> the fact that 7/8ths of people who now dig with their hands will starve because shovels have been introduced is a choice that we are making. We are choosing not to feed them
The unfortunate truth of western economic history is that capital does not willingly share its profits unless forced to (by government or labor).
The core point here is about power.
Assuming AI takes off and automates large sections of the economy, who gets to have control over those entities?
It seems a bit premature to identify the current major AI labs as inevitably being the ones to benefit.
But I am sympathetic to the idea that having the public as a (mostly) silent partner, both in profits and control, is prudent.
Where it gets dangerous is how "the public's" equity share is represented and by whom.
F.ex. I'd be vociferously opposed to the current kleptomaniacal US administration being able to wield 50% control
They justify it as defending their way of life, which can align with Tolkien a little bit with some mental gymnastics
> I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.
but overall Tolkien was against war, being a veteran of WWI himself, and the LOTR saga is about the heroism of the meek.
Peter Thiel clearly loves the sword for its sharpness, it drips from everything his companies do.
I think the movie was every bit as deep as the books. Remember how terrifying it was for Frodo to be seen by Sauron’s eye? No, they know exactly what they’re doing and they don’t care.
"Google" of today is really AdSense ($102M, 2003) -> Android ($50M+?, 2005) -> YouTube ($1.6B, 2006) -> Google Docs ($50M+?, 2006)
Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo.
It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to construct a durable moat.
Was on a team that was trying to sell AltaVista a social media presence (before facebook/myspace/etc). Our people were mostly using Google, but we still wanted the client. One of the "moderation experts" on our side (i.e. - not tech or busniess) who evidently didn't understand what AltaVista was about asked them "Why don't you just use Google? It's better".
There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.
AdSense wasn't a thing until 2003. Google didn't have much revenue before that. However, they still surpassed their competition in quality of search results long before...
Yes. My point is that Google had a temporary search quality advantage… then AdSense-fueled revenue allowed them to convert that to a durable moat by outspending their competitors.
That didn't happen because they were magically amazing at search forever.
It happened because Google had a good business plan and could afford to throw gobs of money at engineers and infrastructure, in quantities that even Microsoft was unwilling to match.
This is ironically a pretty solid use case for (ex VLIW research) ILP-optimizing compilers.
Given knowable runtime hardware usage patterns (huge bursts of memory bandwidth saturation) and a single limited core/thread-shared resource (memory bandwidth), one could optimize for the constraint ahead of runtime.
Because most of the performance optimization levers you have available to pull are (a) trade compute for memory bandwidth (e.g. compression), (b) preload when memory bandwidth is available, (c) optimize the choice of what's in cache when, (d) align to cache size / memory boundaries.
Or tl;dr, try to approximate GPU ISAs at the CPU compiler level. (Which why would anyone but hobbyists, because everyone else just buys pallets of Nvidia/AMD or designs their own ML chips?)
Under appreciated requirement for this to work in post-cloud times: open source
If a vendor can SaaS a solution, then enterprise is generally happy (they don't want to have to hire folks for maintenance), and that completely locks out any ability to run locally.
Between enterprise's ambivalence and the obvious financial incentive to vendors, you get SaaS-only products.
The problem is that both camps take their positions as religious righteousness, which lobotomizes their abilities to have productive, pros and cons discussions about matters at hand.
The internet/apps of the last 20 years have not exactly boosted people's ability to think critically and set aside their passions though.
Much easier to keep eyeballs glued and sell them ads if you encourage their baser impulses.
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