Like everything, it's projection. Those who loudly scream against something are almost always the ones engaging in it.
Google screamed against service revenue and advertising while building the world's largest advertising empire. Facebook screamed against misinformation and surveillance while enabling it on a global scale. Netflix screamed against the overpriced cable TV industry while turning streaming into modern overpriced cable television. Uber screamed against the entrenched taxi industry harming workers and passengers while creating an unregulated monster that harmed workers and passengers.
Altman and OpenAI are no different in this regard, loudly screaming against AI harming humanity while doing everything in their capacity to create AI tools that will knowingly harm humanity while enriching themselves.
If people trust the performance instead of the actions and their outcomes, then we can't convince them otherwise.
Oh I'm not saying they every believed more than their self-centered views, but that in a world that leaned more liberal there was value in trying to frame their work in those terms. Now there's no need to pretend.
And to those who "say" at least now they're honest, I say "WHY?!" Unconditionally being "good" would be better than disguising selfishness as good. But that's not really a thing. Having to maintain the presence of doing good puts significant boundaries on what you can get away with, and increases the consequence when people uncover some shit.
Condoning "honest liars" enables a whole other level of open and unrestricted criminality.
It is not _completely_ naive to believe that in order for a service like Facebook to continue being successful, they must do _something_ that makes their users want to use it.
And therefore, it is not completely illogical to think that Meta’s interests and users’ interests must align.
(Not my opinion, just responding to your question)
> I assume you mean they do a good job of not acting in their own interests...?
They do a good jobs of working in the interest of their constituents. Whether that also includes self interest, I don’t know. They are politicians, their job is to work for their constituents, if we’ve managed to align their self interest with doing their jobs well, that seems fine.
> Let me know what state I should move to.
State and local governments seem to be rated fairly well, just go to one that matches your ideology.
This also happens in corporate culture, because of nepotism and grift. It happens much faster after a corporation captures the government / institutions that would normally check it. I believe in meritocracy, but once you have institutional capture, meritocracy is just a con to convince smart people to work for a fraction of what they could earn on the type of unregulated market that allowed their overlords to become wildly rich. For example: I'm probably the best designer/coder of casino games ever to walk this planet. I can't make a living doing what I love and I'm great at, because it's either $150k a year from a shady company in Cyprus [edit: which is shit money from people I'd never work for], or it's wholesale illegal to do it on my own. Elon Musk never wrote a line of code, but a good chunk of his PayPal money came from facilitating gambling transactions, essentially illegal at the time and certainly more so now.
Merit will get you a 401(k) and a job where you have a nice coffee station and some bean bags to sit on, and a ping pong table. Lord knows, the ping pong table proves you've got merit. But does your boss really have more merit than you? It seems to me that the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the less actual merit people exhibit, and the less they notice it among their underlings (as opposed to loyalty or ass-kissing), but the more they claim to believe in it.
I'm not arguing against merit. I'm a capitalist. I'm just pointing out that the people who so often tout merit are the same people who get most of their tax credits from backroom deals with politicians, and don't seem to earn their keep by the sweat of their own brow. Merit would imply the ability to do both equally well.
I do worry about seeing more of these posts, as a way of SV people - who bare a substantial burden of guilt for enabling the collective mess we’re in because the ad-tech/algorithm dollars were nice - collectively distancing themselves from facing said guilt.
No idea is this particular person is especially part of the problem, I’m just talking about general vibes.
The electrical efficiency of breaking water to hydrogen, then combusting hydrogen through a turbine to generate electricity, compares extremely disfavourably to most other forms of storage - it takes about 50kWh of electricity to produce 1kg of Hydrogen, and if you propagate that back through a turbine and make some conservative assumptions about electrolyser costs and so on and so on, you're sort of approaching 5x the cost of others forms of renewable electricity to make electricity from stored hydrogen.
Of course, if we're building enough renewable capacity that electricity is basically free when it's sunny or windy, that changes the eceonomics and maybe we should all be making hydrogen in that sort of [bumpily]-abundant future.
However, storing hydrogen is also a pain - the density is crap even as a liquid and very technically challenging, and the density is mind-bogglingly crap as a gas - you'd want to find some vast geological underground reservoir in which to store it economically.
None of these are insurmountable, it's just not an especially attractive option as things stand.
Total system cost is what matters, efficiency is only a small part of the equation. As far as I know a mixture of batteries and hydrogen in a renewable grid looks like the cheapest solution.
Storing hydrogen is trivially done in salt caverns. We already do it that way today.
I'm from the dark ages and am interested in this for non-AI things like CFD. What is the state of SDK support for these chips? Is there a nice rust or C++ library that abstracts the hardware and lets you just do very big Matrix multiplications?
Things already are that bad, you’re standing an inch beyond where the previous wave washed up to and saying “well if it gets here in the next few waves then suddenly we become in deep shit’ while all around people are shouting at you about the existence of a concept called ‘the tide’. This is happening right now. fight back.
Come on. Even if all of Darpa is shut down, it will hardly matter. Come back in 4 years and see that the world is still turning but you've used up your hyperbolic panic on a big nothing-burger.
Just because the world keeps turning doesn't mean it's unaffected. Small shifts today can have huge consequences down the line, and brushing everything off as a 'nothing-burger' is exactly how real damage gets ignored. I wonder-what would actually have to happen for you to stop calling it that? This situation is, at the very least, unusual.
For the past 25 years, there have been consistent small shifts towards more government deficit [1]. Aren't those the problem that has to be stopped? I don't know enough about economics but can this really continue forever or is it just exacerbating some painful problem in the future if it's not reversed now? Maybe non-essential for-the-future work like Darpa isn't the best thing to spend money on when you're trying to reduce spending as fast as you can? It can always be re-instated in more prosperous times.
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