excentricus
For at least a year or so, I’ve found very little substance in your writing. It’s mostly surface-level material, resembling the fluff we see on startup company blogs.
Even though I don’t use your relatively recent open-source projects, I respect the effort and contribution. But that’s not what I’m talking about. So, it’s not about your work in general.
Your blog and website content lack depth, originality, and sincerity. You’re trying to sell something, and I’m not a buyer. Still, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that people who buy your stuff have terrible judgment.
You cover AI extensively, but your style and apparent depth of knowledge on the subject (at least judging by your content) remind me of those “experts” invited onto news shows who have no solid credentials but have somehow figured out how to get airtime through social skills, connections, or networking. They present surface-level information riddled with logical and intellectual holes, yet manage to sound convincing to people with limited or no background in the subject.
Anyway, good luck with your content machine.
actually, to me, it was one of the first signs of what’s favored and praised in the AI space (companies building models, doing ai research). an accelerationist mindset: do things to save the day and demonstrate some progress. no one cares much about what comes next, the human aspect, or the headaches you inflict upon your coworkers.
anthropic hiring those guys is not surprising at all, especially given their vibecode-oriented workflows disguised as next-gen product engineering (which is educated vibecoding adorned with some superficial engineering ethos).
they hired some seniors too. one of them went to work on claude code because he cared a lot about the craft and the product. (how ironic right!?)
soon after, they started talking crazy cult stuff like “the software problem is solved” and “this is probably the last job i (can) have (as a software engineer, product developer).” he also told a friend who applied to their team, “better hurry up, we might become jobless in 6 months” (this was almost a year ago :S).
Also, in my limited personal experience so far, the people who relentlessly talk about and evangelize first principles thinking (mostly highly self-confident tech bros and big-tech veterans) are often the ones who fail most absurdly at actually doing it. It reminds me of the exchange attributed to Robert Surcouf: when an English officer supposedly told him, “You French fight for money, while we English fight for honour,” Surcouf replied, “Each man fights for what he lacks.”
P.S I don’t have any stance on the French-English conflict in the anecdote above.
The worst part is that the product, the actual output, often feels underwhelming and at odds with the narrative around it. Action matters more than the narrative. Show these principles in your work and in how you engage with the community, rather than through shallow thought-leadership mumbo jumbo.
Another thing I find skin-crawling is bragging disguised as humility and sincerity. Come on!! Expecting people to buy into that performance is, in itself, a kind of insult to their intelligence.
Whether that makes a good long-term investment is quite debatable. IMO, LeCun’s take (at the end) is far more forward-looking since it aims to gain more insight into what could come next based on what we know about the current state of the art.
All that being said, the extent to which these people capitalize on our tendency to be blinded by the halo effect is incredible. A constant stream of bite-sized aphorisms…
This is especially at a different level for early startup figures who happened to be in the right place at the right time and usually did little more than digitizing mundane, traditional day-to-day processes. Yet they’re treated as geniuses and prophets, with people hanging on their every word as though everything they say contains some deeper wisdom. PG and the like often strike me as broken clocks and they’re still profiting from having been very early players in the game, who had good instincts for commercialization and capitalism.
————
LeCun’s reply:
> I would try to figure out why LLMs can write my essays but not clean my bedroom. Then I would study topics in college and grad school that could help solve that problem. I'll figure out a set of methods and architectures beyond LLMs that can quickly learn to perform physical tasks as efficiently as humans and animals. That last item is also what I would if I were 30, 40, 50, or 66 years old
This is what I think too. But, users’ psychology might be playing a role here. Anthropic has great advantage from being the first major player delivering functional agentic coding solution (rather than an intelligent autocomplete) and they were able to impress people by Opus’ iterative improvements early this year.
It’s technically very easy to switch between models, harnesses but their moat or perhaps a main source of users’ friction could be FOMO. That’s especially powerful in this competitive environment where everyone keeps wondering/worrying about what others might be doing to get or stay ahead.
It feels like prompt(s) is where the actual thinking can be observed these days.
Even if that’s your genuine view of the reported issue, instead of posting a message full of word salad, you could just say something along the lines of “valid feedback yet i couldn’t reproduce, i will pass this along to our model team since it’s more about model behavior, etc.”
Also, that “generated by CC” feels overtly disrespectful and shows how little care goes into hearing feedback. But, why would you listen if no matter what you do your valuation almost doubles every several months (at least for now).
For many reasons, it doesn’t feel sane and humane to impose this way of working on employees without their consent.
The tech space has always had some cult-like, belief-driven practices, but I think we used to have more diversity in terms of working cultures and conventions, which made it easier to find an option that better fit your values and way of thinking. Things are becoming very uniform, at a pace that could compete with dystopian fiction, where all of us are coerced into gathering around an “absolute” truth or at least operating according to one.
i recently had to stop using logi options, whatever the heck it’s called, because the app doesn’t start on my mac (sequoia). no error, no logs, nothing helpful can be found online. i gave up and started using bettermouse, which i have mixed feelings about. it does the job but the set of controls feels too complicated/overwhelming. i couldn’t find that sweet spot for my pointer speed/precision yet.
This is one of my biggest concerns about AI’s social impact. On top of that, models are positioned as superior to humans, at least in certain aspects (intelligence, knowledge) by AI companies’ PR campaigns, fear-mongering, and also by the changing tone of LLMs (e.g. Opus 5 sounds like a very patronizing, know-it-all, cynical person). I am afraid this is causing a shift in how humanity perceives itself and the way they relate to this technology, so AI might stop being a tool/technology and turn into a mythical, god-like superior being.