You can always go back and finish your PhD later.

But thinking Tech Giants are going to crash is woefully ignorant of how the market works and indicates a clear wearing of blinders. And it's a common one among coders who feel the noose tightening and who are the types of people led by their own fear. And i find that when you mix that with arrogance, these three traits often correlate with older generations of software engineers who are poor at adapting to the new technology. The ones who constantly harp on how AI is full of mistakes and disregard that humans are as well. The ones who insist on writing even more than 70% of their own code rather than learning to guide new tools granularly. It's a take that nobody should entertain or respect.

As for your point on 'future none of us can be sure of.' I'll push back on that: It is not clear how AGI or ASI will come about, ie. what architecture will underpin it. However - it is absolutely clear that AI powered coding will continue to improve, and that algorithmic progress can and will be driven by AI coders, and that that will lead to ASI.

The only way to not believe that is to think there is a special sauce behind consciousness. And I tend to believe in scientific theory, not magic.

That is why there is so much VC. That is why tech giants are all racing. It isn't a bet. It is a race to a visible, clear goal of ASI that again, it takes blinders to not see.

So while AI is absolutely a bubble, this bubble will mark the transition to an entirely new economic system, society, world, etc. (and flip a coin on whether any of us survive it lol, but that's a whole separate conversation)

What I did or didn't read is alas occluded from you. The Masereel illustrated woodcuts on a recent edition of the manifesto are wonderful.

Though we give ourselves a pass in the name of capitalism, we could also prioritise fairness in our societies.

seems like governments will have a thing to say about who's able to run that AGI or not.

GPU's run on datacenters which exist in countries

Granted, capitalism needs maintenance.

Externalities need to be consistently reflected, so capitalism can optimize real value creation, instead of profitable value destruction. It is a tool that can be very good at either.

Capitalism also needs to be protected from corrupted government by, ironically, shoring up the decentralization of power so critical for democracy, including protecting democracy from capitalism's big money.

(Democracy and capitalism complement each other, in good ways when both operating independently in terms of power, and supportively in terms of different roles. And, ironically, also complement each other when they each corrupt the other.)

The only case where this may have made sense - but more for an individual rather than a team - is Google's aqui-rehire of Noam Shazeer for $1B. He was the original creator of the transformer architecture, had made a number of architectural improvements while at Character.ai, and thus had a track record of being able to wring performance out of it, which at Google-scale may be worth that kind of money.

He's not there yet, and he knows it. Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Facebook is not even in the same universe, and Instagram is just something he bought. He went all in on the metaverse, but the technology still needs at least 10-15 years to fully bake. In the meantime, there's AGI/super-intelligence. He needs to beat Sam Altman.

The sad thing is, even if he does beat Sam to AGI, Sam will still probably get the credit as the visionary.

I mean I'm with you, I think these things are pretty far away and are going to cost a lot of money to make and require a lot of failure in the mean time. But then again, it looks like they spent ~$18bn on Reality Labs last year. So if he was funding it all on his own dime, his current $260bn of wealth would give him a good 14 years runway if we ignore interest. It would be effectively indefinite if he earns about a 5% interest on that money.

I guess I'm just trying to say, it's hard to think about these things when we're talking about such scales of wealth. I mean at those scales, I'm pretty sure the money is meaningless, that money (and the ability to throw it around) is more a proxy for ego.

This is the same thing. It is the new shiny tech demo that is really cool. And technically works really, really well and has some real uses, but that doesn’t make a multi billion dollar business.

Facebook is a sewer (like all of internet to some extent); Instagram is a teenage depression-inducing drug; and Whatsapp is sufficiently important that it can't be monetized to destruction.

I'm surprised Meta is valued like Google, and not like HP or some other has-been, given that it's running on the spamming crummy ads towards lonely boomers and divorced millenials.

The only bright-spot is their AI lab with Yann and the PyTorch team.

(And while there are certainly those who could have been the best who did not have the opportunity to succeed, or just didn't actually want to pursue it, I think usually this is way at the edges, i.e. removing the top would not make room for these people, because they're probably not even on anyone's radar at all, like the 'Einstein toiling in a field')

AI is great and it's the future, and a bunch of people will probably eventually turn it into very powerful systems able to solve industrially important maths and software development problems, but that doesn't meant they'll make huge money from that.

