It's at least not worse than Microsoft. Go and start a chat with Copilot. Which one? I don't know, they are all the same. Or maybe they are all different? All I know that if you start a chat in one interface, there is close to a 0% chance (but not quite) that you will find the same chat in another interface.
That agents with virtually unlimited computing resources can find these bugs is not surprising and of little interest at this point.
But can they fix and harden the software without introducing new bugs in the meantime? I would argue that over decades we have placed the industry in such feature hell that there will always be new critical attack vectors.
Now that writing the walls of code and building features is cheap, it is time for us, humans, to learn to reduce complexity in the software and to learn which features are not worth implementing.
Why couldn't there a wealth ceiling? Let's take $1B per person, everything above that is taxed at 100%. Would it destroy the capitalist dream and people would lose motivation to grow their wealth, or would it stimulate cooperation and wealth distribution?
You'd probably want to have it be dynamic in some way, as most monetary systems that mostly work tend to have some level of inflation to keep things moving.
Definitely there are many problems to this solution, such as what to do with existing billionaires. If it was up to me, I would say to them "figure it out, the late payment interest will start to accumulate soon". But realistically it could be done over multiple years and in stages to limit the negative effects.
The only thing that might genuinely be hard here is strategic leadership of a company.
Because while some can be transferred into something that is partially worker-owned, not all workers are suited to be given that sort of leverage.
So that might be worth pondering to come up with a solution that makes stuff not collapse. Because the reality of human resources is that the quality is underwhelming.
Disclosure: I work for a fully employee-owned company.
Frankly, I can't think of a fairer way for a company to be guided. If we choose, we can vote to hire (shudder) Elon Musk to run our company - or someone actually competent and trustworthy, from outside the employee pool.
By our charter, no one may own more than 1% of our total stock. Our collective decisions - effectively democratic representation, like the US - help decide our success. Demogoguery is almost impossible (unlike the US). Every worker is vested to some degree in our success, thanks to stock gift policies (and of course we can choose to buy more stock than that low level).
Yeah exactly. I was referring to exactly such businesses.
But, to put my previous point more bluntly, if you do this, you cannot hire idiots, because they otherwise start ruining everything.
Someone needs to hire idiots though, which is why this concept cannot work for all.
The alternative to that is idiot removal, however, that has proven to be a rather complex ethics problem where we've collectively rightfully decided that it is so radioactive, we will no longer entertain such thoughts.
My point is that with such a wealth cap, we will get some co-ops, but we also will have to get something else. And I have not yet found an idea what that could be
So when society says a business owner's assets are worth more than $1B they start losing control of the business they built and other people get to tell them how to run their business? That destroys a lot IMO
It is worth noting that, per the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman data, the tax rates of the top 0.1 and 0.01 percent of taxpayers have dropped substantially since the 1950s. The average tax rate on the 0.1 percent highest-income Americans was 50.6 percent in the 1950s, compared to 39.8 percent today. The average tax rate on the top 0.01 percent was 55.3 percent in the 1950s, compared to 40.8 percent today.
Note that those percentages include Federal, state, and local taxes.
I did not say "effective tax" you are moving the goal post.
It is no surprise to me that an organization originally founded by the chairman of General Motors, the president of Standard Oil and their like [0] is able to conclude:
>"The top 1 percent of Americans today do not face an unusually low tax burden, by historical standards."
Which is a wild claim to make.
Nice that you find the somewhat honest footnote, but you're citing what is essentially an opinion piece from a conservative think tank.
They're quoting a paper by respected economists, but feel free to discard it because it doesn't fit your priors.
And no, you didn't specifically say effective tax rate, but you did say that western countries effectively had a cap on how much you could earn (presumably that's what you meant, even though we're talking about a wealth tax here, not an income tax, but I digress), given a top marginal rate near 100%, but that's simply false, given that the effective tax rate even for the absolute most wealthy Americans was closer to 50%.
It's a little like complaining that university has gotten so expensive by just looking at the sticker price, while ignoring the fact that few people actually pay that, and the median price actually paid is much lower. That doesn't mean the effective price is where it should be either, but you do your position no favors with falsehoods.
My statement is corroborated by the source I linked. If you found it ambiguous, the precise statement I am referring to is illustrated in Figure 2 of my source.
You called the fact I raised a "tired talking point" and referenced a contentious source. While they do cite serious academics, they seem to draw their own conclusions in the text; unburdened by their references.
I don't know. With each new release of these models, they compare side-by-side how they are better than the previous ones, but at the same time I feel less impressed by each new release. Somehow they manage to be a seemingly big step forward but at the same time I feel I have seen so much AI that I just look at the common failure modes and they are all still there.
It's easy for them to show demos of abstract things because they don't necessarily have to follow real-world rules, but anything modeled after real world falls short of expectations.
Would you use hosted models if they promised anonymity and no log retention and servers were physically located inside jurisdictions that respect privacy (Switzerland, Norway or similar, I'm not into law) if that meant better price/performance ratio than your current rig?
What's the point to provide it with Apache 2.0? It's likely going to get sucked into the LLM training or inference process sooner rather than later. By that time license is no longer going to matter.
It will be $1/hour in a year. Then you will have to pay a different rate for better graphics. These things don't end well. Once they see that they have a stable customer base, they will figure out how to squeeze even more money from their customers. Of course, it will be advertised as something that the customers themselves required and they do it for them, not for themselves.
"Working" is a generous word for his position. The "work" involves flying with private jet to expensive places regular people have never stepped foot in for noncommittal meanings, showing up around the office at random times, have a word with random high-level managers in the office. All the while not having the slightest thought about someone evaluating your performance or output.
Also the part where you have three meals a day prepared for you, children’s needs taken care of, laundry washed ironed and folded, house cleaned. Working “hard” as a billionaire doesn’t mean shit.
There are two ends of the rope pulling the opposite ways. On one end there are companies who are only now starting to onboard on AI and their spend grows. On the other end there are companies with certain maturity who are starting to calculate their spend, put on the limits of employees, explore alternative models with the aim to limit spend.
I think as the pool of new adopters shrinks and the pool of advanced adopters grows, the spending on LLMs will start to fall.
I'm told that Anthropic has been locking enterprise customers into contracts with a mandatory amount of spend in exchange for a minor rebate. I don't know how widespread those contracts are, but either way, my guess is that when they eventually expire, those customers will switch to e.g. DeepSeek for the 80% of workloads that don't need the extra oomph of Opus. I don't know if the numbers at that point will add up to Anthropic surviving. They do seem to be concerned, judging by how hard they seem to be pushing for regulatory capture.
on the flip side, some early adopters of the tech have been scaling back or removing. Which would both offset gains from new-comers as an increase and also reduces the willingness of people to take the plunge.
There's no doubt AI companies can be profitable and bring value, but anthropic and OAI are horrifically over-valued at the moment, and there is no credible read that currently signals engaging in trade of these companies stock is anything other than engaging in greater fool theory.
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