He also was Algerian so meant that quote literally rather than figuratively, and consequently he had a lot more skin in the game when compared to Parisians like Sartre.
Anecdotally this is mostly correct, but I also have heard non tech people acknowledge how hard it is to get parts/repair the cars as a downside as well.
They are part of his core argument, but not the entire argument. The (imo) shakier part of the argument is that he is entitled to damages even though he doesn't own shares in the company. This is atypical, most of the time you lose that right once you get rid of your shares. It seems like he is arguing that he was misled and sold his shares because of that, which will be hard to prove if true, and even if it is true, isn't really illegal.
I believe at the time it was reported that Musk and the OpenAI board chose to part ways due to his for-profit AI research (in Tesla) posing a conflict of interest to the OpenAI mission.
Hence his argument boils down to "You made me sell my shares because my 'closed' AI research conflicted with your 'open' non-profit ideals. However, you have since stoped to adhere to your mission statement, effectively seizing to publish your research findings and pursuing for-profit goals. As a consequence of this I have lost a bunch of money."
And as nuts as Musk is, I kind of see his point here.
That argument doesn't really hold a lot of water with me to be honest. If I sell (forced or otherwise) my shares in company because it isn't working on tech I agree with, and then they pivot and start working on tech I agree with and their shares pop, I am not entitled to sue them for damages.
In the scenario you described above, you would be entitled to sue for damages if you sold shares in a company under false pretenses because the other owners deceived you.
Imagine being the part-owner of a bread focused bakery. You tell the other owners that you think the business should focus on pastries – even if everybody agrees that bread products are more important – as pastries make more money (that money can in turn be invested into the bread business).
The other owners hard disagree and ask you to leave the company, because a) that does not fit into their bread-centric mission and b) you own a pastry-supplier in town and would obviously be profiting from this move. So you sell your shares and move on, no harm no foul.
But what if they then turn around and start producing pastries, claiming it's only doing so to financially support their bread business? What if they start entering lucrative deals with other pastry-suppliers and effectively stop making bread?
In this case I would argue that you would be entitled to some portion of your foregone gains. You sold your stock while being under the impression that the company would never go into the direction which you deem is the *only viable one*, only to find out that they did exactly what you suggested after you left.
> ... because it isn't working on tech I agree with, ...
Please notice that this is not what happened. They all agreed on the tech to be researched. The only disagreement was the business model and company structure required to fund the research.
> under false pretenses because the other owners deceived you.
Even your bread/pastry scenario doesn’t quite make this part clear. And this is what will be difficult to prove - did OpenAI know and discuss a rug-pull of “we willingly plan to say we’re going to be doing non-profit work, but actually our plan is to be a for-profit company”.
If their pivot was pre-meditated then I could see Musk having a case, but if they pivoted purely from market factors and realizing they wouldn’t be able to cut it as a non-profit, I’d think he’s SOL
But please reread the comment which is the root of this discussion:
> The (imo) shakier part of the argument is that he is entitled to damages even though he doesn't own shares in the company.
I was never arguing that Musk is entitled to damages. I am merely arguing that it is possible to not own the shares of a company and be entitled to damages. Whether Musk specifically is owed damages is something a judge has to decide.
In the exact case above, you would have to prove intentional deceit (which is quite difficult to do) and even then that isn't actually illegal on its face a lot of the time in non publically traded companies. Further, the timeline isn't as compressed as your comment suggests, if the bread focused bakery pivoted to pastries 4-5 years after you sold your stake in it I do not agree that you would be entitled to damages at all, businesses can and should be allowed to pivot. Selling stock under the impression that a company wouldn't go in a direction you expect, is a normal part of investment and there is nothing wrong with it, people make bad bets all the time.
IANAL but I don't think that intentional deceit is necessary to prove Musk's case, negligent misrepresentation might suffice. And I agree that the judge ultimately has to rule whether or not the time-period between the ousting and pivot is reasonable; this decision would probably be based on precedence, the specifics of the case and the judges opinions.
