Employees also have no moat, and that is not unique to OAI. You either work as much as the other people on your team or you get replaced by one of the many people eager to work harder than you for that money.
I previously worked directly for some of the power generation manufacturers listed in the article and later on the grid/power transmission side.
My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry.
I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with building models and analytics for the new demands.
Focusing on Bloom is fun because they’re new and startup vibes but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with their generators and building diesel/natg engines is much simpler than gas turbines. I’m sure the heads at GE wish they hadn’t sold that off now.
On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember this is an old industry with existing supply chains and maintenance companies.
As long as the demand for new data centers doesn’t lose steam these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the system to be “fast”, only 5-6 years for build outs now. They’re also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously now. There’s so many requests from companies arbing who can give them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you even want a call back.
so we had some onsite generation moves from the lower end - residential solar, etc - and now we have it from the higher end - fossil fuel generation at datacenters. If that creates high efficiency generators then that may drive "onsite" further into the mid-segment. That may also affect the grid role nudging it from hierarchical delivery to network sharing/rebalancing, and may even lead to separate local grids (like 100+ years ago). That also would give fossil fuels new demand (and also would be a market for small/compact nuclear). Kind of disintegration wave.
I'm actually attempting to get into officework, somewhere. I can't do another twenty years of physical construction, whether in houses or factories.
>Are you self-employed now?
Yes, but I choose not to work regularly.
Fortunately, I have enough savings to not be too worried — presuming the economy picks up within the next few years (I can outlast this presidency, doing nothing).
Some of my friends who are senior/staff engs at various fang companies are basically convinced their jobs are at risk over the next few years due to how good the llms have gotten this year.
I switched over to consulting/contracting so I don’t have the visibility like they do, but my work is heavily dependent on llms. However I don’t see it wiping out the industry but rather making people more efficient.
They have much more robust tooling though around their llms and internal products that have automated much of their workflows which is I believe where the concern is coming from. They can see first hand how much of their job has turned into reviewing outputs and feeding outputs into other tools. A shift in skills but not fully automated solution yet.
It’s hard to gauge where things are going and where we’ll be in 5 years. If we only get incremental improvements there’s still huge gains to be made in building out tooling ecosystems to make this all better.
What does that look like for new college grads though? How much of this is really computer science if you are only an llm consumer?
Staff+ work is not that much (exclusively) coding anymore, but identifying correct big things to work on and keeping focus on it, making Bob and Steve from different teams talk to each other instead of building the same stuff twice, making opinionated decisions on things, blocking harmful initiatives, finding elephant in the room and saying things out loud that no one wants to say etc.
It's not really the work that LLMs currently do. I mean sure, maybe if you plug an LLM to read all emails and slacks and zoom transcripts of the entire company, it could do it at some point in the future. But would it have the same amount of influence compared to an industry & company veteran who has the company specific knowledge and experience that is nowhere written down?
Computer science isn’t even about code. Finding the most efficient way to pack boxes into a limited space is computer science. Code is the language. Could LLMs solve such real world problems and all their forms? If it’s in their training data, maybe.
If you’re a master of the syntax fog you’re done. If you understand computation from first principles to tcp frames and transformer architecture you’re golden.
It’s interesting, I’m trying to use it to create a themed collage by providing a few images and it does that wonderfully, but in the process it is also hallucinating the images I use so I end up with weird distorted faces. Other tools can do this without issue, but something about faces in images this model just has to modify them every time. Ask it to remove background objects and the faces get distorted as well.
Using it for non-people involved images and it’s pretty good although I haven’t done much and it isn’t doing anything 2.5-flash wasn’t already doing in the same amount of requests.
Maybe it’s an overcorrection because the Tacoma I had, a couple years older than yours, had auto high beams and they would just stay on all the time. They only turned off from reflecting on road signs or when a car was only a few lengths away approaching. Quickly found the button to disable that feature.
The feature seems to be poorly implemented by all manufacturers. I see Teslas driving around flashing high beams every night because they trigger on/off really quickly and the drivers seem oblivious to the rapid change.
These prediction markets are so ripe for abuse it's unbelievable. People need to realize there are real people on the other side of these bets. Brian Armstong, CEO of Coinbase intentionally altered the outcome of a bet by randomly stating "Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, Web3" at the end of an earnings call. These types of bets shouldn't be allowed.
It’s not really abuse though. These markets aggregate information; when an insider takes one side of a trade, they are selling their information about the true price (probability of the thing happening) to the market (and the price will move accordingly).
You’re spot on that people should think of who is on the other side of the trades they’re taking, and be extremely paranoid of being adversely selected.
Disallowing people from making terrible trades seems…paternalistic? Idk
The point of prediction markets isn't to be fair. They are not the stock market. The point of prediction markets is to predict. They provide a monetary incentive for people who are good at predicting stuff. Whether that's due to luck, analysis, insider knowledge, or the ability to influence the result is irrelevant. If you don't want to participate in an unfair market, don't participate in prediction markets.
But what's the point of predicting how many times Elon will say "Trump" on an earnings call (or some random event Kalshi or Polymarket make up)? At least the stock market serves a purpose. People will claim "prediction markets are great for price discovery!" Ok. I'm so glad we found out the chance of Nicki Minaj saying "Bible" during some recent remarks. In case you were wondering, the chance peaked at around 45% and she did not say 'bible'! She passed up a great opportunity to buy the "yes" and make a ton of money!
I agree that the "will [person] say [word]" markets are stupid. "Will Brian Armstrong say the word 'Bitcoin' in the Q4 earnings call" is a stupid market because nobody a actually cares whether or not he actually says 'Bitcoin', they care about whether or not Coinbase is focusing on Bitcoin. If Armstrong manipulates the market by saying the words without actually doing anything, nobody wins except Armstrong. "Will Coinbase process $10B in Bitcoin transactions in Q4" is a much better market because, though Armstrong could still manipulate the market's outcome, his manipulation would influence a result that people actually care about. The existence of stupid markets doesn't invalidate the concept.
And? Insider trading is bad because it's unfair, and the stock market is supposed to be fair. Prediction markets are not fair. If you are looking for a fair market, prediction markets are not that. Insider trading is accepted and encouraged in prediction markets because it makes the predictions more accurate, which is the entire point.
By 'fair', I mean 'all parties have access to the same information'. The stock market is supposed to give everyone the same information. Trading with privileged information (insider trading), is illegal. Publicly traded companies are required to file 10-Qs and 10-Ks. SEC rule 10b5-1 prohibits trading with material non-public information. There are measures and regulations in place to try to make the stock market fair. There are, by design, zero such measures with prediction markets. Insider trading improves the accuracy of prediction markets, which is their whole purpose to begin with.
I’m pretty sure that these model release date markets are made to be abused. They’re just a way to pay insiders to tell you when the model will be released.
The mention markets are pure degenerate gambling and everyone involved knows that
>Brian Armstong, CEO of Coinbase intentionally altered the outcome of a bet by randomly stating "Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, Web3" at the end of an earnings call.
For the kind of person playing these sorts of games, that actually really "hype".
Abuse sounds bad, this is good! Now we have a sneak peek into the future, for free! Just don't bet on any markets where an insider has knowledge (or don't bet at all)
> On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point.
It’s incredible to think about what else has happened during these past 10 years of development. Or think about other decade long stretches and what was accomplished.
Not cutting short what the undertaking of this is, just that the scale of this project spanning a decade is fascinating.
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