Aki Henrik

In an early meeting at Facebook (c. 2007), when I was describing the goals of Facebook Platform (an area I oversaw) Bill Gates yelled at me/us. His quote has stuck with me to this day: “This isn’t a platform. A platform is where the collective sum of revenues of the participants exceeds those of the platform itself.” Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the tokenmaxxing circle jerk.

@lulumeservey Maybe it's really a values problem and not a "framing" or PR problem.

“The question is not whether AI will shape the world; it will. The question is whether YOU will help…” Tonedeaf disaster Obvious move would’ve been to focus on the graduates as the protagonists, instead of framing them as accessories to AI’s world takeover “The question is not whether you will shape the world; you will. The question is how…” simple switch Then you can go on to talk about adapting to change, trying new things, using the power of technology newly available to them. And make it about empowering new graduates Instead it ended up preachy, condescending, and vaguely menacing all at once

@chrislakin To be fair, neither did my therapist really check if the therapy was working.

traditional “inner work” is so funny. here try these magic spells. we’re never going to check whether they worked. the last person said it made them feel good, temporarily

@Kantrowitz "Ask not what artificial intelligence can do for you. Ask what you can do for artificial intelligence"

@slonob @vividvoid People can only feel themselves and their own nervous system. The standard description of an empath is part of the problem.

@vividvoid Empaths feel everything around them. It can lead them to not feel themselves, especially when everyone around them is in a lot of pain. I wonder how many depressed people fit into this pattern.

One of the weirdest things about depressive clients is how sharp they can be about everything except themselves, where they are absolutely delusional in their self-destruction. People who deeply understand both the price and value of everything in the universe except one thing.

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

@robertwiblin Because he's a genius. And seems like a delight.

"Key theme: everyone's worried about Demis!" What freaks people out about Demis in particular? I don't really get it. Am I missing something?

One of the things that made the Mythos release hard to interpret is that Anthropic held back details on most vulns they found, to give defenders time to patch. 1 month later, info from orgs with access to Mythos is starting to trickle out, e.g. this post from Mozilla today:

My gf is banned from reviewing places in Europe on Google Maps after she gave one restaurant in Portugal a 1-star review When she reviews inside EU it gets auto rejected, outside EU she can review any place Free speech in Europe has sadly died a long time ago

all technology brothers should have a birthright trip to paris to see how good certain things can get and all the axes of civilization they don’t think about. they should also get one to singapore to witness the hollow Disneyland feigned joy of technocratic perfection

Jessica and I have been talking about how earnest Swedish founders seem. Obviously it's news to no one that Swedes would be earnest. But I don't think they themselves realize how valuable this quality is for founders specifically. paulgraham.com/earnest.html

We don’t talk enough about how any state or group which is harvesting encrypted packets right now will be able to read those contents once quantum computers arrive. There’s a huge espionage and transparency overhang on any information that is currently “secret” and hasn’t been encrypted using post-quantum cryptography.

Demis Hassabis and Sebastian Mallaby were on stage in SF today and here are the 9 best things they said: 1. "There is a 50% chance that OpenAI goes bankrupt in the next 18mos" -Mallaby 2. "Dario is the best of all the other lab leaders." -Demis 3. On Claude Mythos: "It's not really tenable for a private company to decide who gets access to the frontier of cyber defense tech. What happens when China can do this in 6-12mos?" -Mallaby 4. "Not all countries are pessimistic about AI. I was just in India for the AI Summit Modi had and they're quite optimistic there" -Demis 5. "The most exciting current prospect in AI is our work at Isomorphic Labs. AlphaFold is just one of the many problems we need to solve. We need 6 'AlphaFold' moments to compress the drug delivery timeline from 10yrs to a few months" -Demis 6. "I don't think of p(doom) as probabilities to throw out there. I just know it's non zero. Some people like Marc Andreesen and Yann LeCun think it's 0% and I think that's crazy" -Demis 7. On AGI: "I think of a post-scarcity world where on the bright side we will have an unbelievable amount of science but we will have to think of economic problems of sharing proceeds equitably. We will also have philosophical questions to answer and need great new philosophers" -Demis 8. On career advice: "Immerse yourself in AI tools. Everyone has access to tools 3-6 months behind frontier. Enormous opportunity lies in applying AI to unexplored areas." -Demis 9. On the future: "When I started building this technology, I pictured a future quite different from this. More like CERN researchers where we discuss ideas and help each other out and stress test each other's ideas. It's my job to help how I can to make sure we make more considered, more scientific, more rigorous and more thoughtful decisions and that will also involve social scientists and economists. I'm going to do all I can to try and influence the future in a note thoughtful manner. The decisions we make in the next 5-10 years are going to affect us for 1000s of years. But I remain very optimistic." -Demis

if your data is stored in a database that a company can freely read and access (i.e. not end-to-end encrypted), the company will eventually update their ToS so they can use your data for AI training — the incentives are too strong to resist

what in the ever loving fuck

Humor and playfulness are the tells of people who are psychologically healthy and unlikely to create conflict

@richardludlow Sounds eerily similar to my exp. The inner critic lives in the neck... For me, the simulated conversations with others don't count as ‘real’ inner monologue. Inner monologue feels distinctly different. It’s conversation with parts of myself (IFS style).

I’m intrigued by this pointer, since I have both an active inner monologue and inner critic but I never hear a voice in my head saying mean things. The inner monologue is typically simulating conversations with others, and the inner critic is a silent somatic sense.

I'm trying to remember who I was before Orbán, but it's so hard. All the newspapers, TV stations, academic departments, cultural projects, venues etc. that I worked at back home -- it's all gone. In the US, we like to criticize the media but imagine if overnight CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, NYU, etc., all closed down because of one politician. That's how it feels to be Hungarian. There is a lot to rebuild, and a lot of restoration work ahead for Magyar. The destruction -- including in the administrative system and the morale -- had been immense.

What goes unsaid: most people probably won’t be able to afford the longevity treatments.

Today, Hungary votes. The choice is between an anti-EU, pro-Russia, pro-corruption party reigning for 16 years (Orbán’s party: Fidesz) or a pro-EU, anti-Russia, anti-corruption party (Tisza). My mail-in vote went for Tisza ❤️🤍💚 A rendszerváltásért!