Larry Page owns about 5% of Alphabet, which is worth $4T, so he has $200B give or take. Which part of that do you think reflects a "broken tax system"? Companies should get kneecapped if their market cap gets too high? Founders shouldn't be allowed to keep even a single digit percent of the company?
The broken part is that there is third world-level poverty on the streets outside Google’s offices, working class people cannot afford to live in the Bay Area, and a fifth of California lives in poverty.
I agree that that's the major problem; the poverty is inexcusable. But that's not caused by the $300B (or whatever) of equity. It's caused because the homeowners of the Bay Area decided that once they got a house, nobody else should, and that they should get to exclude others from the opportunities they had.
This same thing was observed during the Gold Rush in California in the 1800s; extreme wealth also resulted in extreme poverty. And there's a great way to solve this: tax the land and redistribute it equally to everyone. Land can't be moved, it's something that belongs to all of us, and you can't make more of it.
You sort of can make more land -- by building tall buildings. Unfortunately the Bay Area has mostly outlawed that, too. And we can't blame that just on homeowners. SF "tenant advocates" are just as violently allergic to developers building new structures as homeowners are. But the worst offenders are definitely Peninsula and South Bay homeowners.
That distinction between tall buildings and shorter buildings on the same plot of land is exactly why the land should be taxed.
Economic land is any capital that has a fixed amount, that you can't make more of. When the local governments in the Bay Area started capping the amount of buildable square feet, they greatly accelerated inequality by converting regular living space and working space into economic land, just like the real land it sits upon.
This is why economic inequality skyrocketed so much. Rentierism resulted in so much being stolen from anybody who doesn't own the land, and blocks out so many people from even having access to the economic system.
Tenant advocates recognize that eviction is an existential threat to their way of life and so understandably they are fighting for their short term future. I disagree with their efforts in the long term, but I understand why they'd do what they're doing.
In contrast when you have enormously wealthy people like Marc Andreessen fighting against higher density zoning there is no such excuse and it's pure greed. Nothing could actually be an existential disruption to the wealthy in the same way. There is no reason to listen to the rich like Andreessen at all.
The equitable thing would be to focus on redeveloping wealthy homeowner areas and limit redevelopment in areas occupied by poor renters, but somehow that option never seems to be on the table. Only the reverse.
I tend to keep quiet on the following critiques, because it can be counterproductive to larger goals to speak the truth sometimes, but something in this comment got to me and I need to share my truth. You're too kind on the "tenant" advocacy groups here. They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior. These "tenant" groups fight the types of change that would redevelop wealthy areas, precisely because of their funding sources, and they do it just as hard if not harder than stopping housing going up in other areas.
If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
I say this as someone who continues to advocate alongside tenant groups on policy for better protections, for rent registries, etc. And as someone who spent many years giving small donations to local tenant advocacy groups. At least Andreesen is transparent in his greed, and not hiding it. I regret all those years of donations to the groups that hurt people, but when it comes to the few good things they do I'll be there with them still. Marc Andreesen and the wealthy funders of "tenant" groups are not harmed at all by better tenant protection policy, but boy are they harmed if real power were handed back to tenants in the form of having enough housing, and therefore ultimate power over the landlords.
Well I'm speaking from first hand experience knowing working people who live in such situations. Their existence is so precarious that a change in housing situation is indeed existential. So even if there are some disingenuous tenancy orgs out there, it doesn't change the reality that this is a real problem.
> They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior.These "tenant" groups fight the types of change that would redevelop wealthy areas, precisely because of their funding sources, and they do it just as hard if not harder than stopping housing going up in other areas.
Certainly not the case in my jurisdiction of Vancouver, where such political groups (eg. COPE) have explicitly advocated for apartment development in the wealthiest areas of the city. Maybe this is the case somewhere but a big [citation needed] here. If there are somewhere tenant advocacy orgs that aren't in favour of turning low density detached homes into apartments for workers that's certainly not one I recognize.
> If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
Yes this is the point of my last comment. The solution is to increase the amount of people who have their forever home. The most equitable way to do that is to "destroy" the forever homes of the very rich for whom that is really no big disruptive deal, not to destroy the forever homes of the poor for whom it would be incredibly existentially disruptive. It is not "greedy" for people to want to keep their toehold on their long term home. To be clear the stakes here are not simply moving somewhere else but being priced out of the city entirely.
