One irritating aspect of living in a populist age is that no leader of consequence from either party or tribe is the slightest bit curious about American history.
Travis Kalanick is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time.
The bad guys took his company.
But they never broke his spirit.
He rebuilt from scratch.
And now he’s back.
@bennpeifert Margin call might be an all-time undertated movie. The acting, the build up everything was just perfect. I must’ve seen the boardroom clips on youtube like a million times.
As someone who works in cancer research and spent significant portion of his life dedicated to this, I support Sam’s point. The “spend less on entertainment, cure cancer” take sounds simple and feels good. It is also wrong.
The notion that you should devote all AI power to cancer or medical research is a false dichotomy that is not compatible with human reality and is not even as helpful as people assume. You could make that argument about any entertainment, sports, or games: why waste hundreds of billions on these when you could spend all of that on cancer research (currently less than $10 billion a year from the U.S. government, and being cut further). Yet they feel entitled to make these simplistic popular criticisms.
Scientific progress, especially in biomedicine, not only needs AI and massive data centers; it also needs sustained R&D, actual expensive experiments, very robust datasets, faster trials, fewer regulations, and better incentives for such investments. We still have to solve these bottlenecks and invest tremendous amounts of money and resources. Pools of capital are not a single bucket. Consumer spend does not map cleanly to the NIH, biotech, or trials.
It is therefore unfair to attack OpenAI, which is in fact doing much more for the progress of science than most frontier labs, with the exception of Google, which is also devoting huge resources toward these goals. I do wonder how much of their time and money these people who are making these criticism have given to cancer research? Do they ask this to themselves evet time they spend any time and money for entertainment? Why waste it on that instead of donating to cancer research?
It is also important to remember that without fun games, we would not have NVIDIA and current AI. Why? Because games drove GPUs. GPUs powered AI. AI now accelerates drug discovery. The line from “entertainment” to cures is not straightforward. In fact, I have started making educational science videos using Sora 2. I can already see how powerful this will be for training people or get them interested in science, because it’s fun and seeing is understanding. I would not be surprised if one of these AI videos leads to an insight that results in a cure.
Life, education, and research need to be fun, at least while humans are in charge. We need this to sustain our motivation to learn and produce.
Now I will spend some time making a few more Sora 2 videos and will not feel guilty that I did not spend that time finding a cure for cancer. I also know that in science you have to remix unexpected things to arrive at the most creative ideas.
i get the vibe here, but...
we do mostly need the capital for build AI that can do science, and for sure we are focused on AGI with almost all of our research effort.
it is also nice to show people cool new tech/products along the way, make them smile, and hopefully make some money given all that compute need.
when we launched chatgpt there was a lot of "who needs this and where is AGI".
reality is nuanced when it comes to optimal trajectories for a company.