However, please remember your comment which is the root of this discussion:
> The (imo) shakier part of the argument is that he is entitled to damages even though he doesn't own shares in the company.
I was never arguing that Musk is entitled to damages. I am merely arguing that it is possible to not own the shares of a company and be entitled to damages.
> And this is just GPT-5, this year. Next year there will be GPT-6, or an equivalent from Google or Anthropic, and at that point I fully expect a lot of people everywhere getting the boot. Sometime next year I expect these powerful models will start effectively controlling robots, and that will start the process of automation of a lot of physical work.
> So, to summarize, you have at best 2 years left as a software engineer. After that we can hope there will be some new types of professions that we could pivot to, but I’m struggling to think what could people possibly do better than GPT-6, so I’m not optimistic. I’d love for someone to provide a convincing argument why there would be any delay to the timeline I outlined above.
This reads to me exactly like people who said learning to be a truck driver in the early 2010s was stupid because we were 2-3 years away from self driving trucks taking their jobs. I have no doubt that the models will get better, but being 90-95% right still implies you need people for the last 5%. I think, like self driving, the corner case 5-10% is going to be really really hard to iron out and it will not be ironed out in 1-2 years like your comment says. We only just barely have self driving taxis now (despite them being 1-2 years away for the past decade and a half), and we have no self driving long haul trucks afaik.
1. Deep and detailed understanding of how the world works. We are just starting to make real progress there (GPT-4), and more work is needed [1].
2. Reliability. A model should make significantly fewer mistakes than humans would make in similar scenarios, on average. This includes factual and logical mistakes, as well as hallucinations.
I expect the main improvements GPT-5 will bring are improvements in exactly these two areas. The first one is likely to come from training on huge video datasets (next frame prediction objective), and the second one will require high quality data, and some other methods (known and secret), but given that OpenAI has stated many times in the last year that improving reliability is their number one priority, I believe we will see a significant improvement there. Note that simply being better driver than humans is a very low bar, and to be accepted/adopted the self-driving AI must be much better (10x or even 100x better). But I believe that even today’s technology (such as the best models from Waymo or Tesla) could be used today in long haul trucking with similar or better accident rates. And this technology is not even based on large foundational models like GPT-4. Obviously the necessary regulation will delay the automation of self-driving trucks, that’s why I said the automation of physical jobs will come after the automation of routine office jobs like (most types of) software engineering.
Other than those two challenges, there’s also an engineering challenge to put a GPT-5 scale model inside every car (needs to run locally). This can be achieved by producing custom built hardware accelerators, but will still be expensive in the near term, so I expect that self driving will become widespread after the cost of a computer inside every car falls below 10% of the cost of the car. Currently I’d imagine we would need an equivalent of an 8x H100 server to run a highly compressed and finetuned for driving version of GPT-5.
That may all be true, but it sort of sidesteps my point. My point is that people have been saying for 15 years that "technology X" will cause truckers to become obsolete and create ubiquities self driving cars, and there has been billions (if not trillions) of dollars poured into it, and it has not come to fruition (yet). I do think it will eventually be automated, but your comment says we have "at best 2 years left as a software engineer." and that seems very naive to me given that we have seen your exact same argument for the past 15 years. Lets even imagine the tech gets to the point where software engineers can be fully automated, as you mentioned above, regulatory hurdles will need to be crossed even for office jobs and I just don't see that happening in 2 years. I do think it will happen, but if self driving is any indicator, it will take a couple decades at least for the tech and regulatory hurdles to be overcome.
The difference between our opinions is I see 2024 as the time just before the knee of the exponential progress curve, and you see it as a long way to go to get to the knee. I realize how saying "this time it's different" might sound. But I do think this time it's different.
I remember when I read http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness back in 2015 I became convinced that these models are scalable. I remember thinking if only we could find a way to train a really big RNN/CNN hybrid on a lot of video data to try to predict the next video frame we would eventually force it to develop understanding the world. Predicting what happens in a video frame is a lot harder than predicting the next word (just ask Lecun), but it turned out that even just predicting the next word is extremely effective, and GPT4 feels like the first model that finally "understands" the world. To me, this was the hard part, developing this proof of concept that we can get there simply by scaling. Next step is video prediction, and we have a lot of room for further scaling to get there. There is a lot of video training data, and we can scale our models a lot more. The progress is mainly limited by available hardware processing power. There's no lack of good ideas to try to make things work.
