Deepseek blowing up like this really showed how tired everyone was with the AI founders acting like they’re saving the world.
And I don't really think they sound like they're trying to save the world. They sound like they're trying to get rich.
I posted this yesterday, but "AI is failing the Indoor Plumbing Test": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42840785
Real innovations are often boring, but they transform human lives. So far, AI has not cleared that bar. I keep hearing that AI may go rogue and exterminate humanity, but for now I'm not even sure what it will enable me to do that I couldn't do before.
Right now, this part of the internet is obsessed with genAI. Same folks that couldn't stop talking about crypto and web3 a few years ago.
And I could be wrong! But everything about this industry smells wrong. NVidia boosting to obscene highs turning out to be because developers couldn't be bothered to write optimized code. Everyone and their mother talking about AI but I still can't see real world impacts, besides customer service chatbots getting worse. Meanwhile the world burns and people die of curable disease, and we spend money making sand go brr instead.
(0) I really don't have a good term for this that isn't something like "posers." They're the folks you meet at conferences, always giving talks and writing blogs, mostly talking and very little doing. They're the people that are obsessed with technology but can never get below the surface level. This sounds dismissive, and it is, because this kind of person has wasted a lot of my brainpower over the last decade before learning to weed them out (aka - they're not "well aligned" as customers or coworkers).
I don't either. Am I disallowed from calling myself a founder?
There are a lot of smart people in the tech industry without undergrad degrees.
The problem is, in the current generation of tech workers, there's two kinds of people without degrees:
1) The grinder who has a knack for whatever part of the field that they work in and made their name through hard work and building a portfolio of work through practical experience
and
2) The (usually) guy who went to a college prep school, got into Stanford, and encountered a SV VC with exponentially more money than sense, who then told the 21-year-old that they were not a college student, but, in fact, Jesus Christ, and promised more money than the average person could comprehend to "pursue their dreams".
Altman falls into the latter category. Actually, a lot of the founder set does. I say (usually) guy because Elizabeth Holmes also falls into this category.
Bill Gates is a tech founder.
Altman is a tech founder and a business founder, but he is not an AI founder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Roy#:~:text=He%20played%2...
>In referencing his workload during production, director Tim Burton called Roy the "hardest-working man in show biz".
Becoming Oompa-Loompa | Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:
They’ve literally been pitching themselves as capable of destroying it.