Point well made. Engineers, however quantitative they may be, are not often finance people. If the true believers were left in charge, they'd probably bankrupt promises much more rapidly, and auger the whole enterprise into the ground that much quicker. I can't see that Altman is actually that great a finance guy either, at least in stewardship of other people's money, but he has cultivated the ability to manipulate cash out of people and institutions during this grift-dominant era of Silicon Valley.

I guess in this scenario, Balaji's fetishized hyperinflation finally happens sometime in the next 6 months.

Yeah, "thousands of days" seems like a first-draft attempt at "let's choose a unit of smaller magnitude to make this seem more serious to the plebs." And everyone around him drowning their brains in GPT slurry shouted, "excellent turn of phrase, sir!"

Imagine if he turned up among the guest cast on Star Trek. He'd probably play a Bajoran who narc'd out to the Cardassians

Altman is certainly aware of what it takes to be a Jobs-like marketing personality (and probably holds Hubbard-like totalism as a not-so-secret ambition), he's just not, uh, very good at it. He's put the most effort into the strictly lower-case, faux-casual persona on Twitter to seem "approachable" in a social media context, and that doesn't help him at all when trying to actually appear serious.

I also don't doubt that he's beginning to succumb to the yes-man filter bubble that traps so many public personalities. That's surely made worse by the likelihood that any underlings he might have reviewing this crap are drinking the AI koolaid and "punching everything up!" with a few rounds of ChatGPT.

please be gentle with my child, they will soon have a presence on the discount paperback rack at the local grocery store

Dragon Ball A16Z: We have replaced interminable screaming powerup sequences and planet-destroying energy blasts with long panning shots of the characters using their abilities to light giant mountains of cash on fire. If you give us a series C at a valuation of $420 million, we may be able to determine why test audience surveys have thus far come back unfavorable

This post serves as your periodic reminder that the bald people were the bad guys in Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo

This causes me to reflect on contrasting currents in tech culture. I remember growing up with the Apple/Mac rumor culture around the time Steve Jobs came back, and how people had conditioned themselves to get hyped for any little tiny leak about upcoming products. A culture which obviously persists now, albeit in streamlined, advertiser-friendly blog spaces. By contrast, MacWeek magazine had a columnist calling himself Mac the Knife who claimed to have clandestine rendezvous with shady trenchcoat-clad characters in the back alleys of Cupertino... And somehow the new product reveals were almost always somewhat less whelming than the rumormill had built them up to be. Part of the Jobs idolatry that still dominates Silicon Valley is the clear strategy among empty-suit grifters like Altman that such hype is vital but Apple didn't do enough with it; that you should always be marketing what's around the corner rather than keeping it hidden away under lock, key, and NDA.

Contrast this with open-source culture, warts and all. What's in the repository is the basis of what comes next. You think superintelligence is imminent? OK, where's the code stubs that will serve as the foundation? Make a pull request for your mega-brain's medulla, let's review it. It's also a big reason why the current round of AI doesn't fit with open-source culture, no matter how many people are trying to force it. It is inherently an obfuscatory technology. Not just due to the sheer size of the data sets and weights involved, but also through the weird non-deterministic practice of configuring software through natural-language prompts. GIGO at scale, but you can keep the hype going by promising a lower percentage of garbage in the future.

this mf'er watched all the naruto filler and fuckin' loved it

emails SHFiguarts every week from their work address, "Deluxe Mecha-Naruto when?????"

The Hollywood bankruptcy auctions in a few years are gonna be lit

Infrastructural Pykrete as a Service... if y'all can stand up the London office, I'll handle the Bay Area fundraising, time to get paid!!!!!

Deep dive into complex chemistry may be the most important thing in this thread. The bullshitters need more pushback like this, even though the effort involved means it can't happen nearly as often as the bullshit. Thank you.

As the old saying goes, hope in one hand, Lisp in the other.

If you try it, I personally hope you've got a damned good garbage collector...

How would you audit a computer? Would they add USB-C ports to the cans?

User requests something that accommodates their actual use-case. Altman responds by dismissing it as "toys," in that same cultivated faux-casual lowercase smarm that constitutes the bulk of his public identity. This man is not fit to be an executive.

I used to be a serious systems programmer like you once, then I took a prompt injection in the knee

They are practically handing you free leverage

I feel like it’s too much to hope that even the HN crowd have figured out Balaji S. is a more prolific bullshit machine than any LLM…

This is going to drag out for years, as such things do... and I would not at all be surprised if, a couple years in, Nvidia turns around and starts a PR blitz along the lines of, "tee-hee, that genAI bubble wasn't nearly as big as we thought it would be! Look what happened to our revenue and stock price! Monopolists, lil ol' us?!"

In other words, good on the prosecutors, but I feel like they're only doing this now because of the mainstream hype that AI is inevitable and will conquer all industries.