Just to be clear, I absolutely agree with you but corporations are made solely to create a profit and it tends to be lower when one is ethical. I would love if these companies act more responsibly, I would be very glad even for bare minimum eg. not causing harm actively but I just don't expect it. Because their sole existence is usually profit. Not public wellbeing. The "Increasing Shareholder value" is a joke because I noticed that some people are using this unironically.
Genuine question, because "abundance" is meaningless unless you qualify what you mean.
You're saying that we ask the ASI for "abundance" and everyone gets a mansion in silicon valley and doesn't need to work unless they want to? That doesn't seem like a realistic thing to be thinking about.
What if under the no-pause scenario within a couple of years we get cures for N diseases each one of which affects tens or hundreds of millions of people every year - how many years would you wait and keep your hand on the pause button?
Even kind of fits the model. All of the creativity man has raised is herded to the slaughterhouse and ground up so we end up with a big homogenized mash of ground up creativity, devoid of the life that gave it, rotten if not eaten soon enough.
Destruction is easy and entropically rewarded. We've long since lost our way in rewarding and recognizing things that are positive.
Howl by Ginsberg needs a rewrite. "The greatest minds of my generation were harnessed to boil the oceans and reduce the world to ash in the pursuit of capital gains"
I don't particularly agree with Ezra Klein or Francis Fukuyama, often vehemently disagree. But on the latest episode of Klein's NYT show it was interesting to hear Francis mention this coupling of wealth and political power being one of the core problems the US is grappling with.
Separate the nouveau robber barons from political power like we did the clergy?
In the United States, clergy never had formal political power. Religious movements did play major roles in the abolition of slavery and Prohibition of alcohol.
The United States had campaign-finance laws to limit the political influence money can buy. The McCain–Feingold Act restricted “dark money”. The Supreme Court struck it down in Citizens United v. FEC.
I think he’s referring to the separation of church and state that was codified at the founding of the US based on experience of how things went in Europe prior to that
Indeed. If you hold your duty to your net worth above your duty to civil society, you can't be trusted with civil society. To paraphrase Patrick Henry.
Not a lot of people were clamoring for copilot in their outlook. But NVIDIA are giving money to labs so that they will buy their hardware. Manufacturing demand for their hardware, which is used for more AI, which eager PMs stuff into every crevice they can find and call demand.
ChatGPT was the fastest growing software of all time not that long ago. Citing a bad AI product as evidence for lack of demand is saying the failure of the Homer car was due to the fact that people don't like automobiles.
You could have said this about Google's Search product...
How much would the average normie pay if Google suddenly charged? Sure the user-base would drop.
And what? Did Google suddenly become a bad business?
I find it funny how people have these strange and hypocritical viewpoints when it comes to OpenAI and Anthropic when the hyperscalars like Google, Amazon etc, followed these exact same kinds of playbooks for years and years.
I think you, and many LLM fans, have a grossly distorted view of per unit SaaS costs vs per unit current LLM costs.
Google Searches, once the infra setup was finished, were ridiculously cheap. Not the case for OpenAI & co.
Inflation adjusted, launching most of Google's core services (Search, Gmail, Maps, etc) cost less than launching ChatGPT 5. Running them at similar scales is also much cheaper per user.
There is a point at which it's just too much.
Oh, Google and Amazon never had these kinds of humongous losses and they reached profitability much sooner.
> ChatGPT was the fastest growing software of all time not that long ago.
Google+ was the fastest-growing social network of all time not that long ago.
When you're one of a pair of VC darlings that have effectively-infinite money because of -in part- handwavy promises to cure cancer and eliminate 90% of payroll everywhere, or if you're an established company that has total control over very widely used consumer products, you can do all sorts of things to manufacture amazing growth numbers.
In the case of those VC darlings, we're seeing their shift towards providing their products that are most expensive to create exclusively to B2B customers and also the shift towards justifying the elimination of most of their R&D expenditure. Every company performs belt-tightening in advance of their IPO, [0] and those two are no exception.
[0] ...which is when their finances will be scrutinized by the public and regulators...
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