Paraphrasing Yann Lecun:
“nobody has the monopoly on good ideas”
People like Altman and Musk sold this AGI idea to CEOs like Nadella and Zuckerberg. People assume that if you’re a CEO you must be smart, it’s the exact opposite! There’s no positive correlation between brain capacity and success in the corporate ladder. The most verified correlation is with traces of psychopathy which associate with lack of empathy and reasoning.
In sum, con men sold snake oil to overconfident imbeciles and now there’s a hole the size of trillions in the US’s pension system.
LMFAO
I also like how a lot of that Western investment hinges on the companies having the best model and keeping it secret so they maintain the lead. China (or others) only needs to release a good enough model as open source in order to invalidate the entire business model.
Not that this matters much, those companies are so focused on showing any kind of progress, they bin their own models way before making back even a fraction of the investment. Only for customers to go meh any time a new one releases. Or have it be a little bit better, but much more expensive to run.
It would actually be funny, if it hadn’t raised prices on anything tech related and will probably crash the economy any day now.
Yeah, it’s just a complete farce. Also, Chinese companies are clearly playing the long game. By making the models open they ensure that a global ecosystem develops around them, researchers get attracted to them, companies end up using them because they can tune them. And all of this helps turn these models into standards everybody uses going forward. Nobody is going to want to deal with weird proprietary APIs from the American companies because the quality difference simply doesn’t justify it.
In Billions too
We’re also desperate to lock up or deny visas to anyone that isn’t “American enough” so the best and brightest youths from around the world are probably going to study in China instead.
Good. I hate Sam Altman.
