> For nearly all tasks, I want the fastest and smartest AI model.
This is not nearly true for everyone else in the world.
For example, think about the world in ~2021 pre-LLM. Would anyone say the sentence "I only want the fastest and smartest humans working on my project"?
No of course not. Most people don't want to pay $10 million dollar salary to the best programmers in the world. They prefer to pay $200k salary to a median programmer and that's good enough for their ecommerce website.
So then the problem is that Anthropic seems hypocritical when they knowingly insert themselves into this chain, and then complain about people down-chain from them.
To remedy the negative impressions (if they even care to do so) they should do 1 of 2 things:
1) stop complaining about it
2) stop distilling other people's work
They insert themselves into this chain for profit and complain about it. I really think that adds a thick layer to the hypocrisy that people, or at least me, feel is especially distasteful.
No LLM products would exist without the avalanche of largely non-consensual use of IP to create them, full stop. Any of these companies doing this and then turning around and complaining when their IP is "breached" are going to met with a chorus of tiny violins.
It's hypocritical and we shouldn't listen to their bullshit but I wouldn't expect anything else from them.
This generation of frontier models is "good enough." At some point, the Chinese labs will get to where the Americans are right now, they'll race to the bottom, and we will actually see what proliferation of AI looks like.
If Anthropic wants to be a trillion dollar company, they need to make revenue like Google or Apple do. Both of them have near monopolies, Anthropic is only getting further and further away as time goes on.
Of course they're gonna complain until they either figure out a better plan or accept a new valuation which is high but not spectacular.
I'm American and I enjoy hosting at my house. I do it often (imo).
I think some of the stats reviewed in this post are crazy because it is specifically "did it 12+ times in the last year", which means if you only did it 11 times, you simply register as a 'false' according to this modeling.
The graphs with once per year are much more reasonable.
I'm sure these stats still tell you something about life in america, but I feel like this bar is set so extremely high. I'm saying this as someone who LOVES hosting - I don't want to do it 12 times a year. (maybe it's because I set too high of a quality bar for myself?)
One that isn't built on debt bondage and a massive wealth transfer to the old and wealthy. Student debt, housing debt and medical debt are all designed to keep you a complaint worker who will increasingly never escape that debt. We have increasingly just replaced the dukes and kings of old with centibillionaires. Together we're bouldering towards what many of us call "neofeudalism".
This is one thing that Karl Marx and Adam Smith agreed on: landlords are parasitic that reduce economic output. It's another way we're returning to a virtual aristocracy as land gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
This is all going to further fall apart once we don't need everyone to be employed. Arguably we're already there. What are the rest of the people meant to do? Starve and die? At some point you realize the only way forward is to collectively own the wealth you help create.
We will eventually reach the point where not everyone needs a job. Many basic functions of life like agriculture and food production will be automated. Construction will probably be automated.
AI is being used to reduce the labor pool to suppress wages. You not only save on wages for laid off people but the remaining workers need their jobs and won't be asking for raises. They'll probably be doing extra unpaid work to boot.
If 20% of the workforce is no longer necessary, society as it stands now will collapse. That's the point.
You made the assumption that it was fairly valued before and the loss was a "true" loss.
But possible it could have been over-valued before, unbeknownst to low-information external investors. After all, right now it as a PE of 450+. (Google PE is 17, Meta PE is 27, Tesla PE is 330)
The stock dropping on CEO departure had nothing to do with his personal performance, and everything to do with the information that he revealed on the way out. Why would the CEO leave a rising and successful company on the verge of innovation?
And thus tying it back to pay - people should be paid based on their output and their personal performance, not based on simply serving as a signal which any warm body can do. That said, I don't think truly amazing CEOs are overpaid, e.g. steve jobs of old.
Wrong. I specifically stated I hold myself to a higher bar than I held anyone else. I took actions to diminish my contribution, and eventually left. I do not begrudge other Americans who did less than I did.
> Wrong. I specifically stated I hold myself to a higher bar than I held anyone else. I took actions to diminish my contribution, and eventually left. I do not begrudge other Americans who did less than I did.
This is not what I was trying to say.
First let me state the assumption I made: You think that working at Anthropic/OpenAI is morally bad because that's the parent thread, and you made a comment about how somethings are good enough and other things are too bad to tolerate.
So yes, you hold yourself to the bar of I should not work at Anthropic/OpenAI - but the point is that this bar is convenient to hold yourself to.
