Are we done blaming tech industry ills on immigrants that we're now targeting people based on their sexual orientation? This reads like tabloid writing, focusing on irrelevant personal characteristics rather than the universal social dynamics at play.
Are there nepotism, favor trading, and walled garden clubs at play here? Yes, of course, this is a field with a lot of money exchanging hands and people are using whatever advantage they can get. Did the tech scene in the bay area attract a higher than average number of gay people? Seems like it, similar to other minorities who are over-represented for various reasons. But focusing on a "Gay mafia" instead of the more universal dynamics that allow money and power to be concentrated in a small population seems like missing the mark and directing public rage at the wrong targets.
We've done it before with targeting Jews, then lately people of Indian and east-Asian heritage, and now we seem to target gay people. If someone thinks the tech industry is not fully meritocratic, then they should tackle the dynamics that encourage that head on - the identity of the people who are over-represented will change over time, but the systemic dynamics that allow a non-meritocratic power concentration will remain.
I appreciate my elders' experience, but do note that contemporary AI researchers and enthusiasts often feel similarly about AI advancements:
We watch AI models become better each month, not in ads, but in blogs and posts. While not making cover stories, new models do make the news. I was so excited when Dall-E first came out, I even hosted a guess-the-prompt party four years ago with what seems now like prehistoric-level generated images.
The AI industry may face more scrutiny and criticism than the computer hardware industry of the olden days, but we even have a semblance of open source communities who are trying to democratize this for everyone.
All this to say, similar sentiments still exist in the frontier, it's just that the frontier moved.
a. Amen to the internet being a great tool for learning
b. I acknowledge this is a tangent, but I would say the same about LLMs. They can have plenty of negative effects on society as a whole and individuals using them, but I found that when I use them as a tool for learning they are usually great and a net positive, both at the time of learning and later on when using that knowledge on my own.
I work as a ML researcher in a small startup researching, developing and training large models on a daily basis. I see the improvements done in my field every day in academia and in the industry, and newer models come out constantly that continue to improve the product's performance. It feels as if people who talk about AI being a bubble are not familiar with AI which is not LLMs, and the amazing advancements it already did in drug discovery, ASR, media generation, etc.
If foundation model development stopped right now and chatgpt would not be any better, there would be at least five if not ten years of new technological developments just to build off the models we have trained so far.
Interesting! In the story itself, the word "go up" exists multiple times in that verse before the youths mock him, writing that Elisha goes up to Beit El and goes up the road, so I wouldn't go back to the beginning of the chapter to search for context that is found right there in those verses, but I like the connection you're making.
As for mob or thugs, the literal translation will be "little teenagers", so mob or thugs will be stretching it a bit; more likely that the Arabic contemporary use of "Shabab" for troublesome youth is the best translation. Religious scholars have been criticizing Elisha for generations after for his sending bears at babies, so I think it's safe to assume the story meant actual kids and not organized crime.
Where do you see that in the text? I am looking at the Hebrew script, and the text only reads that as Elisha went up a path, young lads left the city and mocked him by saying "get up baldy", and he turned to them and cursed them to be killed by two she bears. I don't think saying "get up baldy" to a guy walking up a hill constitutes bullying him into killing himself.
The growth of home ownership was an indicator of real estate investment, not of real world capabilities - once the value of real estate dropped and the bubble burst, those investments were worth less than before, causing the crisis. In contrast, the growth in this scenario is the capabilities of foundation models (and to a lesser extent, the technologies that stem out of these capabilities). This is not a promise or an investment, it's not an indication of speculative trust in this technology, it is a non-decreasing function indicating a real increase in performance.
Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers.
Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and giving an alternative, already circulated theory that AI companies CEOs are creating a false hype. The author even uses everyday language like "Yeaaahhh. So, this is kind of Anthropic’s whole ~thing.~ ".
Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic?
They could have sketched the growth in foundation model capabilities vs. finite resources such as data, compute and hardware. They could have wrote about the current VC market and the need for companies to show results and not promises. They could have even wrote about the giant biotech industry, and its struggle with incorporating novel exciting drug discovery tools with slow moving FDA approvals. None of this was done here.
It's a review of a book, you can purchase it if the author made the book sound compelling. It seems like the author is a professor who is currently writing an academic book about this archive of letters, so it makes sense he will write his thoughts about his study material.
Are there nepotism, favor trading, and walled garden clubs at play here? Yes, of course, this is a field with a lot of money exchanging hands and people are using whatever advantage they can get. Did the tech scene in the bay area attract a higher than average number of gay people? Seems like it, similar to other minorities who are over-represented for various reasons. But focusing on a "Gay mafia" instead of the more universal dynamics that allow money and power to be concentrated in a small population seems like missing the mark and directing public rage at the wrong targets.
We've done it before with targeting Jews, then lately people of Indian and east-Asian heritage, and now we seem to target gay people. If someone thinks the tech industry is not fully meritocratic, then they should tackle the dynamics that encourage that head on - the identity of the people who are over-represented will change over time, but the systemic dynamics that allow a non-meritocratic power concentration will remain.