In a way, 2024 feels like 2012, when deep learning took over ML world by storm. The same thing is happening now with multi-modal foundational models. GPT4 is like AlexNet - a culmination of many years of gradual improvements, a combination of unprecedented scale and various tricks. Think about every improvement starting with GPT1, which established state of the art in language modeling using a simple, universal, and scalable model architecture. GPT2 was able to generate a high quality one page long text. It's funny, it does not even sound that impressive now, but at the time it was absolutely mind blowing. GPT3 demonstrated incredible generalization capabilities, and significantly raised the quality and reliability of generated output. GPT4 took it to another level, achieving human-level reasoning capabilities. Every single one of these breakthroughs took me by surprise, and I do deep learning research for a living. I have absolutely no reasons to believe we have reached a saturation point in quality of these models. So what's next? Where do we go from already near human capabilities of GPT4?
What do you expect from GPT-5? In what ways do you think it will be better than GPT4, and what will be its main limitations? Which aspects of software engineering do you think it will excel at, and which aspects we will still need humans for? Would these challenging aspects still not be solved in GPT6, assuming another significant improvement in quality over GPT5? I will not be surprised if GPT6 will be designed by GPT5, with some help from humans. How does your timeline of AI progress look like?
The platform seems less stable, it fairly frequently crashes my browser now. Also they've had significant outages since Musk took over. It's not completely falling apart yet, but it definitely is less stable.
If you aren't even a regular enough user to have an account, how can you possibly count yourself as addicted to it? For me nothing much has changed except the logo.
I do have an account with probably thousands of tweets over the last few years.
There’s a sign out button.
The reason I initially signed out was because I was tired of scrolling past dozens of 0 follower, 0 likes, 0 RT, low value commentary by people who paid for Blue in order to get to the first substantive comment by someone who didn’t. That of course is also a significant change (not sure if he rolled this back since then and thankfully don’t care if he did).
Conversely, as an American, American's tend to assume their culture is a lot more heterogeneous than it really is. Tons of people don't travel outside the country because they think that the US has everything when it doesn't at all.
To be fair, the US doesn't have everything, but it does have a lot, so I can see how you could get this idea if you weren't a particularly imaginative or curious person.
State to state the US is significantly more similar culturally than Europe is. The distance from my home town to the University I went to is equivalent to London to Jerusalem basically, but the differences between my hometown and the place I went to university are not very significant when compared to the differences between London and Jerusalem.
Yeah, I did not find moving from Massachusetts to California involved a radical reimagining of my behavior, the way I spoke, or in many cases even the places I shopped. The people here are all familiar with the same cultural touchstones, more or less. Distinctive regional accents are harder and harder to hear. US culture might have been more notably diverse in the pre-War period but now basically you're, to put it in vulgar terms, "cosmopolitan" or "hick" and that's about all the differentiation that matters.
They’re not but that’s kind of my point. It’s not really that varied, you can go “red” or “blue” and those alternate a lot as you travel around, but the idea of a patchwork of many little very distinctive cultures is on life support.
How much have you actually traveled through the US beyond superficially passing through a few cities? Is “Massachusetts to California” supposed to be satire?
You obviously haven’t met any Cajuns, Appalachians, or any number of American subcultures that are very distinct from your generic metropolitan yuppy. Many of them have dialects and accents thick enough to be practically indecipherable to many Americans. You just won’t find them at your local Trader Joes because they live somewhere else
Yes, I have, but I didn’t think I needed to write my whole life story to make a point. Regional accents (Massachusetts has a couple distinctive ones! While we’re being condescending, surely you are at least vaguely aware of that) are more likely to be used by people middle-aged or older. Regional media is dead. Regional cuisine is far less distinct than it used to be with many specialties gone.