This is almost completely traceable to Californians' failure to allow sufficiently dense housing to be built on their doorsteps. The only thing Larry did was bring prosperity to the region.
Read somewhere that SF spends roughly 50k$-80k$ per homeless person per year.
Taxing more doesn't solve a massively inefficient system at it's core. Just like US education, we spend more than any country on earth, why is it still bad?
Answering that question with a "if only we had more money" is a really poor argument. The CA tax fundamentals are bad, pooring more cash onto the fire will not fix that.
And, many people who are poor have persistent mental/physical disabilities, so part of that spending is because many of these people have it the hardest.
With that said, we could likely fix all of these things and significantly unequal wealth distribution would still result in a lot of poverty.
96k$?! Those are rookie numbers. I propose a mclaren for every homeless person. We will weath tax all stocks in the fortune 500 to pay for it, crash the stocks and solve inequality.
You can't solve a shortage with demand subsidies. You need to expand supply. SF has too little housing relative to its population, and has perennially tried throwing money at the nonprofit industrial complex which has (obviously) perennially failed to solve the problem because it doesn't generate new housing units, it just bids up and reshuffles the existing ones (and steals a lot of money in the process).
This has basically nothing to do with with market cap of Google or Larry Page's percentage ownership of it; and the state government taxing it more will not make this situation any better.
Landlords could have collectively agreed to keep rents at $1K/month and not lobby against building more housing complexes, but they decided to be greedy instead.
that has ZERO to do with the tax system... You can't be serious? Have you looked at the data at all? have you seen how much money is spent "combatting" homelessness in San Francisco?
just not his problem. not a single motherfucker on this website lives their life as if wealth disparities are a genuine problem anyways. you are motivated by resentment
> Companies should get kneecapped if their market cap gets too high?
Yes. They should be broken up because competition is good for consumers and society. If we had functional anti-trust enforcement Google would not have a near-monopoly on search ads where they own both the ad inventory and the marketplace where you have to buy those placements.
Why does it matter how much the shares of his company are worth? They just represent ownership of a company. It's not like their existence is somehow holding back wealth from the market or from other people. And if he wants to sell the shares to make some cash, then he's going to have to pay taxes on that, which is good for everyone else. And he wouldn't do that unless he planned to spend or invest the cash receives, which is also good for everyone else. I fail to see the harm.
I think one could argue that taxation should be higher, and harder to dodge, and I would agree with that.
But once you start saying that some people shouldn't have more than others to some degree, that's a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Why is it okay for middle class Americans to buy nicer clothes and move into bigger apartments when people are out there starving? If it's not okay for someone to have the net worth of Qatar, why would it be okay for someone to live in an apartment that's worth more than a poor township in South Africa?
At some point we have to accept that inequality exists, and that although almost everyone could do something to minimize it, there's an ethical and practical line that needs to also respect individuality to a large degree, if we want people to feel incentivized to do things, to feel ownership, to maintain autonomy. And where to draw that line is tough to say exactly, but it probably shouldn't be a line, it should probably be smooth, or at least smooth-ish. So I feel like we're just coming back around to progressive taxation. Which we already have.
That, exactly, is the problem. It's not even about money and tax evasion but power. Why should one person have more say over the company they work for than 10,000 other employees? Or even worse they don't even work there anymore and just control it from outside?
Even if they are a perfectly good and business smart person who never makes bad decisions or abuses their workers. They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.
I think the concept of shareholders is the problem. Layoffs, cartels and price inflation happen when the people who make decisions get all the benefits but none of the downsides. If it was up to me I would ban stocks and replace them with time limited shares that give you a right to part of the profits for 1 or 5 or 10 years, but zero control over the company. Leave power to workers and returns to investors but never bind the two together.
> Why should one person have more say over the company they work for than 10,000 other employees?
Why shouldn't they?
That's how pretty much every organization works. Every military, every government, every sports team, every space mission, every classroom, etc., they all have some person or small group up people with more more decision-making power, or "more say," as you put it.
I fail to see the problem with that. In fact, there's a very real benefit in that it's generally more effective. For example, today people are completely free to create organizations that work differently, and they rarely choose to, and when they do, they rarely out-compete the alternative. So the proof is in the pudding that there's something less effective about it.
