Talent attracts capital. Ilya is a legendary visionary, with a proven track record of turning billions into hundreds of billions. Of course he can raise unlimited money.

There is so much talent in the world that didn’t join PayPal and get silicon valley investors and go on to make billions of dollars and found other companies.

The PayPal mafia includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, etc. They now parlayed that capital into more platforms and can easily arrange investments. Heck Peter Thiel even works with governments (Palantir) and got J D Vance on Trump’s ticket, while Elon might be in his admin.

Kolomoisky got Zelensky elected in Ukraine, by launching a show about an unlikely guy who wins the presidency and named the party after the show. They call them oligarchs over there but it’s same thing.

The first guy to 1 million followers on Twitter was Ashton Kutcher. He had already starred in sitcoms and movies for years.

This idea that you can just get huge audiences and investments due to raw talent, keeps a lot of people coming to Hollywood and Silicon Valley to “make it” and living on ramen. But even just coming there proves the point — a talented rando elsewhere in the world wouldn’t even have access to the capital and big boys networks.

They all even banked at the same bank! It’s all extremely centralized: https://community.intercoin.app/t/in-defense-of-decentralize...

Those people weren’t handed that success. You are acting as if they were born billionaires, which is far from true.

It’s not personally my goal to amass immense wealth and start giant companies (I would rather work minimally and live hedonically) but I am impressed by those that do so.

No, I’m saying it was those who went to silicon valley and got lucky to strike up relationships with CAPITAL who made it.

Overwhelmingly talent isnt sufficient. For most startups, the old boys network gets to choose who gets millions. And the next rounds a few people choose who will get billions.

If you look at the early stages of Google or Zip2, they were NOT swimming in money. Facebook only attracted serious investments when they already had something that looked promising. Apple started in a bedroom in the parent's house, before being moved to the garage, and so on.

If anything, I think startups from 2005-2020 were more likely to get founding easily than those giants.

But after succeeding, in some cases several times, all of the above found it easier to find investors.

Ilya has a similar track record. He contributed on several breakthroughs such as AlexNet, AlphaGo, seq2seq (that would evolve into transformers after he left Google) before even joining OpenAI.

In fact, Elon see it as one of his key contributions to OpenAI that he managed to recruit Ilya.

That Ilya is able to raise 1B now is hardly surprising. He's probably able to raise way more than that once he's hired a larger team.

I never understood this line of reasoning, because it presumes that everyone should have access to the same opportunities. It's clearly silly once you throw a few counter examples: should a Private in the military be able to skip the ranks and be promoted straight to General? Should a new grad software dev be able to be promoted to lead engineer without getting any experience?

Clearly there are reasons why opportunities are gated.

> This idea that you can just get huge audiences and investments due to raw talent, keeps a lot of people coming to Hollywood and Silicon Valley to “make it” and living on ramen. But even just coming there proves the point — a talented rando elsewhere in the world wouldn’t even have access to the capital and big boys networks.

All those people start somewhere though. Excluding nepotism, which is tangential point, all those people started somewhere and then grew through execution and further opening of opportunity. But it's not like they all got to where they are in one-shot. Taking your Ashton Kutcher example - yes he had a head start on twitter followers, but that's because he executed for years before on his career. Why would it make sense for some rando to rack up a million followers before he did?

Talent will earn you opportunities, but it's not going to open the highest door until you've put in the time and work.

Of course, it's not to say inequity or unequal access to opportunities doesn't exist in the world. Of course it does. But even in an ideal, perfectly equitable world, not everyone would have the same access to opportunities.

So yes, it makes perfect sense that someone would give Ilya $1B instead of some smart 18 year old, even if that 18 year old was Ilya from the past.

Presumably the private and the general are in the SAME organization and yes, the avenues for advancement are available equally to all, it’s based on merit and the rules are clear.

The analogy would be if the private could become a major overnight because they knew a guy.

Yes but a private cannot become a general without decades of experience.

What we see with ilya is not dissimilar. I don't see why it's bad that people are more hesitant to give a talented 18 year old $1B than the guy who's been at the forefront of AI innovation.

Necessary but not sufficient

And sometimes not even necessary. Paris Hilton got a music distribution deal overnight cause of her dad’s capital!

> And sometimes not even necessary. Paris Hilton got a music distribution deal overnight cause of her dad’s capital!

Nepotism is a tangential point, and yes I agree that it's a bad thing. Ilya did not get this deal through nepotism, he got it through his past accomplishments, much like how a general gets promoted after many years of exemplary work.