I have been saying this for a while. I visited SF a couple months ago and god do people feel empty from the inside. Everything is revolving around AI this and AI that. Half of these people were not paying attention when we were training gradient boost models and now all of these people are 'AI Agents experts'.
you mean loop engineers?
In addition, if you look at the graph of LOC written by Claude vs Ants (I.e. AI vs human), there is an incredibly sharp uptick post-Mythos internal preview. Something like from 30% to 75% of code inside the company being written by AI.
While I sympathize with the viewpoint here, I still have to admit that that there's a very different feeling to working inside of a company where they've had months of time with a model that's at the frontier, quickly changing the way everyone around them works, and that _they themselves_ control the keys to.
If Geohot had those keys, I can be 100% confident he'd be raising the alarm at the top of his lungs about it.
Seriously -- if you dig through that source code, and then listen to the messaging, it seems hard to keep a straight face.
Also, hasn't this company been claiming that almost all their code is written with AI for significantly longer than "post-Mythos internal preview"?
The last 10 years have been a decade of Big Tech Vaporware. NFTs and the Metaverse were assured to be the future. Once this narrative fails too (which I am almost certain is inevitable) I think society's love affair with Technology being the solver-of-all-things will finally fracture.
Just to throw out a random example - could technology, in terms of advances and improvements to allocation, distribution, and consumption, play a part in solving the western US's water issues? Probably. But would it be something that make a trillion dollars and a household name? Maybe not. And could saner policy, like making farmers have to bid for acre feet instead of getting it for basically free + distribution cost also help? Sure.
Likewise, even with AI most software is still crap. Like when have you heard about a doctor who loves their EHR? Like never.
So I think technology could be a solver of at least a lot more things. But we've created a market where people want to exhaust every flavor of flim flam and trend of the moment first. Because we've glorified the business of tech more than the actual improvements and aspirations that should be possible.
AI is not that bad
Meanwhile, AI has ruined the whole Internet and inflated the price of everything electronic.
If true, it will only be replaced with something else. With what is anyone’s guess.
1. Those, like OP, that believe AI danger and disruption is all hype to boost valuations.
2. Those, like myself, that believe AI danger and disruption is very real and presents dilemmas (but also opportunities) for society, so we must tread carefully.
The first position is not logically consistent with reality. The danger is real: we have already seen hints about how this will impact everything from jobs to warfare to mental health. that danger does not increase valuation, in fact it does the opposite because of the need for government regulation.
2 words: regulatory capture.
Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).
Bad open weight model (can’t let people escape the subscription model).
Because it makes their technology seem more important and powerful?
Do you usually believe 100% what a company says about itself?
> Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits
Who cares about profits? None of these companies make money like a business currently. It's all speculative valuation and influenced by the same hype/doom cycle
The whole point of the article is to answer this question, and here's the answer:
Because all the AI doom fear-mongering is driving sky-high valuations. The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.
Because Americans are obsessed with eschatological narratives and action hero stories. I talked to a Palantir guy once who told me that he loves it when journalists describe his company as a James Bond villain because every single time the market cap goes up.
If they said that they're SAP with Call of Duty marketing they'd actually lose money. In other countries this strategy might not check out but in the US it's better to pretend to be a supervillain than to be boring
Weird to think profits matter half as much as ever-increasing valuations, driven by memetic bullshit. E.g. the entire point of the article you're commenting on.
Dangerous new tech with military applications sounds harder to ignore than AI that spits out text.
Of course it impacts company valuation.
Specifically Anthropic's whole PR has all been about danger, safety, doomerism all to make themselves indirectly more important and central to the debate.
Calling meetings in Washington DC in order to let everyone know they made a cyberweapon is part of those PR moves. Then they seem surprised lawmakers actually called them out and asked to stop serving that model.
I know this is the cynical take but I cannot unsee the elephant in the room: This doomerism allowed Anthropic to be the center of every AI conversation right now. Their market cap and upcoming IPO is indirectly benefiting from this.
I also cannot take that Anthropic while letting everyone know that Doom is coming (or is already here), are also the ones that want to decide who can profit from this Doomerism. This is how every benevolent dictators start.
I don’t think “benevolent” is necessary in that sentence. It’s how many non-benevolent dictatorships started.
Every dictator is benevolent for the people that agree with them.
If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats.
But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time.
Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful and useful even though it makes mistakes. Some companies are wildly overvalued. Some extremely large and expensive companies will quadruple from here. Some frightening scenarios will look silly in hindsight. Other frightening things will happen that none of the doomers foresee.
It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.
It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."
The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.
The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.
And nukes are useful by some metric too.
AI (llms) is not useful in any way that we as humanity should be pushing for. It’s more harmful than good in every way possible. It’s honestly astounding to me that everyone’s ethics are so weak as to believe that somehow these incredible destructive companies are somehow good for humanity.
I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid.
LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea.
What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.
However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.
“Maybe he can” - Complex. Divine, possibly? A breathtaking filigree of nuance, like an Alex Grey painting of conceptual allemande.
Yeah poor you this must be much more tiring than being told constantly that the apocalypse is coming and your jobs are gone and everything is going to be shitty because a bunch of ultra rich midwits want even more money and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Sorry dude, hearing that people don't like that messaging and are replying with copypasta talking points must really be rough for you. Praying for you in these trying times.
The same could have been said (and has been said) about other tech company employees for all sorts of other reasons in alignment with those companies' goals. Don't you remember how much people used to laugh at Tesla employees for worshipping Elon Musk as some kind of god of engineering and entrepreneurial genius? Or Apple employees in the Steve Jobs reality distortion field?
I would have thought at this point that it'd be well known that the employees of all cult-like tech companies can't be trusted to make a sober evaluation of their companies' justified valuation. We can talk about conflicts of interest and we'd barely be getting started! How about biased selection by hiring managers for the most fervent believers in the company's mission from the get-go?
"They are not in a thought bubble YOU are in the thought bubble"
I am absolutely BTFO'd, you got me.
Oh nevermind I get it. They're only intentionally working on building something that they believe will end humanity. Well as long as it's not intentional crypto-tier scamming, it's all good then.
I'm convinced. Consider my model of reality corrected. Thanks homie.
The SFBA culture has given me the ick for a while now. Anyone who has done web development in the last few years is inevitably exposed to it. Idk how to describe it without breaking the rules of the site so I’ll just say nothing.
I imagine tons of people have written that article. But no one reads it. They're all busy with the doomiest bullshit Facebook or Tiktok will serve them. It's what gets engagement.
No one is clicking on the "None of the things your scared of are scary and here's why" video when it's up against the "$x is the end of the world and will eat your children" agitprop.
Would solve a lot of problems in the US, actually. Being financially incentivized to gleefully lie and spread misinformation at the expense of others should not be protected speech.
Oh no, the obvious strawmans that - despite the author's assertions - people did not actually widely believe in, were strawmans? Crazy, I tell you. It'd seem that people aren't actually as dumb as the author likes to characterize them being.
Sure love this genre of writing. It's a beautifully revealing tour de force in projection and narcissism. "Will somebody please think for all the fools who believe in the obvious nonsense I secretly fear?"
The problem wasn't the mortality rate, it's the fact that the media can cleverly turn something in a huge deal by talking endlessly about it. During COVID, there was no other news except the virus on news for 24/7.
Who Would Jesus Nuke?