Did you "took actions to diminish my contribution, and eventually left. I do not begrudge other Americans who did less than I did."
Or did you simply never work there, maybe never even had an offer to work there.
I wasn't particularly commentating on specific companies. The scope of my reply was strictly responding to a claim that voluntarily choosing to contribute to an evil organization is the same as being physically coerced to do it.
That said, I do hold myself to professional standards that are 'inconvenient' as well. User surveillance, manipulative dark patterns for maximizing engagement and monetization, and just about everything else big tech does is antithetical to the way I live my life. I strive to develop software that I myself am happy to use and that my users are delighted to use. My career certainly got off to a slower and less lucrative start than it otherwise would have if I had no scruples about how I made a living. I could've made much more money if I harvested my users' data and sold it. And yet, I chose not to. That is a choice you can just make. If you were in a position where you were facing homelessness, I could understand taking any job you can get, but the people chasing $300k+ TC jobs at $evilcorp aren't usually in that position.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is, and you're basically accusing the individual of "sour grapes". It isn't clever, it's plainly transparent, and about the easiest way to trivialize someone else's moral convictions. Shame on you. Be better.
> easiest way to trivialize someone else's moral convictions
Did not trivialize it at all. Regardless of what's "right" or "wrong" we are definitely in the territory of "advanced ethics" and not "trivial/beginner ethics"
Personally I think if you were going to make a poster for a Japanese themed spring festival, and you did NOT include some sakura, you completely misunderstood the assignment.
Your promotional poster for a community gathering should not be subverting the western gaze on Japanese culture, or any other concept from art criticism 101.
It's supposed to get average people in your neighborhood to glance at it for 5-10 seconds and say, "cool looks like a good time"
YMMV but my experience tells me that the more cliché something looks, the more likely it's bad/cheap.
I've never been in a cliché-looking restaurant that is actually decent.
Meanwhile, the best restaurants I know have, at best, a flag or some kind of small drawing to give a clue about their nationality, but otherwise they look like a regular local one.
Right, but the best restaurants are not most restaurants. The best high end events are not most events. Most events and restaurants could be improved a lot by AI already
More like 100ms or less as their visual field coincidentally sweeps over wherever the ad is posted in the physical world. In this regard, it's even more important to use something people subconsciously associate with your thing.
You just don't know what it's like to live in a place where art and culture is truly valued. Take Japan, for a relevant example. Many things in japan are given an extra small twist to aesthetically elevate them. The food looks a little prettier, their packages are just a bit neater, their technology is cute, they put little doodles on everything, aside from new-age products or architecture everything has a little bit of personal touch and care. This is because there is some tradition of taking pride in small details and not reaching for the most obvious solution.
A society that values culture is taking the extra 3 minutes to think of or look up some Japanese iconography that would make the poster a bit more interesting than a sakura even if brainless "average" people cannot figure out how it is relevant to Japan, the hope being that all of us learn and appreciate these things a bit more.
> Take Japan, for a relevant example. Many things in japan are given an extra small twist to aesthetically elevate them.
I've been to Japan. How would you comment on the aesthetic of this "Little Texas" bar in Tokyo: https://www.littletexas.jp/
Do you think they are valuing the true culture of modern Texas? Because in my opinion this bar is filled with the most basic Texas cliches I can think of: cowboy hats, longhorn skulls, etc. Probably a lot more egregious than putting a sakura on a poster.
I said new-age products are an exception, the bar was opened in 2005. It also kind of proves my point, once Western culture ingratiated itself into Japan the art culture got a bit worse.
It is because you know this and you continually choose to keep using it.
It’s be like if your 2001 BMW car was super fuel efficient, and then for whatever reason the 2028 model guzzled gas and you chose to buy it anyway
Just because the thing you did once upon a time was efficient, does not mean you have a lifetime pass to engage with it no matter the updated circumstances
That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".
Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.
I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.
source: my parents were in the restaurant business
Location makes them try it once. Quality makes them come back every week. Which is useless if they never tried it once. On the other hand if you set up in a place where each person only comes by once or twice in a lifetime, like an airport, you don't have to make them come back and you just have to make sure the food is tolerable.
This is not nearly true for everyone else in the world.
For example, think about the world in ~2021 pre-LLM. Would anyone say the sentence "I only want the fastest and smartest humans working on my project"?
No of course not. Most people don't want to pay $10 million dollar salary to the best programmers in the world. They prefer to pay $200k salary to a median programmer and that's good enough for their ecommerce website.
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