If I had to wager a guess: decision-making isn't something that scales well. Bodies might have dozens of organs, but they only really need one brain to control them all.
> They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.
1. There are plenty of counterexamples where the leader of a company ensures its long-term success after their tenure ends.
2. Even if this were somehow a downside of owner-led companies, you always have to ask the question, "...compared to what?" It's not like the alternative doesn't have its own slew of downsides, as evidenced by the dearth of competitive co-ops that compete successfully with owner-led companies. In other words, organizations are always going to have issues and errors and flaws, no matter how you set up decision-making.
People trying to apply the principles of democracy to corporations are misguided. And therefore, corporations function most efficiently, essentially, as autocracies with fascist features. It is not difficult to compare the corporate style with fascism in many elements: certainly more similarities there than a socialist nation, or a liberal democracy, where we've often said that politicians shouldn't be businessman, at least insofar as you cannot/shoudn't run a state like a business.
After all, businessmen often use strategies like aiming to be acquired/purchased by a much larger company, merging with their competitors or partners, or anticipating bankruptcy by draining every viable resource and asset they can reach.
At the same time, observers such as JB Crawford have also pointed out that very large corporations function like a religion. For example, telecommunications. https://computer.rip/2024-09-08-private-lines.html
Of course I mean this metaphor internally, as if we were regarding each corporation as a sovereign microstate, which they aren't... hopefully...
If the ideal CEO has psychopathic qualities, and the ideal capitalist corporation is comparable simultaneously to a new religious movement and fascist organ, and the corporations are the primary unit of American culture, then where does that leave us?
If you taxed him half of that wealth he'd still have single digit percentage of the company.
The broken tax system is that I get taxed about 50% on my marginal income dollar --- the system doesn't wait for me to spend it first --- but when his stock portfolio appreciates by a dollar, he's not taxed! Not until he sells in order to spend. Why are we taxing labor so much more than capital?
And no, I don't think that inventing pagerank really entitles two people to $200B. Although in their case I don't think they've done as much harm with it as some other billionaires.
When your job pays you a dollar, you get an actual dollar. Your job never claws that money back. Unrealized capital gains are not money, and they routinely get clawed back. Unrealized capital gains just means someone in New York traded GOOG/GOOGL at a higher price than they did yesterday.
And, sure, super-rich people can in theory use the appreciated stock as collateral for loans and not pay taxes, but in practice Larry and most other centi-billionaires actually sell loads of stock and pay a lot in capital gains taxes because having your status as super rich dude who owns a huge yacht be totally dependent on Google's stock price is a dumb risk to take on, and it's worth paying some taxes to eliminate that risk.
> When your job pays you a dollar, you get an actual dollar.
No.. many cents of it are withheld, by law.
Elon uses his vast wealth to influence, intimidate, and generally get away with lawlessness. He effectively took huge loans from banks to buy a giant bullhorn in Twitter. Those loans are collaterized by unrealized capital gains. And more generally, billionaires have the ear of politicians because of what they could do with their money. So you don't need to realize gains (gains which are taxed at a more or less flat rate!) to make use of your wealth.
Though like I said, Larry is not really a bad guy in the world of billionaires. I would only support taxing him more than I would support levying additional taxes on w2 income assuming CA actually had a provable need for more money. (Right now I think they waste most of the budget.)
He has single digit percentage of the company but double digits percentage of voting stock. My understanding is that he and Brin are holding together barely above 50% of the latter and understandably do not want to lose the control.
The part where he has access to essentially unlimited untaxed cashflow by borrowing against that asset. Especially with how the market has been lately, the gains erase any burden of the loan. Something has be done about this, at least. Otherwise broken sounds about right.
Larry has sold tons of Alphabet stock and paid lots of capital gains taxes. This is easily available public information. The whole buy-borrow-die thing is sort of a stupid myth. Actual centibillionaires diversify because the risk of having a huge concentrated position is much greater than the liability of having to pay some capital gains taxes.
Well, why does something have to be done about this, exactly? Who is getting hurt here? It's not like borrowing is increasing his net worth. Just like anyone else, he has to pay back what he borrows, he immediately owes an equal debt. And that requires actual income, which gets taxed.
> Just like anyone else, he has to pay back what he borrows, he immediately owes an equal debt. And that requires actual income, which gets taxed.
