Honest question: where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Nearly all suitable-looking, "smarter" ideas that come to my mind will bring less revenue/profit in expectation than, for example, letting them maximize ad impressions.
I of course wish we lived in a "more intelligent" world where this is not the case. :-(
Call me crazy, but the smartest people I know have rejected maximizing their employer's revenue and profit as their goal. Or even their own company if they go that route. Find a niche, work it, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of your life, too.
Edit: all that and spellcheck still sucks too.
During the AI boom: Attention is all you need
It probably feels this way if you only see headlines like this, but the LLM companies and even extending into their data center buildouts are still only a part of the economy. Investment dollars get spread around far and wide. Investors can’t even get allocations in these companies if they want to because they’re so oversubscribed.
This headline and website are a good example. If you think being a YC founder is rare and reserved for the truly elite, you may not have seen the size of YC batches lately. The number of YC founders is in the tens of thousands. Showing a list of 100 of them who joined a couple big tech companies doesn’t mean anything by itself.
It’s on the order of 1% of YC founders. YC startups don’t work out all the time and their employees and founders go work for other startups. Barely worth noting, if not for a website making it look like a big deal.
It's worth pointing out that "entire economy is betting everything on [AI]" you're talking about here is in the economy in the "numbers go up sense" (e.g. the stock market). It's not the economy in the providing for the general well being sense (e.g. gives people jobs so they can get housing and food).
I wasted like a half hour trying to find decent sources but I guess I don't know how to search the internet anymore.
I think we're betting more than the stock market on AI, even if I can't say for sure how much.
AI is the one and only possibility for saving millions (likely billions) of lives from “old age”, cancers, Alzheimer’s, ALS… you name it.
It’s a big bet. The alternative is we all die anyway: sadly after a gradual decline at best or horribly after long undignified suffering at worst.
I’ll take the economic risk.
Combine that with the fact that “good enough” is a real thing and cheap Chinese models are either there or close depending on your use case and it’s hard to see how this ends well.
105/13000 is a very small number to focus on. This data doesn't really mean anything.
The interesting thing to me is that the belief that Anthropic is going achieve something like AGI appears to have really spread through SV. If not AGI, at least greatly disturb their old cushy SaaS jobs.
Also, I still do believe some people just want to work on "cool" stuff.
edit: not just CTOs and CPOs, I mean John freakin Jumper, who got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left his VP role at DeepMind to have no reports, and be an IC at Anthropic.
I find this whole trend extremely interesting.
One thing I’ve noticed more and more is all the “cool” jobs require you to already be an established domain expert.
Another things I’ve noticed, and this is probably mostly just my opinions evolving, but all the “cool” stuff that catches my interest these days is not in software. Software is boring.
Most recently, I became interested in the field of photonics/optics, particularly in the field of novel optical communications research.
I’ve had mild interests in things like Biology and History since I was a child. The latter particularly hooked me a few years back.
Neuroscience is a pretty cool one as well. The human brain is of course one of the most fascinating pieces of hardware in existence and understanding it (to whatever level we currently can) is incredibly interesting to me.
At one point I thought about going into security research, but now that everyone and their mother is headed that direction, it’s become less feasible.
Unfortunately I don’t even have a bachelors degree, and most of the fields are research heavy and not very accessible to hobbyists, so my actual interaction with these things remains relegated to reading papers/pop sci articles/etc.
So wether it's belief in AGI or a desire for building cool stuff, as an outsider looking in, it seems to be informed by the same echo chamber of thought.
I mean, this is happening right now.
I doubt there are few people talking to customers and potential customers that haven't run into the "look what I rolled last week with Claude" only for it to be legitimately impressive. The idea of technical moats is evaporating in front of our eyes.
Having a major leadership role at a big company is kind of a slog. Getting a chance to go back to a fast growing startup as an IC in a way that will only benefit their career (ex-Anthropic or ex-OpenAI makes your resume gold plated) is an easy choice. They can go back to any job they want after this.
I think this might only be shocking to some people who have forgotten that many people in these positions actually enjoy working on hard things and being surrounded by other like minded people. If you’ve only worked in po-dunk startups or other companies where leadership looks like a Game of Thrones style fiefdom building game it’s harder to imagine executives who are smart, capable, and enjoy working hard. It’s pretty common in Silicon Valley despite all of the sneering here.
I'm not saying it's toxic to have it on your work history, but it's far from gold plated. They'd have work to do for me, and for many, many people in the industry, to prove that I'd want to work with them.
When I say their resumes are gold-plated I mean at the companies they want to work at.
(1) (digital) AGI is a real concept, and will be achieved imminently
(2) AGI will be world (and possibly more) changing.
(3) Anthropic will be the one to do that, or at least capture a large part of it
If you buy into all of these, which I'm assuming a lot of SV does at this point, then its kind of a no brainer to go to OpenAI or Anthropic. And optics wise it seems like Anthropic is "winning" right now, so thats the lab with the talent flow.
If Anthropic actually creates a singleton, contributing to that is way more impactful than being CTO at some random company (though I may disagree that said singleton would treat equity holders any differently).
So I could imagine tons of people in those roles who would love to be ICs again if there was also a chance at outsized wealth.
For all the hubris and arrogance of the tech scene, and especially the Bay Area's, founders at least pretended to pursue a greater calling than money by leaving cushy gigs to pursue a new venture they were passionate about. Sure, that only lasted a handful of years before it became a gold rush to move to the Bay for YC and pursue the startup-to-acquisition pipeline, but they at least pretended to care.
