We’re being told AI will “augment” workers, but it increasingly looks like it’s augmenting them right out of a job. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s stock is near record highs. Shareholders win, employees lose.
It’s ironic: for years the open-source community was trying to match GPT-3 (175B dense) with 30B–70B models + RLHF + synthetic data—and the performance gap persisted.
Turns out, size really did matter, at least at the base model level. Only with the release of truly massive dense (405B) or high-activation MoE models (DeepSeek V3, DBRX, etc) did we start seeing GPT-4-level reasoning emerge outside closed labs.
> Welch was just very good at understanding that some invisible boundaries didn’t apply anymore, and that the zeitgeist was shifting in that direction
Agreed, Welch didn’t invent shareholder primacy, but he industrialized it. What makes him so consequential isn’t that he played the game better, but that he normalized a playbook that treated human capital as expendable
This is a textbook case of micro-architectural reality beats theoretical elegance. It's fascinating how replacing 5 loads with 2 loads + 3 vextq_f32 intrinsics, which should reduce memory pressure, ends up being slower due to execution port contention and dependency chains.