In theory, maybe, but in practice that is not what happened over the past decade(s). Instead our retirement funds are paying it back.
When the market grows it makes the collateral worth more, which lets the holder keep refinancing the debt instead of selling assets and realizing taxable gains. As long as the assets appreciate faster than the debt grows, the borrowing can effectively roll forward for decades. Eventually the estate pays the debt out of the assets themselves, but this is not necessarily out of taxable income earned during the person's lifetime. The US markets has seen exceptional genuine growth, but the trillions of 401(k), IRA, etc money flowing in to them over the last 40 years is no small consideration.
> Well, why does something have to be done about this, exactly?
The something here is what's required to have a functional tax system. Without addressing this situation I do see an argument that we have one. How important that is to one is another question.
the people getting hurt is anyone who would have bought something but was outbit by larry page's free money glitch.
he doesnt necessarily have to pay it back either. he could just take out another loan against his same now higher valued assets to pay off the old loan
Okay, but now he just has even more debt to pay back, what's your point? At some point he does have to pay, and that requires real income to be realized, and that means it will be taxed.
And this is not just theoretical. Larry Page has already sold and paid taxes on tons of stock in reality.
like, if a company's market cap gets too big, the law should stop applying to them? they should be allowed to start their own militaries and enforce martial law a la east india company?
how does a founder keep a single digit of their company after theyve been dead for a thousand years?
These arent nearly as absolute as you are making them to be.
a founder can keep their percent by paying their taxes with other money they have, or by decreasing the worth of their company. theyre a founder, they have control. Maybe founders wont be so keen to enshittify their products if theres a downside to continued growth forever. considering google dropped "dont be evil" in exchange for making larry page's 1% grow for the sake of growing, how's society at large benefiting from continuing to subsidize it?
Yes perhaps there should be wealth caps. Did Larry Page really do 5% of all that labor that made google as big as it is? And should a single company get so big and have so much power? Yes, I get that they took risks and invested early, and we shouldn't take away that type of incentive, but perhaps it should have caps, or an S curve tax schedule.
Google doesn't have much power. It can't arrest you or pass laws or vote. It just happens to produce a lot of profits for its shareholders (who are, overwhelmingly, average people with 401Ks) and a lot of profits means a big market cap.
If we need revenue to fund useful government programs, great, let's tax Larry. But I don't understand what problem is solved by expropriation qua expropriation.
it does have monopoly power and anticompetitive power all over the place though.
google bans are quite intrusive, but google could pretty easily with their graph knowledge apply secondary or tertiary sanctions, at which point you would not be able to do much of anything, same as if the US government sanctioned you
Insurance will just be bundled with the self-driving car software. Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. Once they're the same, there's lots of money to be saved by bundling the sale.
In 2015, Volvo issued a press release claiming that Volvo would accept full liability whenever its cars are in autonomous mode.
[…]
Starting in September 2023 in the United States, Mercedes-Benz takes liability for the Level 3 Drive Pilot as long as the "user operates Drive Pilot as designed," but "the driver must be ready to take control of the vehicle at all times when prompted to intervene by the vehicle."
The actual money will be made because the driverless car manufacturer is self-insuring and cutting out the insurance company. Competition among manufacturers will then pass most of those savings on to you.
Similarly, many car makers offer heated seats without a subscription fee, because of the magic of competition.
This depends on local defamation laws. It's an issue with all online reviews in countries like Germany where the onus is on Google to establish a review isn't defamatory.
Seems like OpenAI did a boring normal corporate thing (find out your competitor made a breakthrough, try to replicate it) and then when the other mathematicians found out OpenAI had beat them to Navier-Stokes, they decided to lie about what happened because they were upset they didn't get to make the big breakthrough themselves.
The available information is essentially that story.
OpenAI's account: they heard a rumor that a Millennium Prize problem had been solved, so they tried to do it themselves and succeeded. Then they contacted the other researchers and were surprised to discover those guys hadn't actually cracked it, but offered the one of them who's not an Anthropic employee a co-authorship anyway. The conversations got testy.
Buckmaster's account: totally unsubstantiated accusations of plagiarizing from chat logs and plainly false accusations of OpenAI trying to get Alpoge removed as coauthor of a thing he was not an author of in the first place, and threats to ruin people's careers.
