One of the things I often fail to fold into my plans or expectations is the
extent to which others fail to understand what I'm thinking/saying. E.g. a
one-time boss of mine was adamant that the responsibility for getting your
message across to the audience lies with you. His adamantinous (?) position
belied his naïve understanding/model of humans. It always felt like he didn't
understand that humans are biological animals, firmly grounded in a soup of
flora and fauna. It was almost religious ... like the way a priest might appeal
to some ridiculous ideal, a lossy reduction to some ungrounded World 3.
It dovetailed perfectly with his desire to be one of the cool kids in the
startup/VC/Angel world. I never understood that world (obviously, else I'd be
rich). But it always seemed to me that it was very pitch-driven. You must be
able to a) choose an audience, b) craft a slide deck, and c) deliver the pitch
in such a way as to hook them. [⛧] I also did quite a bit of poking around in
how to run a company. Running a company for a long period of time is a bushy,
complicated thing. Tying the pitch that hooks the investors to the hairball of
activity of a company is mysterious. The school teachers give lip service to
things like business plans and whatnot. But I think it's mostly *luck*, both
good and bad.
And the ones that luck out and learn to give pitches, get funding, and manage the bramble
bush well enough for the Exit will be *biased* toward the belief that they are good at
it, a false merit. And part of it is self-reinforcing. Due diligence softens and
fuzzifies when being pitched by those who've lucked out in the past, engineering the
world to canalize luck into "a good bet". Then there's also the guru factor.
Musk and Jobs were great cult leaders, telling their slaves to reify some vision, then
taking credit for that slave labor when the slaves make it happen (and equivocating when
the slaves fail). Fake it till you make it.
[⛧] FWIW, I doubt the academy is all that different. Grantsmanship is a thing.
On 5/22/25 12:10 PM, steve smith wrote:
I believe that for both of them, money is merely a means or constraint to achieving much
more abstract, idiosyncratic, hallucinatory, utopian visions. Musk's is clearly rooted
in a-good-old-fashioned-sci-fi-future. Altman's openly expressed vision seems to be one
of an (overly naive) incremental improvement of the "human condition" on an arc
qualitatively similar to the one we've been on since the ramp-up of industry a century or
two ago? They both seem to expect technological phase shifts but don't seem to
understand that sociological/cultural/spiritual ones would seem to follow inevitably?
They seem to only see Jetson-like-visions of self-flying cars and robots? I see
cyberpunkesque post/transhuman utopian/dystopian jackpots.
I don't trust either of them, mainly because of the outscale leverage they
wield. Musk's current $$ wealth is 200x that of Altman and his
industry-dominance has a much broader base. If Altman approaches AGI
(asymptotically?) more quickly, he might catch up in terms of /net effect in
the world/, but not directly through financial wealth?
I was acutely embarrassed for Musk recently when I watched a clip of him talking about his Grok and Colossus,
using his usual "schtick" around "first principles" and "physics based" and I'd
swear he didn't understand (or mean) a thing he was saying? It was very buzzword compliant to his stories
about Tesla and SpaceX. It sounded like hollow rhetoric aimed at Fox News, Donald Trump (and his allies) and
high-school techbro wannabes. Nothing he said sounded the least bit grounded in anything truly technical?
The more I listen to Altman, the more *naive* he seems to me... he is much
smoother than Musk and his narcissism is possibly much less significant and
much more well disguised.
On 5/22/25 11:42 AM, Prof David West wrote:
Unification. None implied. I agree that such would be unlikely.
To the extent that some people confidently express that "this is how we use
language," this is how scientists think," they are pretty much wrong to some
significant extent. Reconciliation/unification would always be elusive or non-existent. You
cite logicians, but my favorite example would be Whitehead's Process Philosophy contrasted
with his earlier work with Russel.
Even if possible, I don't immediately see the value in "unification."
Cynical aside to Pieter: I think Altman's only vision is a personal net worth
greater than his old partner Elon.
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