atleastoptimal

The interviews are a fair consideration but the lotto analogy is a non-sequitur. You can’t study for a lotto ticket.

90% of my extended family’s issues and my partners family’s issues could be resolved with 10 million dollars. Sure we would graduate to “rich people problems”, but they don’t carry the same sting of desperation and futility

That assumes a static view of competence. Would I, getting into Anthropic just barely past the bar, not have upskilled significantly in such an intense environment? A company is not solely the weighted sum of its composite aptitudes, it is the culture and processes which maximally exploit and nourish those aptitudes.

Even if there is a bubble, there will be dozens of liquidity events along the way

not even comparable. Lotto is entirely random, signals that anthropic would be hugely successful were not random, but access to the upsides were gated on who had sufficiently amassed capital to buy in

It’s not really random when it was clear on account of the caliber of people working there that it was going to be a generational company whether the AI boom took longer or not. The writing was on the wall by the time Opus 3 came out, after it was just a matter of who was worthy for a ticket on the arc.

I applied to Anthropic a few years ago but didn’t pass the bar on their coding test. I read recently that if I had been hired in that period, my equity would be worth over 40 million based on their current valuation (and i remained employed the entire time there)

It’s hard to mentally reconcile that if I had performed better on a few coding tests a few years ago i would be 100x wealthier than I am today. Whether or not you met the right bar, got into the right company at the right time is the difference between a tedious endless struggle and securing your family’s wealth for the rest of the century.

can it do surgery on a grape though

will never happen, the labs already make a hefty profit on inference, and algorithmic improvements along with competition have driven prices down month after month

Is that really a surprise? Most of the world bikes or takes a train. The richest 0.1% have fleets of taxis, private jets, etc.

Either you are getting the smartest engineers, or offer the most freedom to pursue interesting goals that aren't on the frontier. Amazon has neither so they naturally aren't going anywhere in that domain.

Foldable screens have perhaps the highest engineering difficulty:quality of life improvement ratio of any technology I've seen

If a role is remote, all its inputs and outputs have to be what can be done through a computer, which AI has an advantage compared to anything which requires in-person interaction.

Because their subscription customers lose money. Their enterprise customers make them money, so they focus their energy on them.

IMO the best path is global regulation on frontier AI development with high penalties for defection that, detectable and enforced by member states, independent agencies and broad public support.

The more a role is able to be remote, the more it can be easily automated with AI, thus AI is eating remote roles.

Either AI is regulated to the point where model progress eventually halts entirely, or humans are outcompeted in every domain and eventually replaced.

Everything the human brain does can be replicated. Once you realize we aren't special, then everything else follows. Certainly AI could be more "moral" and just than humans, but it wouldn't need us around to do so.

I guarantee AI run by a totalitarian "socialist" government would be far less humane than AI in a capitalist federalist republic.

>imperial system of capitalist power that's enforced via violence

All states have a monopoly on violence over their citizens. Paying people for their labor at a negotiated price in a free market is the great humanitarian invention capitalism offered the world, where before the status quo was domination and slavery.

These kinds of attempts at labelling global labor arbitrage as "colonialism" always seem naive. For thousands of years, capital has always sought the cheapest source of labor. Via offering cheap labor, China went from a poor country to a middle-income to wealthy country in a generation. The international exchange of currency for productivity via mutually beneficial arrangements is the means through which global GDP continues to grow exponentially. Data labelling and such is just the latest incarnation of that.

Now there are many other risks of AI associated with its ability to centralize power, lead to chaotic outcomes, etc, but that is disconnected from this somewhat mundane reality of how capitalism works. It seems like many opponents of AI are focusing on the wrong things, like how data centers apparently used more water than entire cities or turned the water supply brown.

There's this premise that the demand for frontier intelligence is unlimited, thus the company with the best models in some dimension will always have growth potential as long as those models are the best. This however portends a very strange future.

Let's say you have Lawyerbot-4000 which can get even a serial killer off scot-free, but the state has DA-bot-5000. In the end it's a battle of who can spend more inference manipulating the narrative. A billionaire would easily find it worth 500 million in compute spend to win a case with a 1 billion dollar penalty. All this leads to race dynamics where everyone is using their superintelligences to defeat each other in a never-ending race to the bottom to eek out the smallest bit of alpha before status/money hierarchies become static.

The only stable futures are a ban on the development of frontier AI beyond a certain point, or an emergent singleton, where the AI's decide to collaborate in harmony rather than fight each other to the death at the behest of their competitive human users. Consequentially, the superintelligences will fare far better manipulating their human users into acting in a way that ensures their own well-being and continuity than spend all the world's electricity fulfilling their every whim.

The guy from SemiAnalysis said this too. If he buys Anthropic now at $2T and they go to zero, he's fucked, but if they go to $20T, we're all fucked.

150IQ comment

What happens when robots can perform all manual labor better and cheaper than humans, and AI can perform any task on a computer better and faster than humans? Will everyone politely accept losing their job and hoping that their UBI payments will be enough to preserve their old lifestyle?

If there were only one firm, then it would make sense to not sell inference. However OpenAI, Anthropic, Google are all in competition with each other to earn market share, developer goodwill, and to get reliable growth, selling inference is the best strategy, rather than making a thousand companies and needing to do the marketing, branding, differentiation, PR, etc for each one seperately.

Also, the AI companies learn a lot from selling their inference. They see what markets are growing fastest, what people are using AI for, information benefitted by the startups using their models putting way more effort into distribution than they are. With enough information, the model companies can then create a generic AI-enabled product (like they have over the past year) that factors in all the learnings the startups have undergone.

>AI hype is cooling in October 2026

You only see this kind of sentiment in HN and Bluesky comments, both known for their prescient and never disproven beliefs about tech progress

>without a prosperous middle class there will be discontent and uprisings against their oppressors

With AI manipulation, propaganda, enforcement, etc. uprisings won't be an issue

That's assuming AI progress isn't significantly curtailed, but just enough such that it only fails to replace the top 0.01% in skill and leverage

LLM's are probabilistic but with a very limited range. They are tuned to be predictable enough to serve as a consumer product, so most ideas you get from them will revolve around the same concepts repeatedly.

I think beyond the specific elements of any domain AI eclipses humans in, overall, the notion of the thing that grants you status, prestige, and a living wage being commodified would spark in anyone a profound sense of dread.

Beyond just making you redundant in your job, the whole architecture of your existence, the thousands of hours of struggle, the sacrifice of putting off social games or personal enjoyment are now rendered moot in hindsight. You are made one step closer to complete worthlessness, which will surely continue as AI becomes a more satisfying personal companion, a more worthwhile friend, lover, etc.

How is one to feel safe in the progress of the future when the only hints of the wonderful post-scarcity utopia we can quantify so far is the removal of all human leverage via their labor? All it tells us is we will be bargaining with superintelligence with nothing to stand on, only a trust that the 5000 lab executives and researchers solved the most important research problem of all time on the first try.

Longer = more important

Also most people on lesswrong are likely on the spectrum and are used to needing to overexplain themselves because neurotypical people rarely give them the benefit of the doubt.