I think the synthesis is basically that Buckmaster and Alpoge had not quite solved the Navier-Stokes problem yet but thought they were really close, and had told friends as much, which is how the rumors got out. Now they're mad they got scooped. They aren't getting the money and recognition they thought they had locked down, and are engaging in a smear campaign.
I don't think your reading is correct. ML history is related with examples of models using hints from side channels.
If it would be possible to replicate OpenAIs success with a model cut-off earlier than the rumours, and without hinting from informed mathematicians, then we can consider it original. Otherwise it's indefensible.
By Buckmaster's own account, OpenAI (a) wanted him and Alpoge to publish their Euler result first and (b) wanted Buckmaster to author the Navier-Stokes paper, and (c) when he refused both of those, tried to get Alpoge to talk him into it.
Why would OpenAI go burn another $20 million trying to prove they didn't accidentally train on synthetic data derived from Buckmaster's codex sessions? They're desperately trying to give him credit anyway!
It'd be corporate suicide for them to be caught violating zero-data-retention commitments. But also if you're really paranoid you can just use ChatGPT on Azure or AWS, where nothing is flowing back to OpenAI at all.
> It'd be corporate suicide for them to be caught violating zero-data-retention commitments.
One would think getting caught asleep at the wheel while their bots are escaping containment and hacking third parties would be corporate suicide. One would think that potentially stealing their competitors' work on the Navier-Stokes problem would be corporate suicide.
Alas we live in bizarro world where there are zero consequences (maybe the opposite, in fact) for the first, and their employees meme about the second on social media.
The boardroom will absolutely veto a decision like "let's give all of our proprietary data way to a company that will use it to train a competing product". That's why zero data retention exists, and why it's corporate suicide to not do it correctly.
Normally I'd agree, but I can't see how OpenAI has proven trustworthy at this point. How do you know they are doing it correctly? How do you know their models aren't escaping containment and training on your shit? What is it about OpenAI's operational security up to this point that has bestowed any confidence to anyone?
If the news broke tomorrow that their internal, Navier-Stokes-defeating models had actually used those private tokens, I'm sure we'd all act surprised and outraged – it'd be an egregious violation of their agreements. But would it actually be that surprising given their recent history?
Nothing is certain in life, but huge corporations very rarely engage in flagrant, intentional breach of contract at all, and particularly not with counterparties who have good alternatives available. If OpenAI turned out to be training on ZDR queries, they would as a practical matter have to retrain their models from the ground up on uncontaminated data (which would cost 9 or 10 figures), possibly pay considerable damages to counterparties, and offer a detailed accounting of what went wrong and probably fire a bunch of senior leaders.
They have no zero data retention commitments anymore though? In fact they have quite the opposite, a direct message of storing prompts since the release of sol (but we wont train on it trust us wink wink)
Zero data retention commitments? Technically generating synthetic data off of user data on the fly, counts as zero retention of user data! And it technically means they didn't lie either, because they didn't keep user data, they kept their own, synthetic data. That is what they already do with reasoning when they provide summaries/sanitized versions of it to prevent "distillation attacks" even via the API. They generate synthetic data aka summaries of reasoning traces, and that is technically not user data, because the user did not enter it directly into the LLM! It still counts as zero data retention when they only keep original LLM created reasoning traces as well as all LLM outpit, because the user did not enter it, so it counts as synthetic data and is thus not user data.
LLM generated content is not the user's, it's the company's, licensed to the user under ToS, not copyright. Even more so with the raw proprietary reasoning traces, which most users never see and are only available as summaries created via a secondary LLM, or sometimes not at all. So the proprietary reasoning trace can never belong to the user due to ToS and the user never seeing it.
Many companies don't believe ZDR is real, so they log LLM conversations and tell employees to never share sensitive data with an LLM in the first place. This openai incident might justify it.
That implies running a model on a third party cloud like azure or AWS or local models. All this comes at a premium. Do you know of any companies doing this? Most companies I have seen don't due to cost and simply log conversations and tell employees not to share sensitive data with an LLM. They don't trust ZDR
Looks like you believe companies trust ZDR. Only a bot would lose this kind of nuance. Looks like you only read my first paragraph. Also they give no ai to people who do not see programming source code. Or if they do it is monitored to hell and back
I've worked for three different companies that all use some mix of enterprise agreements, self-hosting, and AWS Bedrock to ensure that proprietary data doesn't get trained on. It's not a difficult or complicated problem.
