To your first paragraph partly because just about everything to do with health and nutrition communication and policy is overwhelmingly influenced by corporations and industries whose interests are not aligned with our health.
It doesn’t start off convincing though. His premise is that since 2018-2024 follows exponential growth, 2024 onward will. Contrast with Yann’s oft repeated mantra that what looks like exponential growth is more likely the beginning of a sigmoid.
That’s the difference between someone with 3+ decades in the field of AI research vs someone with barely 2 decades on earth.
This is a fair critism. However, I don't think it matters much, to the overall argument he makes.
Why?
We don't need AGI to see massive geopolitical disruption. We are already seeing this. The US has put up a GPU wall around China. That is evidence enough.
The capability we have already is enough to greatly upset the balance of power in a variety of spheres... Both sides lag in implementation. The capability is alresdy there. Capability will grow. AGI is not relevant to the concern for security. We've past that point already. The labs are a key NAT security asset. They just are privately owned/operated... For now. This is the way of things. History shows this.
Honestly its mindboggling how uncritical most of the folks here are about Sam Altman and Paul Graham and somehow giving billionaires who have been caught in multiple lies the benefit of the doubt multiple times.
Its unbelievable that apparently no-one has noticed a 10M stake in the hottest company that could well have >10x'd in the meantime. Watching Paul try to handwave it away and pretend he doesn't understand how investments work is incredible.
Trying to hand wave away a 10M stake in OpenAI taken when they were valued at <1Bn and then trying to weasel out by saying profit is capped. Why yes it is Paul, at 100x initially with the cap raising by 20% a year. And then trying to claim that the PPUs aren’t liquid despite regular liquidity events being the entire reason we know OpenAIs current valuation.
Didn’t think I’d see the founder of YC try the “I’m a moron who doesn’t understand how investments work” defense.
Paul Graham would have been officially retired from YC at the time. Jessica Livingston still worked full-time at YC for some years after Paul Graham hired Sam Altman to replace him as president and hired Dan Gackle to replace him as moderator. If Paul Graham had not been retired, this entire conversation wouldn't exist. His retirement is why Altman was president of YC.
What does it mean to be officially retired in the YC firm world view anyway... if you have a significant ownership stake are you actually ever really retired? Are major decisions not vetted by the stakeholders? YC was founded by JL and PG (I'd assume equally). And this decision is now described as a JL decision.
Anyway, there's a Hollywood movie in this drama... maybe I'll write a script using ChatGPT... :)
As a guess: It means he got to see his kids grow up instead of working 100 hours a week.
He handed off a lot of the day-to-day scut work. He didn't go "I'm just a shareholder who reads the annual report and counts my pennies from the DRIP."
He was still one of the two main founders and married to the other main founder. He wasn't totally uninvolved with the company.
He still did Office Hours, at least for a time. He described that as "ten percent of what he did" and hired at least two people to divide up the other 90 percent.
I imagine he and Livingston discussed the company over breakfast/dinner and a lot of decisions were likely joint decisions privately hashed out. It's a company founded by a dating couple who later married. There is probably no clear, bright dividing line between "her" decisions and "his."
Well, if you want to read it tendentiously, I guess your choices are the buck stopping with Jessica, with Paul, or with Jessica and Paul. Seems straightforward to reason about.
Why the fuck would one of the most famous people on the planet who is already phenomenally wealthy want to be the voice of a company that has already maligned her for an application that people are already demonstrating the use of to have sexually explicit conversations.
Anyone signing up to your revenue sharing scheme is going to be all over the internet saying the most vile things imaginable.
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