It peaked at around +60% from IPO price and swung daily around 10-15%. It’s possible it’s starting to stabilize but that first week was basically the definition of volatile.
> Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can't come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn't come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. — Orwell
Yea my father is looking for a new car, sedan, and will only buy American. Except American owned companies don’t really make sedans anymore. So he’s unsure what to do. I told him basically any Toyota sedan he buys would be made in the US and it blew his mind. I don’t understand how people who have strong opinions on these sorts of things don’t also do any research at all into their opinion.
The reason it is so noteworthy is because these companies are based upon valuations which assume mostly debt free companies with giant free cash flows. If Google starts to look like Ford a lot of the assumptions around why it’s worth so much money go out the window. Of course we’re not there but this is a change in direction which is new and noteworthy.
I think it's true across most of society today. There's value in removing friction up to a point but we're finding that by treating everything as an end to optimize results in loss of meaning. Most of life is lived in the in between moments and by fully removing them we lose something important.
Interestingly I haven’t had such a challenge in the past but regularly am accused of being AI. In my case I think it’s because I have experience writing philosophy papers which trend towards a more stilted tone. For this response I’m also probably exaggerating it a tad.
A lot of it is that good argumentative/persuasive writing follows the structures that AI writing follow. Groups of three, not only x but y, etc. It’s all stuff that’s considered a best practice. It used to be comments structured like that meant you were writing overly formally now it’s so common people see it as LLM output.
Oh as for how I feel about this… couldn’t care less if people think I’m AI or not. Im not in it for the karma, I don’t care if people think I use AI even as someone who’s anti AI.
Just because something is doesn’t mean it ought to be. We’ve settled on this system because it seems to be generally the most effective way of valuing things. In times of extreme changes in valuation it comes off as more egregious than normal.
This is what always confuses me about the “keep up or get left behind” crowd. Either these tools are gods in boxes and we’re all going to be replaced or they are actually something that you can gain expertise around. If you can gain expertise around them then sure there’s value in keeping up. But those shouting we’ve all gotta keep up are mostly the same claiming they are building god boxes. It genuinely has to be one or the other. Something isn’t a god box if you have to learn how to best use it.
It’s so wild to me to make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events. My next car will be an EV not suggesting it’s a bad decision however I’m still blown away by statistics like this.
I think the comments that the tech industry was always a bit terrifying and this piece can both be accurate. It is the case that the public perception has changed significantly due to lighting trust on fire and that the trust might not have been that deserved in the first place.
The asset liquidation analogy is perfect. For about the past ten year, I think the Cambridge Analytica hearings are a good turning point, tech has realized that their warm and fuzzy persona is no longer valuable cultivating and so there’s been a very rapid burn down of that persona into the hyper capitalist power hungry one we have today. It has always been the case that money and power were motivating factors but until that was laid fully bare there was value in pretending like it wasn’t the only factor.
These companies have pivoted from being cash generation machines to being data center building companies. It’s a huge bet that might pay off but the market is starting to notice that where there used to be revenue generation there is now infrastructure spend.
That representation is also old, incredibly well documented, and used to describe how to reason about chess. There are of course text guides to other games in training data but they rely upon depictions of what’s happening that aren’t purely text so the game harness is always going to have to make novel decisions about represent the game as text.
Yea it’s wild watching so many smart people convince themselves that LLMs are general purpose AIs. Don’t get me wrong they are incredibly powerful tools. However being surprised that text models cannot play video games particularly well is like being surprised weather models cannot.
Why aren’t those all spiritual questions? They seem like it to me. Maybe not religious questions but at the very least they are questions which, if approached honestly, force you to grapple with what it means to be you.