The only way to avoid extreme power concentration is to ensure we have multiple independent providers of frontier AI models, including open-source options.
The value of a degree is in question, as tuition costs have increased in the last few decades while the college premium-the expected benefit from getting a diploma-has flatlined and possibly even declined in the last few years.
Even if AI makes the pie grow bigger, it feels like a better bet that it will only increase the level of concentration in the stock market and economy if the past is a good predictor of the future.
While it was routine for companies going public in the 1980s to be profitable (>80% were), less that a quarter of the companies that have gone public in the last decade have been profitable.
there still seems to be an enormous premium on cognitive ability. And so, I wouldn't I I I I think, um, renouncing that before there's evidence that we've saturated, uh, those benefits would be premature.
I think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history um to varying degrees of course but I have a real spirit and I think this is part of the startup spirit of thinking that the world, the economy, society is the best off when power is very widely distributed
It surely does not “produce” one quarter of world culture or intellectual activity (if the latter is defined as influential books, of fiction and non-fiction, politics, history; films, plastic arts, music, theater etc.)
Standardized systems are important, and there is a systems premium in the US and UK, but it can't be about a regular pipeline because London has that and yet Crossrail engaged in some really dodgy systems decisions that drove costs up.
Either way, atmospheric CO2 is better seen as a lagging rather than leading indicator of changes in emissions, as it is harder to see the effects of emissions reductions on concentrations over shorter time periods.
So with one, you get the effect that the person produced art print is valued much much higher than the than the AI version. And then what we do is to say there's in a set of other conditions, there's 500 of these being produced. So for the human made one, the price goes down a lot because it's no longer seen as like you're not like making a connection with this one artist versus with AI, there's no difference. AI is already viewed as like a commodity.
Um, and then you stack on 70 this year, 80 next year, growing to 100 by 2030. You're at like 700 EV tools by the end of the decade. Um, 700 EV tools, three and a half tools per gigawatt. um assuming it's all allocated to AI which it's not but three and a half tools per gigawatt gets you to 200 gigawatts worth of AI chips for the data centers to deploy
I think frontier AI auditing (covering both safety and security) is both urgently needed and doable, and can help avoid extreme concentration of power, since it introduces external oversight into the decision-making of people with a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" at their disposal.
the improvement software improvements of really throughput in terms of tokens per dollar per watt that we're able to get uh you know quarter over quarter year over year is massive uh right so it's 5x 10x maybe 40x in some of these cases
and so I think this is interesting just modernization learning that especially if you work on a premium product try to have your free product be a reflection of like everything that your product can offer you. Obviously, to an extent, there's some costs involved with some of the paid features and things like that, but it generally will pay it for itself if you're able to put your best foot forward um and go do that.
So premium is one source of our revenue. We also have ads, but they're context-based, not targeted. Of course, we leave probably 80% of value on the table because we're not ready to engage in all this practices, exploiting personal data.
So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know. And there are documents to it.
The interesting Tesla point is people always looked at it and said, "It's the iPhone of cars." No, it's not. What's happening is that cars are becoming Android with no iPhone. And then Tesla is just selling and is is in that metaphor Tesla is just another android phone maker
And it came back and half of them were great, a quarter of them were total garbage and a quarter needed some work. But like it was, you know, in a way him working the entire weekend with, you know, guidance from him.
So you if you look at the leverage in some of these securitization books and mortgage books if you have 30 times leverage and you're getting 20% of the profits you'll go to 40 times leverage. It's just going to it's literally will add you know 25% to your bonus.
the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.
I try to focus 20% 20 to 25% of growth team's time annually, not every given sprint, not every given quarter, but annually, to introduce a new growth loop.
Well, we’ve divided the New York cost premium into three tranches: labor (mostly overstaffing, not high wages), station and system design, and procurement and soft costs.
It’s less about access to a model’s weights, it’s more access to compute that is putting the world in more concentration of power and few individuals. Because not everyone’s going to be able to afford this much amount of compute to answer the hardest questions.
But modularity may also facilitate a shift away from a concentration of model development in a few institutions and to distributing the development of modular components across the community.
A special dishonorable mention goes to Slack, which can easily suck away a quarter of your time without you noticing. If you use Slack and you haven’t disabled the “unread messages” badge, stop reading this post and do it now.
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