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Of course people will need convincing. People hate change.

Yes

Has any company done their yearly release - like Apple Google I/O where they released 10x as many products or the releases were 10x as ambitious?

Linkedin shows that the number one place where Palantir employees studied is Stanford. They love to dig on these universities, but yes, he's wrong, by his own companies hiring processes. And I can't find the number of applicants, but at all these universities the number of accepted students is rising, and the acceptance rate is falling dramatically, which suggests many more people are applying. So he will tell you Elite universities suck while absolutely advising people he knows to go to an elite university.

Pedigree matters tremendously. I don't want it to! I went to a state school, I want to believe going to Harvard doesn't matter. But it's bananas to think it actually doesn't. Alex Karp doesn't believe elite education is useless, he wants YOU to believe it's useless.

Clicked on 20 random Palantir profiles on LinkedIn. All went to college, disproportionate number of ivies/elite

I actually think this is an interesting question because of inflation. Like I understand the theory, but I think this would be limited to entertainment or some kind of IP as the person mentioned. A one-person billion dollar game? Yes, maybe one-person selling or reselling a proprietary algorithm or something like that, but certainly not anything with sales overhead, if there's no IP, then a three person company with AI could run circles around a 1 person company with AI.

I know this maybe sounds luddite-ish or anti future, but I really can't see anything supplanting the screen you hold in your hand. Maybe lots of new ways to do a screen you hold in your hand, but people like holding a screen in their hand and like watching cat videos. Like people REALLY like that.

And we think the administration that had used all its weight to get educational institutions to do its bidding is going to apply this fairly? If so why is this an EO and not an act of Congress? (And the answer to c the marijuana question is no, not as long as marijuana is still illegal

Im a little concerned by the combo “and crypto companies” in fact I don’t think this is for ideological reasons I think this is for risk reasons. All sides should be against this.

Also, isn’t this coming at the same time as laws that say doctors can refuse patients for ideological reasons?

Would this prevent banks from targeting marijuana companies?

What if, and this might be controversial, we went back to the days where we used technology to make life better?

Elon Musk may die considering himself a failure. There's a lot of things you can do, therapy, change jobs, travel Europe, buy a sports car, and for sure a few of those things you should do, but they'll all lead to the same conclusion: You're not behind, you're right where you are supposed to be.

So I don’t buy this, and I’m trying to figure out why, while it’s technically true, for all the “democratization” of everything, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I think the problem is, when you “democratize” a thing you devalue it, so now, for instance, the labor of a software engineer may lessen in value, but capital can still exploit it at a lower price.

I’m curious if something similar happened with guns, I imagine it’s yea, maybe every individual can have a gun, but big institutions can manage bigger weapons in ways individuals fundamentally can’t.

I think the microwave is actually the perfect example, per your data, I, as an AI skeptic don’t think AI is going to go the way of the Segway, I think it will have real solid use cases and quickly grow to sustained usage that will persist. And like the microwave, will plateau long before the “end of all white collar jobs and scarcity” superintelligence, but yeah, a solid $100 billion dollar a year business? Great? But people are investing in it like it will be the only tool ever used for everything, and a multi trillion dollar business.

Ai obviously has solid use cases, it’s just not the whole kitchen.

It seems like we’re still ascending hype cycle mountain, so I can’t imagine it will be soon, but it will be… unpleasant when it happens. Though maybe it could happen sooner than expected. The night is darkest before the dawn as they say. Or the opposite.

It’s kind of interesting that everyone seems optimistic that AI will revolutionize scientific inquiry, but I might argue that it could lead to another dark ages. Sort of as implied in the article, AI is likely to divide us further into micro-communities (of 1). Fully embracing our individuality but never having to compromise with (or learn from anyone else’s opinions.). Further doing unpleasant things to our politics as we learn we should get everything we want.

There was a recent interview with Travis Kalanick on all in, talking about how he felt like he was on the verge of reaching new physics in his talks to AI.

And it reminded me of something someone said which was basically like AI may be able to be perfectly influential or convincing before anything else. And if you think about the human psyche as a black box, maybe Travis Kalanick doesn’t actually need to start a company to be stimulated, just talk to perfectly stimulating AI.