In 1900 it wouldn’t have been common sense that MA and CA are “supposed to be” similar so the fact you’re throwing that in my face is actually making my point.
I think this sort of proves the point that Europe is significantly more varied though. Even if you only travel to major cities in Europe you notice very significant cultural differences between them. Small pockets of distinct cultures are around the US but there are way fewer of them and they are sparsely distributed in a way that most people don't run into them at all.
For example, in Canada the difference between the Haida people, Inuit people, English Canadians are very apparent and obvious, but the vast vast majority of the country (outside of Quebec and northern NB) is small towns where people speak English, play the same few sports, have the same like 8 chain restaurants, and live in broadly similar property styles. Sure culturally BC is different from Ontario slightly, but having traveled to and lived in both for many years, the differences are not very significant unless I were to seek out specific cultural enclaves, and that is a 4500 km difference.
Isn’t it a little odd that we can have culturally very similar places 3000 miles apart unless culture has mostly been nationalized in a couple variations?
Cosmopolitanism- more multicultural cross pollination due to trade and travel. Wealth disparity is another. The coasts are also richer than ‘flyover country.’ There are isolated places in New Mexico, the Deep South, and Appalachia that are grievously poverty stricken, to give some extreme examples.
If we want to get so nitpicky there are poor and isolated areas along the coasts too. And heartland areas outside of major cities are less able to sustain independent media. Modern institutions like the military shuffle people around to and from these less notable areas and many broad trends do not fit the simplistic narrative you're presenting (for instance, many rural areas have large immigrant populations who work in farms, meat-processing facilities, and similar).
(parsing out the prepositions) Agreed, I think: MA-CA are nearly the physically most distant, but perhaps the culturally most similar.
But disagreed that the places in between are not that varied.
Beyond the superficial veneer of a (mostly) common language and political drama and media and sports teams and retailers, there are deeply different predominant ways of thinking about self and life.
We may just be using different criteria on how to measure the magnitude of cultural variation.
You won't see it from the highways, and yes the Internet is normative, and ultimately yes humans share a fairly predictable psychology.
But the cultural variation between regions seems undeniable to me. Thank goodness! I travel a lot, and spend a lot of time in individual strange places, and this is a large part of the reason why I do so.
I would wager that if you sat down people from small, deep-red towns in California, New England, and Texas, they’d agree on much more than they disagreed. And I’d bet you’d get similar results with city dwellers from each region. There are variations on, for instance, how likely people are to strike up a conversation with strangers in an elevator, but to me these are the more superficial differences.
To use your example: I think you'd be correct for the superficial beginning of the conversation.
But this is no different than saying "Metallica fans from ...", or "NASCAR fans from ...". Politics is no longer about what people think. It's a nationalized polemic sport. There are two teams, and an irrelevant number of pretenders.
But if you ever got past the "what you think you think" and into the "why you think the things you think", or "how do you live that expresses the way you think" ... the variations would start to come out.
Like what? I mean what do you think the variations are really going to be? People orient their entire value systems around their political affiliation.
Viewing humans through a lens of regional characteristics is also reductive so, so long as you still think that's worthwhile, it's more a question of which reductive categorizations you think are meaningful.
I could easily take a plausible position that people within the same town have so much difference between them that trying to lump regional characteristics together is meaningless. Since you don’t, apparently you’re OK with some reduction.
There's more variation on the street I live on today, than between MA and CA taken as a whole.
I'm not sure what I "don't" in your comment above, but clearly my intent is not clear, so I'll restate:
(Parts of) MA and CA have a lot of similarities. Some of the places physically between them are very different.
You may disagree. If so, you are surely measuring by a different metric than I am, or have not seen the places I've seen. But that's all I intended to say.
It doesn't really seem like you've understood what I've said either, then: I'm saying is that there are essentially two American cultures, the urban one and the non-urban one, and these two parallel national cultures have almost entirely subsumed what were formerly much more varied regional ones. Anyway, you're being glib about how much I must not know about the various other states since CA and MA are "so similar" as if Los Angeles is just like Bakersfield or a California farm town, so it's no less facile.