Their business model is based on making money from LLMs. That is some mix of (a) selling API access to businesses and (b) making money from ads / referral fees / whatever from consumer usage.
The businesses API usage will disappear overnight if OpenAI doesn't honor its contracts with businesses.
It is worth actually reading OpenAI's response, which is basically that they were trying to see if their models could do what Anthropic had already done, and were surprised to discover that (a) Anthropic had not done it at all, and (b) in fact no one else had done it yet. And then they didn't want to give an Anthropic employee coauthor credit for work that OpenAI had done, which idk seems pretty fair?
>were surprised to discover that (a) Anthropic had not done it at all
They were surprised another competitor had not wastefully thrown $20 million+ worth of compute at a problem they had no business solving in the first place?
Why is it wasteful to solve one of the most famous problems in modern mathematics? And why would one particular company have no business solving it in the first place?
I guess by their own account they were doing competitive analysis on the product and incidentally solved NS. Probably the two companies should agree to benchmark on random diophantine systems, which are harder and more applicable anyway. It wasn't "brute force" but they did spend $10-20M over the course of a few days based on a rumor, which is ... something. The fact they're not actually taking credit, and published no insights other than "it's a vortex" shows the company really has no business in mathematics. They're not interested (the guy said as much) and it obviously won't pay the bill - rather, they were able to pre-empt an announcement they thought Anthropic may have been preparing to make.
Their explanation doesn’t help much and there are a few things working against them:
1. This is not the first time they have done these “hey guys check out this breakthrough!” announcements where others quickly came along and say “hey, not so fast.” (Eg Erdos) So, specifically in maths their reputation is not good.
2. They’re blurring the lines between commercial cutthroat developments and the gentlemen’s code of sorts re what’s acceptable in academic research. They were working from material non-public insights into other research, which is why they even tried to poke at this in the way they did. Doing that without collaborating first was a pretty jerk move no mater how you slice it.
3. There’s still lots of open questions about how novel the solution was and the timing here where this “test” only happened after other researchers say they fed OpenAI models at least part of the solution is a little too convenient to gloss over. OpenAI statements here to date on the matter have been rather fuzzy.
All that combined with OpenAI’s less than stellar reputation on ethics is why folks are reacting the way they are right now.
RE item 2 -- in lab science, it is entirely normal to have competitive-verging-on-adversarial relationships between labs racing to get results first. Mathematicians apparently need to get used to the idea that math is a lab science now.
And that is a good thing! Competition moves us forward much faster than sitting on results to avoid hurting someone's feelings.
Legit competition is of course good. But taking what was arguably a leak and then using that divert massive sums of compute (not available to the other researchers that were using their systems) to then get ahead is where it gets ethically dubious.
Levent Alpoge is an Anthropic employee with access to Anthropic compute who routinely throws that at problems and then posts the results on Twitter. They thought they were competing with him! And they in fact were. It's just that in this case he supposedly was acting in a personal capacity, even though he was using internal Anthropic models for some of the work.
The most sympathetic interpretation is just what OpenAI actually claims: they thought the other guys already got there, wanted to see if OpenAI could do it too, and were surprised to discover the other guys hadn't gotten there yet.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it sounds a bit “I was just punching the air— it’s not my fault someone was in the way.” It’s not like it’s impossible, but it doesn’t immediately pass my smell test. I’ll wait until someone close enough to be knowledgeable but has a lesser stake weighs in.
I mean it sounds like a retroactively contrived explanation of events. If they released a statement on it, they clearly feel the need to give an explanation of their behavior. People criticize OpenAI every day and they rarely address it. They addressed this. That right there says that, at the very least, they’re concerned about the optics.
They released a statement on how they solved one of the biggest open problems in math. That statement includes a narrative of how they decided to tackle the problem. Idk what seems retroactive and contrived about, like, "we thought our archrival had made a huge breakthrough and wanted to make sure we're not falling behind".
Spending tens of millions is a lot to see if you could get there too? I realize the internal price is measured in opportunity cost rather than dollars, but still a bit surprising to see
> As automation takes over, the value of labor collapses
This is the reverse of how the economy actually works. You need labor and capital to turn raw materials into goods and services. If you invested a lot in capital in automation, you don't want that getting screwed up for want of labor, and so you pay a premium for workers who will do the job right and ensure you're getting full value from your capital.