Extrapolated to the rest of society, and yeah, dark ages.

I always find personal stories and quotes a weird way to tell these kinds of stories. Someone is always frustrated trying to find a job, right? Every field has ups and downs over time, and I know people whose fields were having a down turn in 2021 when tech was hotter than ever.

AI engineers aren’t in a slump I assume, nurses are classically understaffed right?

I wonder if it would be better to have 1 “perfect” LLM trying to solve problems or 5 intentionally biased LLM’s.

“but most people can see a rough line of overall progress.”

This idea is the core to my argument. That the bias of what can you see is creating a false sense of progress. I think my core argument would be progress is an asymptote, so you might say loosely I agree with you (yes of course there are always optimizations you can eke out) but at what cost, and is the asymptote approaching something that looks more like a thing that can solve all problems in theory but not in practice, getting better and better at solving problems in a laboratory, or getting better and better at solving problems we know the answer to, but never gets serious traction at solving novel problems or working in the real world(outside its core skill set; generating text)

If it works who cares? If vibe coding gets the job done it gets the job done. Part of the point of not wanting tech debt is it makes it harder to make changes, but if the vibe coding software can grok all that who cares? This response seems to be assuming a level of competence from vibe coding that I don’t think is there, but if it gets there (which I think is questionable) “standing by your art” is not what you’re paid to do, go sell your code in a gallery.

Impossible to measure. Anyone can declare victory and find evidence to support it.

Why does the link on “ 27,000 job cuts have been directly linked to artificial intelligence since 2023.”

Not link to anything related to job cuts as a direct result of AI?

I disagree progress will be meaningful, but I’m not stupid enough to think anyone will be able to agree on a definition of “meaningful”

I think VR is a great example of a technology we are currently choosing to stop, very similarly to AI, all evidence suggests we’ll hit a cost/benefit wall before we get to superintelligent AI similar to the abandonment of VR progress currently in the works.

Contradictorally though - I am near certain we will declare victory on AGI much sooner than 10 years from now. OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft nearly requires it, and Sam Altman recently said that by reasonable measures of 5 years ago, ChatGPT 4 is AGI. In some sense that may best evidence things are stalling.

But really 10 years from now, either one of us could declare victory, and we’d probably be right.

Why is it that Substack can’t just be run as a 10-20 person small-medium sized business forever? If publishers want to go there for a basic product, and Substack can collect rent from them, what’s the problem?

> Did you not notice a trendline of technological improvement of AI?

No, in fact I noticed a series of AI winters. In all things, progress is famously _not_ a straight line.

Also I find it interesting that your argument seems to boil down to “I’m smart because line goes up, you’re dumb because you think line goes down.” Everyone Clearly can see what would happen if line went up, I just; looking at the broad history and totality of factors(that I’m aware of) don’t think it’s inevitable.

“You can’t stop progress”

We literally stop progress all the time, every time we choose not to invest in something, crypto progress slowed from its height, Vr progress, green energy, I’d argue it’s relatively few technologies that progress forever.

Progress is famously not a straight line.

Substack philosophy is not at all clear here. In the end, maybe I think Substack should refuse to censor their notifications. Maybe it should be illegal to censor notifications without user consent. Their approach is the worse of both worlds. The most dangerous thing is probably letting people speak and then pretending like your not.

If sunshine is the best disinfectant, than by censoring their notifications, Substack is protecting Nazis.

On the one hand, I should be excited, over the next decade or so, we will see lots of AI built/inspired movies, and as a person who is super into the eighties, AI is going to create another eighties. In the eighties it was synthesizers everywhere creating the bizzare experimental of music, and that extended into a visual style in movies and TV and were probably going to see a similar experimental foray into movies.

All for it, but to me the biggest problem with phone addiction is that Apple and Google (understandably for their pocketbooks) don’t provide a robust API for stopping it.

Yeah, it says these aren’t a result of the economy, but they’re obviously the result of the economy? I think the difference is just that big tech has bigger boom/bust cycles than most other industries(at least for now) but I wonder if other world-changing industries; like rail were the same, lots of rail companies went under, probably causing a glut of unemployment for certain types of skilled labor.

On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?

Are there any services that imply the opposite? Isn’t everything supported forever until it isn’t?