An older ThinkPad is a great choice. Sometimes when a company goes out of business or upgrade, they dump a bunch of laptops and you can get used ThinkPads on the cheap.
LeCun, “I’m not gonna make friends saying this . . . ” he tells me, “but I was reading this and I thought everything that Chomsky . . . was saying could not possibly be true, [because] we learn everything."
This was a theoretical debate until the case of Genie Wiley proved Chomsky was correct. Our capacity for language is innate. The wild thing is he still doesn't stand corrected and his world-view hasn't expanded to include it.
I'm not casting stones; I've done this. And I don't know if it will affect the outcomes of his research but it's interesting.
For the last year I have been having for breakfast every day: four or five eggs scrambled and three slices of bacon. Coffee with cream, no sugar. No juice.
I watched the Google interview with Ilya yesterday and this came up. There's a large disconnect between the evals and the real-world performance, and he admitted that the evals are targeted.
There was a storm of hype the last couple weeks for Gemini 3 and everyone, correctly, rolled their eyes. Investors are demanding a return and it's not happening. They're just going to have to face reality at some point.
Unfortunately, investors facing reality means homelessness for the rest of us. Maybe the real treasure was the billions of dollars we made along the way. :)
My close friends got showered so much with money poured down by investors that it is indecent.
Just because they happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and idling, gets paid 10M USD+ due to stock options vetting.
Sounds like crypto^2; money is spread completely irrationally and unfairly (lucky folks who launched a ponzi get rewarded instead of jailed) and completely disconnected from actual efforts.
In the long-term this can only lead to a very unhealthy society.
Good that we won't need money anymore, thanks to AGI right ?
This is how VC and on some level professional success always worked. Gotta be in the right place, knowing the right people, at the right time. Although the scale and speed is more absurd.
I was wondering if AI was essentially the last hype cycle, that’s what it’s sort of been billed as, the tech that can do everything, but I guess robotics could be a next big thing to replace it, basically applied AI.
You mean the last 5 year plan? VCs seem to lack so much imagination and are so prone to group think. That we effectively have a top down command economy with 5 year plans in tech. Interestingly VR seems to punctuate every 15 year cycle.
I've pitched to VCs a lot, and you touch upon a key aspect: they really lack imagination, and are extremely prone to group think. These days, I tend to think of VCs - the people - as frat boy bullies that never grew up.
>> I was wondering if AI was essentially the last hype cycle
The next hype wants to be quantum computing, but its just not there yet - never mind the lack of real-world applications.
I thought nVidia would start promoting GPUs (whole data centers) to run classical simulations of QC to develop the applications while real hardware gets figured out.
If you want to go off trying to predict the cycle I’d suspect ag/weather tech. Political complexity aside it appears to be the biggest thing we’ll need to work on in the coming decades if we want to sustain the planet’s carrying capacity.
Probably more likely though to be something novel that few took seriously before it demonstrates utility. And this is the issue for QC, we already know what it’s useful for: a handful of niche search algorithms. It’s a bit like fusion in that even if you work out the (very significant) engineering issues you’re left with something that while useful is far from transformative.
reply