To highlight the inverse: If someone truly has an "AGI" system (the acronym the goalposts have been moved-to) then it wouldn't matter who was wrangling it.

Yeah, that framing for LLMs is one of my pet-causes: It's document generation, some documents resemble stories with characters, and everything else (e.g. "chatting" with an LLM) is an illusion, albeit an impressive and sometimes-useful one.

Being able to generate a document where humans perceive plausible statements from Santa Claus does not mean Santa Claus now lives inside the electronic box, that flying sleighs are real, etc. The principle still holds even if the character is described as "an intelligent AI assistant named [Product Name]".

For AI researchers pursuing AGI, this variance between distributions is arguably even worse than the distribution between samples - there's no past data whatsoever to build estimates, it's all vibes.

People forget Kerr was a bad GM

None of these models are operating in a vacuum.

For whatever reason, remuneration seems more concentrated than fundamentals. I don't begrudge those involved their good luck, though: I've had more than my fair share of good luck in my life, it wouldn't be me with the standing to complain.

Even if it’s 1% at the scale you’re talking that’s 1B to the company. So still worth it.

Wild.

You bring up the only relevant data point at the end, as a throw in. Nobody outside of academia cares about your PhD and work history if you have a startup that is impressive to them. That's the only reason he's being paid.

"Our key innovation is a new collection of datasets called PixMo that includes a novel highly-detailed image caption dataset collected entirely from human annotators using speech-based descriptions, and a diverse mixture of fine-tuning datasets that enable new capabilities. Notably, PixMo includes innovative 2D pointing data that enables Molmo to answer questions not just using natural language but also using non verbal cues. We believe this opens up important future directions for VLMs enabling agents to interact in virtual and physical worlds. The success of our approach relies on careful choices for the model architecture details, a well-tuned training pipeline, and most critically the quality of our newly collected datasets, all of which we have released."

This is a solid engineering project with a research component - they collected some data that ended up being quite useful when combined with pre-existing tech. But this is not rocket science and not a unique insight. And I don't want to devalue the importance of solid engineering work, but you normally don't get paid as much for non-unique engineering expertise. This by no means sounds unique to me. This seem like a good senior-staff research eng project in a big tech company these days. You don't get paid 250M for that kind of work. I know very talented people who do this kind of work in big tech, and from what I can tell, many of them appear to have much more fundamental insight and experience, and led larger teams of engineers, and their comp does not surpass 1-2M tops (taking a very generous upper bound).

  > given what even a resource-constrained DeepSeek did to them.

Which that framing weirdly undermines DeepSeek's own accomplishments. They did do some impressive stuff. But that's much more technical and less exciting of a story (at least to the average person. It definitely is exciting to other AI researchers).

  > There is a group of wealthy individuals who have bought in to the idea that the singularity is months away.

What, it used to be 2025? Then 2027? Now 2030? I know these are not all the same people but there are trends of to keep pushing it back. I guess Elon has been saying full self-driving is a year away since 2016 so maybe this belief can sustain itself for quite some time.

So my second question is: does the expectation of achievements being so close lengthen the time to make such achievements?

I don't think it is insane to think it could. If you think it is really close you'd underestimate the size of certain problems. Claim people are making mountains out of molehills. So you put efforts elsewhere, only to find that those things weren't molehills after all.

Predictions are hard and I think a lot of people confuse critiques with lack of motivation. Some people do find flaws and use them as excuses to claim everything is fruitless. But I think most people that find flaws are doing so in an effort to actually push things forward. I mean isn't that the job of any engineer or scientist? You can't solve problems if you can't identify problems. Triaging and prioritizing problems is a whole other mess, but it is harder to do when you're working at the edge of known knowledge. Little details are often not so little.

they know it may be or not gonna happen because months its ridiculous, but they still need to do it anyway since if you not gonna ride it, you are gonna miss the wave

stock market has not been rational since??? forever??? like stop pumping and dumping happen all the time

Assuming a lab has 20 phds/postdocs and a few professors, call it 25 people per lab, and you're compute / equipment heavy, getting you up to an average of 1M per person per year in total fully loaded costs (including facilities overhead and GPUs and conferences and whatnot), then you're looking at 200 PhD researchers. Assuming that each PhD makes one contribution per 4 years, then that's 50 advances in the field per year from your lab. if only 10% are notable, that's 5 things you've gotten that people are going to get excited about in the field. You need 2% of these contributions to be groundbreaking to get a single major contribution per year.

