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edouard-harris

1,594 karmajoined قبل 10 سنوات
twitter.com/harris_edouard

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edouard-harris
·أمس·discuss
> But the existence of commoditised AI implies model selection isn’t a huge deal, which in turn implies the models are about the same, which strongly implies there is no recursive self-improvement. Depending on your definition, you may still have AGI. But you don’t have superintelligence.

This is only true at a given AI capability level, no? e.g., if AI at the GLM-5.2 level is commoditized, all that suggests is that there's no recursive self-improvement easily possible at the capability level of GLM-5.2. (And with the harnesses for it that exist so far, etc etc.)

If I observe commoditization of a given tier of model capabilities at a given point in time, this seems to say little about what's possible with models six months later, or models that are undergoing proprietary deployments at that very moment inside the major labs, or even models that are notionally available for public use but have had recursive self-improvement adjacent capabilities intentionally nerfed (e.g., Fable).

(I might be misinterpreting your comment tbc - if you mean observing commoditization implies there is no existing, ambient superintelligence at the moment of that observation, then I don't disagree.)
edouard-harris
·قبل 11 يومًا·discuss
> The agents have sandboxes, but those are loose. Not enforced by anything outside of the agent harness itself.

You might want to check out Ant's open source srt [0], I use it to contain my local coding agents. It's strict by default and enforced at the OS layer.

[0] https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime
edouard-harris
·قبل 28 يومًا·discuss
What AOC actually said was (linked in the essay): "You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that." That is a strong claim - a claim of universal impossibility - but it's the claim she chose to make. Because she made a universal claim, an N=1 anecdote is enough to disprove it by counterexample.
edouard-harris
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
> with no means of significant revenue generation.

OpenAI will top $20 billion in ARR this year, which certainly seems like significant revenue generation. [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-will-...
edouard-harris
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
As one more data point: I've angel-invested in a couple of Nigerian startups, and I can confirm this tracks with the black-market rates my portcos are seeing over there. The divergence (between official and actual forex rates for NGN/USD) first took off in September '22 and has stuck around since.
edouard-harris
·قبل 5 سنوات·discuss
> YC will always advise going for a high-growth, high-risk strategy

I agree that this is indeed YC's bias, but it's incorrect that they will always advise founders in this direction. That claim is inconsistent both with my direct personal experience as a YC founder, and also with the experiences of other YC founders who I know intimately and have spoken to about these sorts of questions.

The fundamental reason claims of "being bullied" and similar are incorrect is that there's another major component to YC's incentives. Namely, YC loses out on an enormous number of great startups if there's even the slightest justified perception that they do anything close to bullying their founders.

YC's time horizon is naturally long: their biggest investments pay off over a 7-12 year time scale and almost all of their portfolio is extremely illiquid at any given time. That means they're especially culturally sensitive to actions that carry the risk of long-term negative effects, even if those actions also have positive short-term effects. Bullying founders into risking it all is just such an action, so they'd default to avoiding it even if it worked (which, by and large, it does not).
edouard-harris
·قبل 5 سنوات·discuss
The advice on Bookface certainly isn't scientifically based in the strict sense of having been compiled through double-blinded, controlled studies. But the writer and publisher of this content (the YC team) has both 1) intimate access to the largest single dataset of startups that has ever existed; and 2) an extraordinarily strong financial incentive to give consistently excellent advice to its portfolio companies.

That doesn't mean their advice is always right, but it does mean they have both the capability to quickly discover when they're wrong, and a powerful motivation to quickly correct their mistakes. So at any given time, we should expect the advice YC gives its portfolio companies to be pretty good.

Given that, it's worth considering whether what's perceived as "business monoculture" might actually be better described as "set of business practices that have been shown to actually work pretty well in the real world".