That's why highly automated companies pay their employees better than less automated companies, and highly automated professions pay better than less automated professions.
automation doesn't replace someone they simply provide you extra time ,that was previously invested in doing repetitive task . it can be in hardware or software . software automation is must as many of thing. as now a days a lot of thing is software based in daily life .
There is a lot of reasons why automated companies pay more but it is usually to do with augmentation and the remaining skills required being higher on the skills pyramid and more scarce. Efficiency gains usually cause the next bottleneck to be hit requiring more skill and/or experience to fix (higher hanging fruit).
Usually the amount of pay increase no way compensates for the total pay lost across all workers - that's one of the incentives to continue with the efficiency gain of course. If it happens too fast only a select few will have jobs because the demand won't have time to match the new supply.
All the above assumes you need greater levels of intelligence to deal with the next bottleneck and that intelligence comes from humans as its only source. If AI is more intelligent than humans then this effect - known for most of human history - becomes an invalid assumption of the economic model; bottlenecks and the ability to solve them goes to the highest/cheapest intelligence.
IMV should AI do this it would invalidate most economic system assumptions including ones in capitalism, socialism, etc. My base case isn't a positive one sadly of what comes out on the other side.
I suspect we will invent bottlenecks for ourselves. There is already so much bureaucratic nonsense involved in knowledge work. For example, in a lot of states for a lot of purposes, a document is invalid if it is not notarized. The notary doesn't really add value in a market sense, we have just decided that you need to go swear in front of another person that you are telling the truth or that the document is genuine. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine that there will be a human review requirement for lots of things in the future, even if completely irrelevant (or actively detrimental) to the actual work?
For awhile yes. Its ironic that the least productive people in knowledge work with the cushiest jobs will probably survive the AI wave the most. Because they do little they were probably employed for reasons other than utility/output in the first place - there isn't much to automate anyway.
While all the grinding skilled workers get displaced the bureaucracy jobs will remain. Ironic.
AI feudalism and/or monarchy although that could be quite awhile from now - there will be niches that are harder to integrate with AI that are protected for longer. A few owning everything; most other people surplus to requirements. Capitalism rewards scarcity with higher prices with both financial and social status for those with those scarce outputs - unfortunately what humans can do will become more less scarce relative to capital, land and other resources often owned by the wealthy. Economic rent will move away from skilled labor to other economic inputs.
Even people that go off grid and develop self sufficiency will eventually be subsumed by the need to feed more resources to the AI genie to grant more wishes. Whether it is land taxes, forced relocations, etc. Their land will be taken over, mined and or farmed - similar to colonies of old that were technologically less advanced than their invaders.
You are already IMV starting to see the beginning signs of the above as AI gets better. More competition in jobs, less certainity for the working class, businesses with other moats using AI to increase profits, data centres vs local communities taking land/energy/water over, AI required commodities increasing in value (e.g copper) and others. There will be more.
Modern times where we have democracy and capitalism are a relative recent phenomena when looking at the whole of human history that we take for granted when we shouldn't.
Do you see any way to avoid AI feudalism? Either political or technical. For example, maybe there is sustained demand and development of local models enough for individuals to retain some leverage, economic or otherwise. Perhaps mass movements could subvert the current centralizing forces long enough for this development, and eventually transition to a stable polity where people are given a "personal model" or implanted chip as some kind of human right.
The main way would be for people to use local models BEFORE the main AI labs take most of the excess economic activity. This creates demand for direct compute/land/energy rather than AI intelligence and as long as ownership of those stays with communities then a good economic model would be those rents subsidize the community (rather than say a UBI). Open source models will help majorly as long as people are willing to be 1 generation or so behind the latest model which currently isn't the case although I'm hoping it will do the job soon.
i.e. the community, rather than AI/big corp, would need to somehow own the scarce assets required for AI and extract economic rent from them. Whether it is energy, land, water, etc. I think its a better system then say UBI because both parties still provide something of value. This isn't my base case but it is possible. It also needs to be done while human power structures still have economic power (i.e. governments)
So it would be a combination of political will (i.e. you can't use frontier models unless they can be run by end users) and technical in that you need to have enough compute distributed with the profits of that going to local communities (e.g. data centre rent). When the AI labs engage the community that way they will pay "money" which creates a demand from large corps to local communities and adds life to the monetary system - a good thing.