So 250M for a single person is a lot, but if that person is really really good, then that may be only expensive and not insane.

If you really had thoughts in your head worth a quarter of a billion, the rational thing to do is not to spill those beans.

Approximately no one is motivated by money they already have.

That's probably true, but at the moment the only thing that creates something resembling a moat is the fact that progress is rapid (i.e. the top players are ~6-12 months ahead of the already commoditized options, but the gap in capabilities is quite large): if progress plateaus at all, the barrier to be competitive with the top dogs is going to drop a lot, and anyone trying to extra value out of their position is going to attract a ton of competition even from new players.

In an actual arms race you use your arms to actually physically wipe out your enemy.

It's not just like an arms race.

Nightmare Future!

I have two questions about this, really:

- is he going to be the last guy getting this kind of value out of a couple of research papers and some intimidated CEO's FOMO?

- are we now entering a world where people are effectively hypothetical acquihires?

That is, instead of hiring someone because they have a successful early stage startup that is shaking the market, you hire someone because people are whispering/worried that they could soon have a successful early stage startup?

The latter of these is particularly worrisomely "bubbly" because of something that people don't really recognise about bubbles unless they worked in one. In a bubble, people suspend their disbelief about such claims and they start throwing money around. They hire people without credentials who can talk the talk. And they burn money on impossible ideas.

The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates. People who would be written off as fraudsters at any other time are taken seriously as if they are visionaries and ultra-productive people, because everyone's tolerance for risk increases as they become more and more desperate to ride the train. People start urgently taking impossible things at face value, weird ideas get much further advanced much more quickly, and grifters get closer to the target -- the human source of the cash -- faster than due dilligence would ordinarily allow them.

"This guy is so smart he could have a $1bn startup just like that" is an obvious target for con artists and grifters. And they will come.

For clarity I am ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that the subject of this article is such a person. I am perfectly happy to stipulate that he's the real deal.

But he is now the template for a future grift that is essentially guaranteed to happen. Maybe it'll be a team of four or five people who get themselves acquihired because there's a rumour they are going to have billions of dollars of funding for an idea. They will publish papers that in a few months will be ridiculed. And they will disappear with a lot of money.

And that could burst your bubble.

We are talking about the promises of the same crop of people who brought you full Autopilot on Tesla (still waiting since 2019 when it was supposed to happen), or the Boring Tunnel, the Metaverse, and their latest products are an office suite and "study mode".

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021949/openai-goes-fo...

https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/

This is EXACTLY the same as NFTs, Crypto, Web3, Mars. Some gurus and thought leaders talk big talk while taking gullible investors' money and hope nobody asks them how they plan to turn in a profit.

My edgy prediction is that blunder after blunder (Metaverse, LLAMA, the enshittification of whatsapp, instagram losing heavily to tiktok and facebook having mostly dead accounts) and now giving 250M in vapor-money to youngsters, this is Meta's last stab in the dark before they finally get exposed for how irrelevant they are. Then no amount of groveling to Trump or MMA would be able to save the Zuck from being seen for what he really is: an irrelevant morally bankrupt douche (I could say the same about Elon as well) just trying out random stuff and talking big.

>"The first is enabling business AIs within message threads ... We’re expanding business AIs to more businesses in Mexico and the Philippines. And we expect to broaden availability later this year as we keep refining the product."

>"The second area of business AI development is within ads ... We’re currently testing this with a small number of businesses across Feed and Reels on Facebook and Instagram as well as Instagram Stories."

>"And then the final area that we are exploring is business AIs on business websites to help better support businesses across all platforms ... and we’re starting to test that with a few businesses in the US."

So it's just very small scale tests so far - not the sort of thing that would have any measurable impact on their revenue.

[0]: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2025/q2...

I suppose some are genuine materialists who think that ultimately that is all we are as humans, just a reconstitution of what has come before. I think we’re much more complicated than that.

LLMs are like the myth of Narcissus and hypnotically reflect our own humanity back at us.

In either case, the fact that the stock was created is reported to investors, and investors know that the creation reduces the value of every existing share of Meta, which is the feedback mechanism which restricts how much money or value Meta can get out of the creation of new shares of its stock.

You're right that they don't need to do this.