I watched the Google interview with Ilya yesterday and this came up. There's a large disconnect between the evals and the real-world performance, and he admitted that the evals are targeted.
There was a storm of hype the last couple weeks for Gemini 3 and everyone, correctly, rolled their eyes. Investors are demanding a return and it's not happening. They're just going to have to face reality at some point.
Unfortunately, investors facing reality means homelessness for the rest of us. Maybe the real treasure was the billions of dollars we made along the way. :)
My close friends got showered so much with money poured down by investors that it is indecent.
Just because they happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and idling, gets paid 10M USD+ due to stock options vetting.
Sounds like crypto^2; money is spread completely irrationally and unfairly (lucky folks who launched a ponzi get rewarded instead of jailed) and completely disconnected from actual efforts.
In the long-term this can only lead to a very unhealthy society.
Good that we won't need money anymore, thanks to AGI right ?
This is how VC and on some level professional success always worked. Gotta be in the right place, knowing the right people, at the right time. Although the scale and speed is more absurd.
I was wondering if AI was essentially the last hype cycle, that’s what it’s sort of been billed as, the tech that can do everything, but I guess robotics could be a next big thing to replace it, basically applied AI.
You mean the last 5 year plan? VCs seem to lack so much imagination and are so prone to group think. That we effectively have a top down command economy with 5 year plans in tech. Interestingly VR seems to punctuate every 15 year cycle.
I've pitched to VCs a lot, and you touch upon a key aspect: they really lack imagination, and are extremely prone to group think. These days, I tend to think of VCs - the people - as frat boy bullies that never grew up.
>> I was wondering if AI was essentially the last hype cycle
The next hype wants to be quantum computing, but its just not there yet - never mind the lack of real-world applications.
I thought nVidia would start promoting GPUs (whole data centers) to run classical simulations of QC to develop the applications while real hardware gets figured out.
If you want to go off trying to predict the cycle I’d suspect ag/weather tech. Political complexity aside it appears to be the biggest thing we’ll need to work on in the coming decades if we want to sustain the planet’s carrying capacity.
Probably more likely though to be something novel that few took seriously before it demonstrates utility. And this is the issue for QC, we already know what it’s useful for: a handful of niche search algorithms. It’s a bit like fusion in that even if you work out the (very significant) engineering issues you’re left with something that while useful is far from transformative.
China is absolutely winning innovation in the 21st century. I'm so impressed. For an example from just this morning, there was an article that they're developing thorium reactor-powered cargo ships. I'm blown away.
> The tech is from America actually, decades ago. (Thorium).
I guess it depends on how you see it, but regardless, the people putting it to use today doesn't seem to be in the US.
FWIW:
> Thorium was discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius during his analysis of a new mineral [...] In 1824, after more deposits of the same mineral in Vest-Agder, Norway, were discovered [...] While thorium was discovered in 1828 its first application dates only from 1885, when Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach invented the gas mantle [...] Thorium was first observed to be radioactive in 1898, by the German chemist Gerhard Carl Schmidt
For being an American discovery, it sure has a lot of European people involved in it :) (I've said it elsewhere but worth repeating; trying to track down where a technology/invention actually comes from is a fools errand, and there is always something earlier that led to today, so doesn't serve much purpose except nationalism it seems to me).
Jm2c, but I really dislike those winners/losers narratives. They lack any nuance, are juvenile, and ultimately do not contribute much but noise like endless of pointless "who's better Jordan or Lebron?" debates.
Different as in much worse? It's not that you're wrong but, just to be clear, the problem with investing as the only place to keep up with inflation means that markets will detach from value, and become a giant Ponzi scheme.
There is no such thing as "growth detached from value" lasting forever.
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