next_xibalba

It could be even weirder. We might be playing video games that are essentially built from the ground up by and for the individual gamer, such that the concept of a "game", let alone the same game, doesn't even make sense. Same for what we have called movies and TV for the last 100 years.

The implications for what we now call video games are crazy.

> little hard evidence that they’ll generate the revenue (let alone the cashflow) to pay for all these future liabilities

According to the S1:

- FY24 revenue $386 million -> FY25 revenue $4.59 billion (+1,008%)

- Q126 revenue $4.7 billion -> Q26 revenue $11.5 billion (+145%)

That seems like pretty good evidence of current and ongoing explosive growth. Much of this revenue is pre-paid (re: cashflow). Meanwhile, operating margins went from -184% to -$4%.

Seems like pretty good evidence. Will growth continue apace? Unknown. But the arguments for Jevon's paradox applying to intelligence seem pretty convincing, so the TAM here seems likely to be enormous.

> All while everyone is discovering there isn’t really a secret sauce moat to demand

Also not convinced by this. The Chinese models seem to have distilled their way to current levels, with Anthropic and OpenAI now getting serious about defending against this.

I don't think you're definitely wrong in all this. Rather, I think your claims are too confident.

With respect, I think this is a naive opinion. The banks that were bailed out were systemically important. This would not have been normal bankruptcies, with a very real risk of plunging the U.S. into a depression as bad as or worse than the Great Depression. So, the objective was to prevent that. And in order to keep these institutions in good working order by retaining the key employees who operated the institutions, bonuses were approved. It was distasteful and there was significant public and legislator outrage.

And, once again, the taxpayer turned a tidy profit on the bailouts.

You’re withholding important context.

Bonuses (owed under preexisting agreements) were an unfortunate necessity. The USG effectively nationalized AIG because it was determined to be too systemically important to be allowed to chaotically fail. So, the new owners needed to retain the employees necessary to continue its operations. To do so, they had to honor employee compensation agreements.

This turned out to be a wise move as the American taxpayer ended up turning a profit on the AIG bailout.

And it wasn’t as though the bonuses were uncontroversial. They were possible bc of loopholes in the bailout legislation. But the government was furious and, alongside public outrage, pressured the executives to give the back bonuses. The house of representatives even passed a bill to tax the bonuses at 90%. Many did voluntarily give them back.

Kinda cool, but also annoying that it's just backdoor marketing for a b2b SaaS company.

I'd never heard of this. It turns out it is very rare for publicly traded companies [1]. In these cases, I would guess it comes down to contract terms. But again, it's not as though the law would compel an individual to continue working at a company. It would just come down to what the contracts say, and, potentially, how the courts interpret those contracts in the event of a lawsuit.

[1] Examples I found: Worksport Ltd., Exicure, Inc., Rainmaker Worldwide Inc., and Acorn Energy, Inc.

I think copyright is mostly not relevant. Contracts operate mostly independent of copyright law (in the U.S.). If OpenAI puts in their license something to the effect of "you may not train your LLMs on these outputs" and/or "your access is limited in these ways", but you violate the license, they can and should block your access and sue you. These are things that can be monitored and enforced under existing law.

And, in fact, they already do this:

- OpenAI [1]: "[you may not] Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI."

- Google [2]: "You may not use the Services to develop machine learning models or related technology."

- Anthropic [3]: "[You may not use our services] to develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services"

[1] https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/

[2] https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/archive/2023...

[3] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms

Likely anything that goes beyond missing out on compensation (ex: unvested RSUs) or even clawing back some comp would violate labor laws. CEOs are still employees, and legislation regulating employer-employee relations trumps all contracts.

'Fair play' is a dimension of competition. They aren't orthogonal attributes.

You can compete fairly or unfairly.

In any event, distillation seems to be in a grey enough area that reasonable people can disagree (IMO). It strikes me as more akin to theft than to fair competition, but it doesn't seem like it should be treated as criminal. Rather, I think the onus should be on the labs to defend themselves against it.