I moved from non-rural Louisiana to Boston and it involved a radical reimagining of my behavior:
- Understanding how people spoke. There are more, and more different, languages spoken and cultures in Cambridge than even the most diverse parts of Louisiana. I met in Boston for the first time people from, and not just culturally descended from, India, Pakistan, Spain, Israel, Peru, Ethiopia, just off the top of my head. Even if English dominates, it's a very different English, where the same words mean different things, and new words are used that didn't exist in Louisiana.
The kind of English coming out of my mouth, my vocabulary and accent, marked me as a very different kind of person and set first impressions that I didn't want or intend — and it wasn't a "cosmopolitan"/"hick" binary, it was more of a matrix of rich/poor, smart/dumb, educated/not, straight/gay, English first/second, Black/not, local/not ("Worcester"). I confused the hell out of people, both on those dimensions and also with what I was literally saying, if I didn't modulate my speech to be more like theirs. Meanwhile I had some interesting times as a French speaker overhearing conversations about me that were not meant for me, because I didn't look like a French speaker, because most French speakers there were non-white Haitians or from Francophone African nations.
- The places I shopped. Back then Boston had the kinds of stores and markets that I had never actually seen in real life while living in Louisiana. Other than Market Basket, the one true constant in life (except apparently anywhere else in the country).
- The different cultural touchstones. Y'all. "Milkshakes" being liquid, and "frappes" being milkshakes, except at Starbucks. "Regulah" coffee. St. Patrick's Day being a less fun but equally drunk Mardi Gras (and no Mardi Gras despite all the Catholics? Then what's the point of being Catholic?). Baseball — like, we have it, but it's kind of a joke sport people only care about if LSU is good or the Astros were especially bad. Everything that comes from moving from a red state to a blue state — less homophobia, less xenophobia, more classism, more weird and weirdly enforced rules. Candlepin. The whole concept of state-run liquor. Vastly different types and intensities of racism. People in Boston go to live music shows and don't dance. Almost nobody white in Boston knows how to hold a cookout, like a real proper whole-neighborhood meal, and the word "cookout" just means BBQ there.
- How I got around. Public transit! Everyone else is complaining constantly about the MBTA and I'm like, I get to ride a train? Every day??? And if I miss it I can also take one or two buses???? And it might catch on fire??????? Before that I was putting 120 miles a day on my car to commute, almost all of it straight-line highways. I'd never in my life set foot on non-school-bus public transit. It took me a solid month just to understand that I really could get almost anywhere with just walking and transit.
- Conversely, owning a truck is by far the easiest way to make friends in Boston.
- How close everything was. The nearest anything for me in Louisiana was typically 5 to 10 miles away. People in Boston had no concept of distance; transit abstracted it away into minutes. Neighborhoods were walkable; I'd regularly used maybe two or three notable paved sidewalks in my life before I wound up in Boston. Driving the length of my old college commute, which had been almost all highway with little to nothing to even stop for, would send me through a dozen small cities in the NE.
- Snow! Holy shit. Snow!!! My god!!!!! The snow!!!!!!!! Seven feet of snow that doesn't go away! Parking sweeps for snow plows! SNOW PLOWS! Lines out the door to get ice cream when it's a balmy 33 degrees out! Yak Trax! MITTENS
- And in the summer, as the man in the show said, I had to learn to accept that air conditioning was a privilege and not a right.
Lived there three years and it was life-changing. Got married to someone who had travelled far, far more than I had, domestically and abroad, but never to the southeast. Brought them to Louisiana a couple of times and the inverse of all of the above was wild to watch them experience.
I lived a little bit outside of Boston and some of the things you’ve written (things being close, for instance, or diversity, or public transit being a viable option to go places) didn’t really apply at all.
Not OP but I just straight up deleted the play store and internet apps on my android phone using https://adbappcontrol.com/en/. That way I can't download it or just mindlessly browse to it when I'm bored. I have had this setup for a year now and not had any issues needing info or apps when I am away from my computer.
