It could be even weirder. We might be playing video games that are essentially built from the ground up by and for the individual gamer, such that the concept of a "game", let alone the same game, doesn't even make sense. Same for what we have called movies and TV for the last 100 years.
You can already go and generate a book to read or a song to listen to, no one does this, I don't know why you expect it to be different with video games. People want to consume art, they don't want to make it.
You can't just remove the societal/cultural aspects of art without neutering its emotional appeal and impact. Ripping all humanity of out movies/video games is not going to result in higher quality art.
Take a closer look at your own previous comment. Aside from stubbornly declaring "AI bad!", what you described there is market behavior. Markets can not be ignored.
That seems like pretty good evidence of current and ongoing explosive growth. Much of this revenue is pre-paid (re: cashflow). Meanwhile, operating margins went from -184% to -$4%.
Seems like pretty good evidence. Will growth continue apace? Unknown. But the arguments for Jevon's paradox applying to intelligence seem pretty convincing, so the TAM here seems likely to be enormous.
> All while everyone is discovering there isn’t really a secret sauce moat to demand
Also not convinced by this. The Chinese models seem to have distilled their way to current levels, with Anthropic and OpenAI now getting serious about defending against this.
I don't think you're definitely wrong in all this. Rather, I think your claims are too confident.
Bonuses (owed under preexisting agreements) were an unfortunate necessity. The USG effectively nationalized AIG because it was determined to be too systemically important to be allowed to chaotically fail. So, the new owners needed to retain the employees necessary to continue its operations. To do so, they had to honor employee compensation agreements.
This turned out to be a wise move as the American taxpayer ended up turning a profit on the AIG bailout.
And it wasn’t as though the bonuses were uncontroversial. They were possible bc of loopholes in the bailout legislation. But the government was furious and, alongside public outrage, pressured the executives to give the back bonuses. The house of representatives even passed a bill to tax the bonuses at 90%. Many did voluntarily give them back.
> So, the new owners needed to retain the employees necessary to continue its operations. To do so, they had to honor employee compensation agreements.
At that point, compensation agreements with a previously solvent employer are... negotiable.
There's no "had to" in that scenario.
The government wanted to retain the people who knew how to run the thing. Those people wanted the most money they could get.
The deal could have been whatever the two of them struck -- and the public anger was/is that historically the government hasn't bargained very hard against the leadership of companies in that scenario.
With respect, I think this is a naive opinion. The banks that were bailed out were systemically important. This would not have been normal bankruptcies, with a very real risk of plunging the U.S. into a depression as bad as or worse than the Great Depression. So, the objective was to prevent that. And in order to keep these institutions in good working order by retaining the key employees who operated the institutions, bonuses were approved. It was distasteful and there was significant public and legislator outrage.
And, once again, the taxpayer turned a tidy profit on the bailouts.
Likely anything that goes beyond missing out on compensation (ex: unvested RSUs) or even clawing back some comp would violate labor laws. CEOs are still employees, and legislation regulating employer-employee relations trumps all contracts.
A lot of these labor laws get less protective for higher-ranked people in a company, whether it be due to thresholds based on compensation or explicit carve-outs for executives/board members. It varies a lot from place to place.
In the US, there is only one labor law that is different for execs and high paid employees and that is overtime rules. Fiduciary duty does govern how a director or officer behaves while in the role, loyalty, no self-dealing, no stealing corporate opportunities etc. It doesn't oblige them to stay or dictate how they must leave.
In US and English law, "specific performance", so a court ordering you to do what you promised, isn't available for personal service contracts. In the US that's reinforced by the 13th Amendment's ban on involuntary servitude. So even if a CEO signed a contract promising 6 months notice and a smooth handover, the company can't make them do it, they can only enforce any financial penalties that are contracted.
There are many many instances where the CEO is not an employee, but they operate via their own legal entity. To be honest I don't know how this works at larger companies.
I'd never heard of this. It turns out it is very rare for publicly traded companies [1]. In these cases, I would guess it comes down to contract terms. But again, it's not as though the law would compel an individual to continue working at a company. It would just come down to what the contracts say, and, potentially, how the courts interpret those contracts in the event of a lawsuit.
[1] Examples I found: Worksport Ltd., Exicure, Inc., Rainmaker Worldwide Inc., and Acorn Energy, Inc.
Yes, CEOs pay taxes on income. The only way around that is to structure the compensation so it's not income, and the IRS probably has tried to prevent that as much as possible. I'm not a tax or HR expert but I'd think unrealized gains on stock compensation might not be. Deferred compensation might not be, until it's actually paid.
'Fair play' is a dimension of competition. They aren't orthogonal attributes.
You can compete fairly or unfairly.
In any event, distillation seems to be in a grey enough area that reasonable people can disagree (IMO). It strikes me as more akin to theft than to fair competition, but it doesn't seem like it should be treated as criminal. Rather, I think the onus should be on the labs to defend themselves against it.
All that said, Jensen's take is clearly quite biased.
Hasn’t it already been ruled by a court that LLM outputs are not subject to copyright? It opens a can of worms to say that LLM companies can dictate what their outputs are used for.
I think copyright is mostly not relevant. Contracts operate mostly independent of copyright law (in the U.S.). If OpenAI puts in their license something to the effect of "you may not train your LLMs on these outputs" and/or "your access is limited in these ways", but you violate the license, they can and should block your access and sue you. These are things that can be monitored and enforced under existing law.
And, in fact, they already do this:
- OpenAI [1]: "[you may not] Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI."
- Google [2]: "You may not use the Services to develop machine learning models or related technology."
- Anthropic [3]: "[You may not use our services] to develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services"
He is of course 100% correct. There is no way to stop RSI without truly global cooperation and enforcement. And the incentives are such that global cooperation will never happen. So what Klein and others are really discussing is depriving the U.S. of the benefits of RSI while other nations race ahead. Even if China and the U.S. were to officially ban RSI, the compute would simply migrate to friendlier jurisdictions. In any case, enforcement, as Cowen correctly points out, would be nearly impossible.
None of this is to say that labs and researchers shouldn't take alignment extremely seriously and dedicate major resources to it. But, again, incentives. The lab(s) that allocates more resources to "intelligence" than alignment will have a compounding marginal advantage. And they all know that and are acting accordingly.
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