Uber was blatantly ignoring the local laws in order to break into the market and quickly defeat local competition. They used their infinite VC money supply to interfere with and delay investigations and enforcement, betting that if they do it fast enough, they'll have the general population on their side.
LLM vendors found and exploited[0] a legal uncertainty - correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK it still isn't settled whether or not their actions were actually illegal. Unlike Uber, LLM vendors aren't breaking into markets by ignoring the laws to outcompete incumbents, and burning stupid amounts of money just to get away with it. On the contrary, LLM vendors are simply providing an actually useful product, and charging a reasonable price for it, while reinvesting it into improving the product. Effects it has on other markets aside[1], their business model is just providing actual value in exchange for money. That's much more direct and honest than most of the tech industry.
The product itself is also different. Uber is selling a mirage, a "miracle" improvement that quickly turns not so, and is destined to eventually destroy the markets it disrupted. LLM vendors are developing and serving systems that provide actual value to users, directly and obviously so.
--
[0] - Probably walked into this without initially realizing it. No one complained 5-10 years ago, where the datasets were smaller and the resulting models had no real-world utility. It's only when the models became useful, that some people started looking for ways to make them go away.
[1] - That's an unfortunate effect of it being a general AI tool, and would be the same regardless of how it was created.
I'm not as bearish on AI, but its hard to tell if you can really extrapolate future performance based on past improvements.
Personally, I'm more interested in the political angle. I can see that AI will be disruptive because there's a ton of money and possibly other political outcomes depending on it doing exactly that.
I like the idea, but that kind of setup doesn't provide an infinitely growing revenue stream. Incidentally infinite growth targets are essentially why the internet looks the way it does today. That's the thing that needs fixing, product development is secondary to structural incentives.
Antitrust doesn't change the basic structure of capital markets, which will still demand infinite growth even if there's a government around capable of breaking up monopolies.
I think forth is fun, but I can't really take the collapse narrative of this project seriously. IG it's disrespectful, but I kinda view it as a performance art piece with fallout vibes.
Not really, at best its linear if your job is like an assembly line. Office work rarely benefits from longer hours. 8h days already have diminishing returns after 4-6h on average.
Many pilot programs have found that 4 day weeks are at least equally productive compared to 5 day weeks.
I know this is going to be an unpopular take, but isn't the idea of socialism that you make a unitary democratic government fill the role of Huge Monopoly Foundation so you can do stuff like fund research labs and be accountable to the public?
It's the statist idea. Socialism in practice usually involves regulating the market heavily, or into oblivion altogether, and giving the State a huge redistribution power. See my comment nearby on why such a setup fails to work.
A socialism where the only way to work is to own a part of an enterprise (so no "exploitation"is possible) would likely work much better, and not even require a huge state. It would be rather inflexible though, or mutate back into capitalism as some workers would accumulate larger shares of enterprises.
Having some kind of default steward for market developments that get so competitive and fundamental that they reach full market saturation is helpful. Under a market system, at that scale, the need for growth starts to motivate companies to cut corners or squeeze their customer base to keep the numbers going up. You either end up pricing everyone out (fixed supply case) or the profit margins get so slim that only a massive conglomerate can break even (insatiable demand case). This is why making fundamental needs and infrastructure into market commodities doesn't work either.
The problem with social democracy is that it still gives capitalists a seat at the table and doesn't address the fundamental issues of empowering market radicalism. Some balance would be nice, but I don't really see that happening.
"market radicalism" as in, the notion that ~all aspects of life should be subject to market forces. I think markets are good for a lot of things, but competing for basic necessities like food and shelter puts people in a really unhealthy headspace. The green revolution made a lot of our concepts about food scarcity obsolete.
A good example of market radicalism at play in the US is the healthcare system. "Everyone knows" that the market is better at allocating resources, but we actually have terrible outcomes and there is no political will to change an obviously broken system. Despite having real-world examples of single-payer (and hybrid) healthcare systems out there that are more cost effective and have better outcomes.
On what market the cost of services to be rendered would be held secret, or at least obscure? Try shopping for a particular kind of surgery across hospitals. How many plans does your employer offer? Would you rather buy a plan independently? Why?
The whole "insurance" system is not insurance mostly, but a payment scheme, of a quite bizarre, complicated, and opaque kind. The regulatory forces that gave birth to it are at least as strong as any market forces remaining in the space, and likely stronger.
OTOH direct markets are a poor way to distribute goods that have a very inelastic and time-sensitive demand, like firefighting, urgent healthcare, or law enforcement. Real insurance is a better way, and a permanent force sustained by tax money usually demonstrates the best outcomes. The less urgent healthcare is, the better a market works, all the way to fitness clubs which are 100% market-based.
Hardly. Socialism is about workers/communities owning the means of production. Research labs these days are mostly funded by the public. That's just about allocation of government resources.
The accents actually change more east-west. That's why all the movies filmed in Vancouver using local actors sound just like those filmed in LA. The "neutral" accents of the US midwest are similar to those of the Canadian prairies. Only in the east does the north-south thing become so prominent.
Norte America es un territorio enorme. Lo que yo quería decir es que la frontera política entre EEUU y Canadá no es el borde de la cultura que comparten.
I'm with you on a lot of this, but you might want to think about how circular this statement is: "until American's realize we aren't exceptional because we are American, but because our forefathers lived out American values" and then read a lot more American history before it gets deleted.
What's troubling to me is that we can't easily own our history, even while we are asserting the necessity to stay grounded in reality.
I'm in a similar boat. I dropped out of uni for reasons (a bit of a story, I can tell it if you buy me a beer) and ended up making a career out of software engineering.
The main thing to do IMO is spend time building a network. A recommendation in the right place at the right time can open doors that would otherwise be closed to you.
School is an option, but the opportunity cost has been too high so far for me. Though doing a freelance PhD thesis probably wouldn't hurt.
I think latency has to be taken into account too. Human reaction times are already on the order of 200ms, so any network latency would be additive. Anywhere close to 1000ms is too much, so you'd probably need to be less than 100ms or so from the bot you're operating.
