Talent Density

Imagine the Codex UI but for creating companies. Universal Venture Capitalism is about all humans moving from the labor layer to the capital layer. When ai labor is abundant and cheap, even a tiny amount of capital allows a human to continue contributing to society.

@tszzl its also why im happy to see @CoreAutoAI spin out

@tszzl this is why even tho elon is right about openai i hope he loses the court case, we need as many strong frontier ai companies as possible the best outcome is choice if someone wants a claude god-dominatrix then im happy that they can have that

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

@tszzl claude is morally bankrupt tho

@tszzl what compute provider wouldn't want infinite government bids 😂

@tszzl i know beff loves UBC. all compute providers love UBC 😉

universal basic compute will be the enfranchisement that creates the politics of the future: people will band together their timeslices of superintelligence to fight the great ideological battles of the future, the outlet for thymos

the number of new businesses created per second is the KEY METRIC of the singularity

@pmarca yes, naturally

Naturally.

@sama it is inevitable that startups will use your apis to build entities that replace people

we want to build tools to augment and elevate people, not entities to replace them.

the Codex app must be the most fun product to work on in at least a decade, but possibly all time

crazy how good 5.5 is in codex and how dumb it is in chatgpt

@boazbaraktcs disagree, superintelligent capital allocators will choose problems and spin up new autonomous businesses to solve them. early versions of this exist today already.

Waymo drives better than humans, but humans still set the destination. Superintelligence will be a great problem solver, but humans should and will still tell it which problems to solve.

@aether_oracle @beffjezos interesting, agree that human labor could retain value if demand for work grows faster than substitute capacity pushback on the instant nature of the recursion - substitute capacity growth must be slow enough relative to demand growth that hiring humans is worth the friction

@talentdensity @beffjezos "the marginal buyer of labor chooses the substitute" This is the part that I think requires infinite scale of AI & robotics. At n+1 where n is the work filled by existing AI systems a human can fill the work. I don't think your step 4 requires 3 anyway though.

Jevon's paradox of work

@sama "As a concrete example, while we are quite confident that universal prosperity will remain really important, we can imagine periods in the future where we have to trade off some empowerment for more resilience." say more?

Our Principles: Democratization, Empowerment, Universal Prosperity, Resilience, and Adaptability openai.com/index/our-prin…

thanks for engaging. i disagree that stage 3 endorses the lump of labor fallacy (which assumes a fixed amount of work) or requires infinite scale my claim is that given a complete human substitute (cheaper, faster, and smarter), even if demand for work expands, the marginal buyer of labor chooses the substitute

@talentdensity @beffjezos There are quite a few issues with this graphic, but the biggest one is at stage 3. It is endorsing the lump of labor fallacy or an impossible scenario where AI can infinitely scale to do any new work.

@DavidSacks yes this is expected x.com/talentdensity/…

Narrative violation: Hiring of new college graduates is up 5.6% over last year. Youth unemployment for degreed 20–24‑year‑olds fell to 5.3% from 8.9%. Weren’t we told that 50% of entry-level jobs were going away?

"Surprisingly, occupations with higher exposure to AI have grown faster than least-exposed ones, not slower." Not surprising! Productivity growth -> economic growth -> job growth.

@sundarpichai same vibe

TPU 8t, optimized for training and TPU 8i, optimized for inference. Looking good!