This article is about silicon. But the other shortage that matters is meat-compute.
AI is trained on human intelligence. The hyper-scalers are squeezing every last drop of automatically verified reward, and that may get us very far. A compiler passes or fails in milliseconds for free, forever.
But.. "good design taste" has no compiler.
Of course, taste isn't unverifiable. But it's is expensively verifiable. Noisy, slow, and orders of magnitude lower throughput. People with deep domain knowledge often can't articulate well _why_ one design works and the other doesn't. So, judgment arrives as a verdict, and not a crisp rationale. I guess we'll see if sample efficiency outpaces the cost of human judgement.
In the mean time, leverage will sit with whoever holds this tacit knowledge (incumbents). I.e., hospital systems, law firms, chip designers, studios, SaaS that are dominating their niche.. and not with the labs training on it. To me, this is why valuations of companies like Palantir could potentially make sense.
There was a touch of hyperbole ;) we live in the Information Age after all.. but to answer your question,
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution
Which empowered Congress to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Scientists and the artists and their "exclusive rights" have built quite a lot over the centuries.
I mean.. this claim is just untrue. "Owning" something is a social construct defined by law. Our entire society exists because we own things we cannot hold, that is, intellectual property.
What this post is actually pointing out is that intellectual property that has transferrable physical representation has more value to the consumer.
And intellectual property that does not have transferable physical representation has more value to the producer.
Reselling or gifting a book you've read to a friend is wholesome.. it feels good. Truly.. but every time we do that we also take from the artist.
Should it also be their decision that they can gamble? Smoke cigarettes? Get a job? Have sex?
We draw the line somewhere because these things that "are the parents' decision" have consequences on broader society. They have consequences that impact you and me. And we also have a say.
You can make the argument that it's just the parents' decision. But you have to say why.
Deciding what to build. Reviewing Code. And testing code. Are the new bottleneck.
So of course we don't see massive productivity gains. Because these parts of the SCLC were always bottlenecked but their capacity matched the throughout. We fired all the dedicated QAs years ago. Sr+ engineers that do all the code review are limited.
Teams have not re-organized to match the new code-input velocity.
Engineers don't want to do QA because it's "beneath them".. and most engineers don't like performing or are not Sr enough to do extensive or high quality code review.
Fable responded to that for me.
Im nearly certain that blocking this class of prompt is a mistake of a classifier. No one at Anthropic thinks this kind of prompt should be gated.
The classifier is still classifying. The model was released to the public yesterday.
Of course, its not that simple. Some companies probably are great at scouting. Yegge mentioned a few ways in the post. Good internship programs, acquihiring, etc.
No, this is a totally fair response. That was probably the core error in my argument.
Some people, perhaps most, will enjoy AI art. Artists are at risk of displacement too.
But a subset of art appreciators hold firm that the creator is an essential aspect of the work, and I don’t see that conviction fading.
How large this subset is, I don’t know. But they also happen to be the world’s tastemakers and trendsetters. Their beliefs largely shape our aesthetic world, so their influence may only grow.
There is a class of human output that will retain value regardless of AI capability: art and sport. People care about the creator. The source defines the work, the awe, and the emotional response.
But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement. Corporations are amoral entities that optimize for profit, and they follow the law only as much as they must.
The law is our collective action. We socially construct what we value. We could fight to preserve the 5-day work week doing what machines can do. But.. I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.
"Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century."
.....
"...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body"
AI is trained on human intelligence. The hyper-scalers are squeezing every last drop of automatically verified reward, and that may get us very far. A compiler passes or fails in milliseconds for free, forever.
But.. "good design taste" has no compiler.
Of course, taste isn't unverifiable. But it's is expensively verifiable. Noisy, slow, and orders of magnitude lower throughput. People with deep domain knowledge often can't articulate well _why_ one design works and the other doesn't. So, judgment arrives as a verdict, and not a crisp rationale. I guess we'll see if sample efficiency outpaces the cost of human judgement.
In the mean time, leverage will sit with whoever holds this tacit knowledge (incumbents). I.e., hospital systems, law firms, chip designers, studios, SaaS that are dominating their niche.. and not with the labs training on it. To me, this is why valuations of companies like Palantir could potentially make sense.