The naked pursuit of wealth at the cost of potentially tearing apart society is mildly alarming because the scale it's happening at is so big.
In my opinion there is no "slipping mask", merely a changing of the guard that always happens when massive piles of generational wealth are at stake.
SV has always operated on exploitation of their workers, they just hid it well from the public.
Perhaps you've seen under their mask, and you know they're scamming the investors. After the NFT bubble it's a plausible hypothesis. But I don't know what it means to say that the mask just isn't there and it's naked pursuit of wealth.
It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance estimation or measurement, CUDA or ROCM or any kind of GPGPU/accelerated computing. But that is the core business of both of these companies.
I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.
They invest in people more than ideas, so you’ve got, at least in many cases, people with good pedigree and skills (age adjusted anyway) building on stupid ideas, but that are eminently employable.
Obviously there are other factors, I’m not really trying to defend anything but just point out that there are legit reasons why someone impressive enough to get into YC would also be impressive enough to get a good job. It’s not like it’s random founders off the street.
This is what always stood out to me. Founders talk about the risks they take as their major legitimizing force. But what risk? They’re the types who can (mostly) skip an interview and go direct into a six figure job - because of the sales and founder networks they develop.
Startup founders with no risk doesnt sound like a recipe for great companies.
I figure most of these are working on products, rather that deep frontier research.
Someone with experience running a startup that has no moat probably does have some relevant experience in that area.
Culture. The Uber for Dogs idiots will gulp down the kool-aid like they’re dying in the dessert.
They are hiring for sales.
Why spend to resources to invent AGI when you can just gaslight the whole world by telling everyone that LLMs are already better than people?
Is this causing massive problems for us as a society? Of course, but no one seems to want to do anything about it, so here we are.
I’m just surprised they need this many of them. What do they do all day? And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
Breeding product ideas? ChatGPT, but for dogs?
> And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
They learned from Elon how to get by with a skeleton crew?
Same as they were doing in their startups: burn mon..., eh, tokens.
> And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
AI, of course.
Jensen Huang himself says nobody in their right mind should start a company https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/11/jensen-huang-i-didnt-kno...
Not that I disagree, but it doesn't refute the original argument. It could even support it, class protecting their own from more people figuring out there's no clothes on the emperor.
Sounds to me as inability to delegate. Or implicit in the [acquire VC, aim for high growth] mindset as if that were the only path to success.
Companies can grow organically. With a positive cash-flow early on & reasonable work/life balance for founders & employees alike. Heck, there's even non-profits.
Yes they can, but unless you strike luck, they take many years, often decades of work to grow to a level where you can retire and enjoy the money.
With FIRE and similar concepts being pushed around everywhere, and the plight of the masses to keep their jobs and homes, I see where that desire for "make money fast" comes from. And from a game theory mindset - it's not wrong. (That is also a bit related to the explosion of gambling and gambling-alike stuff such as "prediction markets"...)
> Heck, there's even non-profits.
Non-profits often enough run on conditions bordering on (self-)exploitation.
YC has funded over 5,000 companies. If you assume 2-3 co-founders per company, that's more than 10,000 to 15,000 people. The vast majority of these founders aren't producing "generational wealth" outcomes. There's no glamorization of the companies that shut down, the ones that are scraping by, and the ones that get their founders a normal job, but those are the far more likely outcomes, especially in the more recent spray-and-pray batches.
Point being: don't start a startup if your goal is to get a job. Just get a job.
[1] Note that I'm not arguing about experience -- you can gain a lot of experience as a startup founder, but that experience is rarely directly marketable. Also, most startup founders are completely clueless when they start, so "a lot of experience" is a relative term.
Sam Altman was the president of YC, so it's not particularly suprising that he has hired lots of talent from YC - these are people that are pre-qualified because he has seen their work before outside of a job interview (better the devil you know than the devil you don't).
This happens everywhere - person leaves company A to company B and then poaches the best talent from company A. Obviously in this case the talent are founders rather than staff members, but still.
SELECT * FROM yc_founders WHERE employer IN ('OpenAI', 'Anthropic');
If there are 7k founders [1], the graph only shows 1.5% of the people from YC.
Edit : and money. I guess most founders follow the money here.
I guess you can extrapolate that and say a trillion dollar company is made of a bunch of people who could have started a billion dollar company.
Would be curious what some of the VP+ people are building inside Anthropic if they joined as engineers
After 20 or so years of YC, with multiple catches per year, and the insanely high failure rate of start ups, there must be a lot of former or floundering founders.
Where are YC founders now who went to openai and anthropic ? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
I still can’t put a finger on it. I’ve seen real people use these fonts and layouts yet theirs look original.
Whoever finds an explanation for this solves AGI (/s)
So you're saying the site screams "Claude's style!" to you. Not too different from "I know a WordPress site when I see one".
- Orange/beige-ish colors - Rounded corners - Cards with a thin border - A thicker colored border on the left of cards - Serif font for headings - Monospace fonts for small text - Headings that often have an unnecessary subheading / pre-heading - Little badges, often with a "status indicator" dot on the left - Obviously LLM-generated text / language
I'm sure I'm missing many but the above are dead giveaways!
The copy is usually a bit of a giveaway too, ”explore your future path to greatness and experience the defining divider between those who can and those who can’t” or as most humans would write the header ”plans”.