swe, speculative investor
O O
Karma: 675
I recently interviewed with them, and one of them said they’re hiring a lot of SWEs as they shift to product. Also many of my friends are currently interviewing with them.
I mean some hard evidence is them currently hiring a lot of software engineers for random product-y things. If AGI was close, wouldn’t they go all in on research and training?
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/sam-altman-ai-will-make-coders-10x-more-productive-not-replace-them
It sounds like they’re getting pretty bearish on capabilities tho
Yes, the likely outcome of a long tariff regime is China replaces the U.S. as the hegemon + AI race leader and they can’t read Lesswrong or EA blogs there so all this work is useless.
These tariffs may get rid of the compute disadvantage China faces (ie Taiwan starts to ignore export controls). We might see China being comfortably ahead in a year or two assuming we don’t see Congress take drastic action to eliminate the president’s tariffing powers.
The costs of capex go way up. It costs a lot more to build datacenters. It will cost a lot more to buy GPUs. It might cost less to buy energy? Lenders will be in poorer shape. AI companies will lose funding. I think it’s already quite tenuous, given how little moat AI companies have. Costs are exploding and pretraining scaling seems too diminishing to be worth it. It’s also not clear how AI labs will solve the reliability issue (at least to investors).
I also expect Taiwan to start ignoring export controls if our obscenely high tariffs on them remain.
The U.S. tariffs, if kept in place, will very likely cede the AI race to China. Has there been any writing on what a China leading race looks like?
The point is the money or food just won’t get to them. How do you send food to a region in a civil war between 2 dictators?
A lot of them are trapped in corrupt systems that are very costly and have ethics concerns blocking change. We have the money to feed them, but it would take far more money to turn a bunch of African countries into stable democracies. Overthrowing dictatorships might also raise ethics concerns about colonialism.
The easiest solution would just be lots of immigration, but host population reject that because of our evolutionary pecularities.
Isn’t it a distribution problem? World hunger has almost disappeared however. (The issue is hungrier nations have more kids, so progress is a bit hidden).
In a long AGI world, isn’t it very plausible that it gets developed in China and thus basically all efforts to shape its creation is pointless since Lesswrong and associated efforts don’t have much influence in China?
I’ve always wondered, why didn’t superpowers apply MAIM to nuclear capabilities in the past?
> Speculative but increasingly plausible, confidentiality-preserving AI verifiers
Such as?
I mean, I don’t want to give Big Labs any ideas, but I suspect the reasoning above implies that the o1/deepseek -style RL procedures might work a lot better if they can think internally for a long time
I expect gpt 5 to implement this. Based on recent research and how they phrase it.
I thought OpenAI’s deep research uses the full o3?
Why are current LLMs, reasoning models and whatever else still horribly unreliable? I can ask the current best models (o3, Claude, deep research, etc) to do a task to generate lots of code for me using a specific pattern or make a chart with company valuations and it’ll get them mostly wrong.
Is this just a result of labs hill climbing a bunch of impressive sounding benchmarks? I think this should delay timelines a bit. Unless there’s progress on reliability I just can’t perceive.
SWEs won’t necessarily be fired even after becoming useless
I’m actually surprised at how eager/willing big tech is to fire SWEs once they’re sure they won’t be economically valuable. I think a lot of priors for them being stable come from the ZIRP era. Now, these companies have quite frequent layoffs, silent layoffs, and performance firings. Companies becoming leaner will be a good litmus test for a lot of these claims.
https://x.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/1889522974467957033?s=46&t=9y15MIfip4QAOskUiIhvgA
O3 gets IOI Gold. Either we are in a fast takeoff or the “gold” standard benchmarks are a lot less useful than imagined.
I feel like a lot of manifold is virtue signaling .
Just curious. How do you square the rise in AI stocks taking so long? Many people here thought it was obvious since 2022 and made a ton of money.
quantum computing, nuclear fusion