Love this: building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations. All too often, we place our hope in unlimited “upgrades,” in forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of healing people’s wounds. As a result, while some pursue the illusion of unlimited self-assertion, many are deprived of basic necessities.
Karpathy is an interesting case of PhD gone industry and he mentions this topic in the article. In my field of computational social science it is sadly very taboo to happily leave the academy. Yet, they don’t do much to make it more appealing. My biggest win was to find a group of people outside of my research group that I liked collaborating with. Research is more fun as a team sport.
I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?