humans that own and control the robots, so humans still factor in there somewhere.
Actually they didn't release the actual files yet, and now they seemed to scrub even all mentions of the metadata torrents out of their website, because they were threatened by lawyers.
I don't know about AGI, but these models are automating a lot of work.
I think but do not know that we'll have higher level work that sits atop it.
I don't know if/when we won't be needed to orchestrate that work.
I'm worried that if we don't have open source models that are up to par with the work-automating models that we'll have a rosy future. One of my biggest fears right now is big capital owning all the big models and infra. And that one day, they'll own all the labor.
I share your worry, and I would say that the AGI scare is definitely instrumental to the outcome you’re describing. It’s a narrative that serves the goal of large capital, with the hope of a side of regulatory capture too.
Reddit never faced the same pressure. The API thing pissed off mobile users, but all of the Reddit alternatives, such as Voat, were hyper polarized politically and were not good destinations for most people. They collected the "worst parts of Reddit" rather than providing a place for the majority of users.
The same thing happened to Twitter. Bluesky is very polarized and constantly gets poked fun at because of it, even by left-leaning folks. Threads was a much more neutral and inviting space that doesn't force you to wear a particular set of politics on your sleeves.
Discord has a few (small) alternatives that aren't alienating or off-putting.
> Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before?
The model owner can just withhold access and build all the businesses themselves.
Financial capital used to need labor capital. It doesn't anymore.
We're entering into scary territory. I would feel much better if this were all open source, but of course it isn't.
I think this risk is much lower in a world where there are lots of different model owners competing with each other, which is how it appears to be playing out.
New fields are always competitive. Eventually, if left to its own devices, a capitalist market will inevitably consolidate into cartels and monopolies. Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late.
> Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late.
Before its too late for what? For OpenAI and Claude to privatise their models and restrict (or massively jack up the prices) for their APIs?
The genie is already out of the bottle. The transformers paper was public. The US has OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google and Meta all making foundation models. China has Deepseek. And Huggingface is awash with smaller models you can run at home. Training and running your own models is really easy.
Monopolistic rent seeking over this technology is - for now - more or less impossible. It would simply be too difficult & expensive for one player to gobble up all their competitors, across multiple continents. And if they tried, I'm sure investors will happily back a new company to fight back.
Why would the model owner do that? You still need some human input to operate the business, so it would be terribly impractical to try to run all the businesses. Better to sell the model to everyone else, since everyone will need it.
The only existential threat to the model owner is everyone being a model owner, and I suspect that's the main reason why all the world's memory supply is sitting in a warehouse, unused.
The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).
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