All that said, Jensen's take is clearly quite biased.

I have been saying for years that the great gap for ML is that it isn't in space. Glad Google finally caught up with me.

He is of course 100% correct. There is no way to stop RSI without truly global cooperation and enforcement. And the incentives are such that global cooperation will never happen. So what Klein and others are really discussing is depriving the U.S. of the benefits of RSI while other nations race ahead. Even if China and the U.S. were to officially ban RSI, the compute would simply migrate to friendlier jurisdictions. In any case, enforcement, as Cowen correctly points out, would be nearly impossible.

None of this is to say that labs and researchers shouldn't take alignment extremely seriously and dedicate major resources to it. But, again, incentives. The lab(s) that allocates more resources to "intelligence" than alignment will have a compounding marginal advantage. And they all know that and are acting accordingly.

> purchased milk in a completely sealed plastic container, and it was rancid when I opened it

I've lived in the U.S. for 40 years in 8 different states and twice as many cities. Never once have I experienced this.

That’s like saying the goal of the process is the process. It is a recursive definition and a pointless, expensive endeavor.

> In my community, [strawberry leaves are] considered medicine

Huh? What does this mean? Isn't this a binary? Either they are or are not medicine. I don't "consider" Tylenol a medicine. It is because it has an effect.

Thanks for the reference. I am interested in your specific perspective as opposed to someone else's (much less else the received opinions from The Experts).

Which laws? And why?

I can't think of a single unionized organization that is run as well as or better than union-free organizations. Unionized companies all seem to be crippled by bureaucracy and unable to improve performance and output.

And all of that (along with the serious problems in how WMF/Wikipedia operate) is why I no longer donate to WMF.

Clearly, they don't need my money. But if they ever want to bring me back into the fold, they need to adopt Larry Sanger's prescriptions. This unionization seems likely to push WMF (IMO) further in the wrong direction.

We can’t even execute heinous murderers effectively. What makes you think this would be any better?

It’s the classic confidently wrong HN opinion about a field outside the commenter’s expertise.

It is truly amazing how hostile some of these "free thinkers" are to ideas and speech that are in conflict with their own. Kind of makes you wonder who is actually fascist.

Why are these books "rare"? Because no one wants them. Why then are we up in arms over their destruction? These sensational headlines make it seem as though a copy of the Codex Sassoon 1053 is being destroyed, when in fact these are just obscure books that no one cares about.

The rhetoric on this topic is reminiscent of the rhetoric regarding data centers: some noxious combination of misinformation, misunderstanding, and sensationalism, wielded against technological progress.

I worked with a woman who, in 1-on-1 meetings no less, would stop mid-sentence when she received text messages and reply via her Apple Watch. It was maddening. I finally had to kindly ask her to be present and stop playing with her watch.

My uninformed hypothesis: Demis was gently pushed out. Gemini, while having made major strides over the last year, continues to lag behind Anthropic and OpenAI.

Doubtful. His destination is both funded by Google and has a compute deal with Google.

And yet:

> Despite the July losses, Situational Awareness remains up about 80% on the year and holds a portfolio of investments in private companies including Anthropic.

80% return (YTD) is the type of performance for which many hedge fund managers would sacrifice their first born.

What is your theory of how the dominoes fall and why?

My understanding of this situation (ahem) is that SI was highly leveraged and where tech (ai and adjacent) stock prices fell, they got margin called ABs were forced to liquidate. Why would this lead to cascading events beyond SI? It appears to have been a very orderly liquidation. No counterparties are reported to have been blown up. Nothing systemic.

There is quite a bit of information out there as to how Google is achieving short term growth in their core search business. And boy, it is ugly. It does not signal long term continued growth.

It tickles me greatly how much HN’ers are fascinated by dithering. It seems like a few times per year a post about dithering makes the front page.