Apologize for long wall of text, at the bottom I dived into your aside more as that’s highly relevant to deciding the course of my next 10 years and would appreciate your weighing-in.
Pre-Lesswrong/my entire life I’ve been really interested in longevity, and I would do anything to help people have more time with their loved ones (and as a child I thought solving this was the only worthy kind of fame I’d ever want.) I didn’t know how to get there, but it was probably somewhere in math and science so I decided I had to do anything to get into MIT. My hobbies ended up being CS-y instead of biology-y, and I realized that not only was CS profitable for earn to give, but it also might be the best shot for longevity since AI was just infinitely better at problem solving. So that’s where my AI interest comes from. Not in being afraid of it but in using it to solve mortal problems. But the AI safety thing is something that I of course just hear smart people like Eliezer mention and then I think to myself “hmm well they know more about AI than me and I can’t use it to cure aging without the AI also maybe destroying us so I should look into that.”
Your crypto comment is surprising though and I’d like to go further on that. I should be more clear, I’m pretty interested in cryptocurrency not just cryptography and so far trading it has been really profitable, and this summer I’m essentially trying to decide if I’ll stop my schooling to do a crypto startup or if I’ll do my Masters in AI (or potentially also a crypto thing).
Startups seem like the best thing to do for profit and people are falling over themselves to fund them nowadays so I assumed given how many people have offered me funding to do so, that the crypto startup thing would be far easier to profit from than an ML startup (with ML maybe overtaking it in 7 years or so)
If this isn’t the case, or we’re a year away from the flip to ML being the easier startup, I’d love to know, because I’m right on the precipice between pursuing as much ML knowledge as I can and trying to get a pHd (probably eventually do an ML spin-off), versus trying to crypto startup earn-to-give ala FTX Sam.
My claim about AI vs crypto was just a misunderstanding. I still think of “cryptography” and “distributed systems” with their historical meaning rather than “cryptocurrency startup” or “cryptocurrency trading,” but in the context of earning to give I think that should have been clear to me :)
I’d still guess an AI career is generally the better way to make money, but I don’t have a strong take / think it depends on the person and situation / am no longer confused by your position.
Crypto generally has been unusually profitable (as a career or investment), but much of this simply stems from the rising tide raising all boats. Given that crypto market caps can only grow about another 10x or so before approaching major currency status and financial system parity at which point growth will slow—it seems likely that much of the glory days of crypto are behind us.
AI/ML is pretty clearly the big thing happening on Earth.
Admittedly in the short term it may be easier to cash in on a quick crypto career, but since most startups fail, consider whether you’d rather try but fail to have an impact on AI vs trying but failing at crypto wealth.
Apologize for long wall of text, at the bottom I dived into your aside more as that’s highly relevant to deciding the course of my next 10 years and would appreciate your weighing-in.
Pre-Lesswrong/my entire life I’ve been really interested in longevity, and I would do anything to help people have more time with their loved ones (and as a child I thought solving this was the only worthy kind of fame I’d ever want.)
I didn’t know how to get there, but it was probably somewhere in math and science so I decided I had to do anything to get into MIT.
My hobbies ended up being CS-y instead of biology-y, and I realized that not only was CS profitable for earn to give, but it also might be the best shot for longevity since AI was just infinitely better at problem solving.
So that’s where my AI interest comes from. Not in being afraid of it but in using it to solve mortal problems. But the AI safety thing is something that I of course just hear smart people like Eliezer mention and then I think to myself “hmm well they know more about AI than me and I can’t use it to cure aging without the AI also maybe destroying us so I should look into that.”
Your crypto comment is surprising though and I’d like to go further on that. I should be more clear, I’m pretty interested in cryptocurrency not just cryptography and so far trading it has been really profitable, and this summer I’m essentially trying to decide if I’ll stop my schooling to do a crypto startup or if I’ll do my Masters in AI (or potentially also a crypto thing).
Startups seem like the best thing to do for profit and people are falling over themselves to fund them nowadays so I assumed given how many people have offered me funding to do so, that the crypto startup thing would be far easier to profit from than an ML startup (with ML maybe overtaking it in 7 years or so)
If this isn’t the case, or we’re a year away from the flip to ML being the easier startup, I’d love to know, because I’m right on the precipice between pursuing as much ML knowledge as I can and trying to get a pHd (probably eventually do an ML spin-off), versus trying to crypto startup earn-to-give ala FTX Sam.
My claim about AI vs crypto was just a misunderstanding. I still think of “cryptography” and “distributed systems” with their historical meaning rather than “cryptocurrency startup” or “cryptocurrency trading,” but in the context of earning to give I think that should have been clear to me :)
I’d still guess an AI career is generally the better way to make money, but I don’t have a strong take / think it depends on the person and situation / am no longer confused by your position.
Yeah I saw this post:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MR6cJKy2LE6kF24B7/why-hasn-t-deep-learning-generated-significant-economic
So I’m somewhat confused on how profitable AI is, but maybe I can just start asking random experts and researching AI startups
Crypto generally has been unusually profitable (as a career or investment), but much of this simply stems from the rising tide raising all boats. Given that crypto market caps can only grow about another 10x or so before approaching major currency status and financial system parity at which point growth will slow—it seems likely that much of the glory days of crypto are behind us.
AI/ML is pretty clearly the big thing happening on Earth.
Admittedly in the short term it may be easier to cash in on a quick crypto career, but since most startups fail, consider whether you’d rather try but fail to have an impact on AI vs trying but failing at crypto wealth.