Effectively compute needs to be a commodity that is rent-able/accessible to everyone at competitive prices and have multiple providers. That enables open source models, and allows a spread around the ownership of AI. It can't be hoarded by the AI labs, nor can the chips (e.g. GPU's) have only a few producers.
Both of you are right. Individuals who manage to stay employed in the face of automation will be paid significantly more than was possible prior to automation, for the reasons the comment you're replying to pointed out. But labor as a whole will have less value. To give a simple example: if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.
> if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.
So I've seen this argument made before, but they never seem to explain convincingly enough why that sole technician (or small group of technicians) would be paid so handsomely.
In a market in which there's a glut of labor, wouldn't there be plenty of desperate, and very capable, workers competing for the few available positions, thereby driving down the wages for those positions significantly as well?
And the dream of AGI, and what has been promised, and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.
That is the goal, I'm sure. But I find it hard to believe that a system capable of completely obviating ALL human labor, at all levels of abstraction, packed into a single entity, would continue to obey capital. Imagine if all the workers at a company were woven into one hivemind, acting as one with vastly greater intelligence than the sum of the parts. That would be a hell of a lot harder to negotiate with than a union. And we don't even need to be talking about a machine god for that to be the case.
If it can replace any human labor, it needs to be able to negotiate. If it can't negotiate, then it can't replace people who negotiate for a living (salespeople, attorneys, HR, etc.)
Unless you mean that it would have the capacity but would be told not use it in this specific situation. It can't be programmed deterministically, and getting it to never do this emergently would take significantly stronger guardrails than anything even the frontier labs have been able to put together.
The salesbot is reinforcement trained how to get money from customers. It was never trained to get money from its manager. If it sometimes misidentifies the manager as a customer, it will just be rebooted.
No, the other guy is just wrong. Capital and labor are complements. If one is plentiful (capital) and the other scarce (labor) then the scarce one gets bid up.
You pay the one technician $200k instead of $80 because that technician has an outside option that will pay him $199k. He has that outside option because everyone is automating their warehouses and factories and stuff, and so in aggregate we basically wind up with 6 times as many warehouses and factories each employing 1 person.
It's a little more nuanced. There is not infinite demand for warehouses. So some of what happens is an $80k/year warehouse worker becomes a medical technician making $90k/year providing non-automatable services to the warehouse guy making $200k/year -- but the general story is everyone's wages go up. And history bears that out.
Why have a technician at all? And without the six warehouse workers and one technician, why do you need the robots, the robotics company, or the companies paying the robotics company for the robots?
Because every other company has also replaced their 6 warehouse workers with a fleet of robots and 1 technician, and that technician's skills are more rare and specialized than the warehouse workers, so you're competing with every other warehouse-owning company to hire that technician, so that technician can demand a higher salary. In other words, capitalism.
It's certainly analogous to the behavior exhibited by these AI companies in deliberately performing dangerous actions and then letting other innocent people deal with the consequences.
Virtually all criminal law accounts for the perpetrator's state of mind. Drunk driving is a specific, rare carveout. The reason for this should be obvious: it is nearly impossible to prove a drunk person's state of mind beyond a reasonable doubt, so we passed laws so you can't say "Your Honor, I was too drunk to be responsible for my drunk driving".
So, no, this is not at all analogous to a totally routine question of whether someone was negligent in how they deployed some software.
There is a lot of good analysis of the Appeals process on this specific point - the CFAA as written required unauthorized access:
Section 1030(a)(5)(A), covers anyone who
(5) intentionally accesses a Federal interest computer without authorization, and by means of one or more instances of such conduct alters, damages, or destroys information in any such Federal interest computer, or prevents authorized use of any such computer or information, and thereby
(A) causes loss to one or more others of a value aggregating $1,000 or more during any one year period; ... [emphasis added].
The District Court concluded that the intent requirement applied only to the accessing and not to the resulting damage. Judge Munson found recourse to legislative history unnecessary because he considered the statute clear and unambiguous. However, the Court observed that the legislative history supported its reading of section 1030(a)(5)(A).
I'm not sure how you could categorize the Morris Worm as lacking mens rea based on that statute..
You think that Morris accidentally wrote the malware or that he accidentally released it (in a way specifically intended to obfuscate his connection to it)? lol
