Just for clarity, Ceausescu’s execution was not streamed live. It was recorded and shown on TV the same day, but when it was shown the announcer read the dry statement that they (Ceausescu and wife) were tried, found guilty, sentenced to death, and the execution carried out, and then the footage was shown. Just like that. Very out of the blue.
> If you let someone get to hundreds of billions in net worth
"Let someone"? I guess the right to pursue one's happiness is not all that self-evident after all. One should first ask permission, and, if we are in a good mood, we might "let them" pursue their happiness.
Here's my opinion on the "pacing the frontier" issue. Recursive self improvement can accelerate AI advances a lot. Whoever nails it first, has a huge first mover's advantage. But OpenAI is taking a "move fast and break things" attitude. This is making life very difficult for Anthropic: how can you retain your edge when you keep measuring twice to cut once, but your competitor keeps blowing things up left and right?
Google, who was left a little bit behind anyway, is more than happy to join the calls for taking a more cautious approach to AI development. Hence DeepMind Institute.
Sam Altman has no option than to pretend he agrees with all these ideas. What else is he supposed to say?
I think you are committing the lump of labor fallacy [1]. Lots of jobs will disappear, but others will appear. Lots of things (both intellectual and material) that are produced nowadays by humans will be produced in the near future by AI. But humans will be needed to do new things.
Take the Hugging Face incident. Why did it happen? Because the people whose task was to set up a testing framework took shortcuts. Why did they? Because there weren't enough people who were assigned to do the job. Why not? Because the job is too new and not enough people are qualified to do it. It's a job that simply did not exist 3 years ago. But 3 years from now, this job might very well employ tens of thousands of high skill knowledge workers.
That’s fair. I guess I’m also thinking that whatever new kinds of intellectual work that arise from the introduction of AI could be also done by AI. But maybe this comes from a lack of imagination again.
My guess is that when you sign up for either Anthropic or OpenAI, the terms of use specify you can't use their model for purpose A, B, C, D. For example, you can't use their model to try to build biological weapons, or to try to extort people, etc. Most likely there is language there that you can't use their models to train other models. It's as simple as that. You agree to those terms of use, or you don't use their models.
I don't think Anthropic and OpenAI will IPO at all. Word is that Anthropic will have $100 BN in revenues this year, and very likely OpenAI will get some similar amount. You IPO when you need money, and I think Anthropic and OpenAI are past that point.
Why would they not? The cost to do that is 0.000001% of whatever numbers they usually work with. The upside is that it creates a community of hobbyists, most of whom will us (consummer grade) Nvidia GPUs. Which are not a significant source of revenue for Nvidia anymore, but it’s nice to have a bit of insurance.
The 1 and 2 you listed can be summarized as client buys Nvidia GPUs with equity instead of cash. Clients like Anthropic or OpenAI are not exactly flush with cash right now, so such sn arrangement makes sense. Plus, it reduces Nvidia’s incentive to invest in training a frontier-level Nemotron model.
If they were buying GPUs with equity then it wouldn't show up on Nvidia's quarterly report as revenue, even if the net trade is GPUs for equity. This is the point of the structure, to make cash flows show up as top line revenue. Furthermore, the structure pushes the liabilities off-balance sheet. This means if the flows slow down, in-flows rapidly become out-flows as Nvidia has to cover its liabilities. This is the problem with the trade, it puts everything on a knife's edge.
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