lmao less than 60 seconds of playtime and it's a hit piece against anti-zionism
God I love Content Creation and Digital Video
this is the forum of all forums
1 Like
Listening to Thiel on Rogan now
I think his typical argument about the retreat from the "world of atoms" into the "world of bits" / "where is the progress"-type stuff doesn't hold as much water as it did 10 or even 5 years ago. Today we are making progress on these "world of atoms" topics - SpaceX is shooting rockets into the air and then catching them, Nvidia is doing some shit with chips (who knows but this is kinda the point - advancements today require specialized knowledge so it's very easy to be a nimwit and sit there saying "nothing ever happens")
Even looking at stuff like the smartphone or the ubiquity of those little touch screens they turn around at every little shop and ask you for a tip, this is an area where technology and access to technology has significantly grown in the modern world. Our world does not look like it did in 1990. It doesn't even look like 2008.
I think it's very easy to say "nothing ever happens" until something actually happens and that's when you need to update your mental models. And that is exactly what Thiel is doing here - he talks about AI in a way that makes it clear he does see massive change - something has happened - and he thinks people actually haven't realized yet how transformational it is.
This really highlights for me the nature of how things happen when "something happens." It will appear that nothing is happening for years until you hear a hint of something. Then, if you're not on the inside, it will appear that nothing is continuing to happen, until suddenly it's too late and everything's changed. That's what's going on with AI. People everywhere are rushing to be first to do a bunch of different transformational things, but they are all competing with each other and don't want anyone to know what they're doing (even though we're all basically doing the same things) - as a result, to outsiders it appears to be another Fake Innovation (like blockchain or quantum computing - two topics which I attended talks on ~6 years ago now and still have yet to result in even 1 meaningfully transformative output) while meanwhile a shadow war is raging to get first mover advantage on what is essentially the next dotcom boom.
Positions: AMZN AAPL NVDA
@yns if North Korea secures a nuclear sub from the Ruskies then LA might be nuked.
My buddy in the military is in Latvia right now, he said same thing. Russia isn't going to nuke anyone they're not going to bite the leftist hissy fit of them letting UA use USA made weapons inside Russia proper.
So in summary: In order for something to happen it is preceded by nothing happening until finally it does, but sometimes it doesn't because it was a fake something.
Not quite. My point (which could be wrong, Thiel is a smart guy) is that the nature of things that happen is that most of the time they are not happening, then suddenly they are, but even in that moment it will appear that they aren't (until it is too late and they have clearly already happened) unless you are on the inside watching them happen or even being the force that causes them.
The reason I say could be wrong/Thiel smart is that I view this as a semi-rebuttal of the core assumptions of Zero to One.
I don't think it's meaningful to proclaim that something disruptive like "powerful AI" has "happened" until it has been applied broadly and most people agree that is having an impact on their lives. Until then it is purely speculation, which is colored by the financially driven narratives of investors like Thiel.
tard
tard
The point is that "nothing ever happens" or "nothing has been happening" are not correct - what the common person sees is the illusion of nothing happening and then suddenly a big change happens and we go back to nothing happening.
Think about the atom bomb.
In the years leading up to 1945 the common person would probably think there are no new advancements in the nuclear weapons fields. Countries were not in the habit of disclosing all their new weapons innovations - the illusion is that nothing is happening. Then, suddenly, a massive amount of progress would happen all at once - two atom bombs were dropped that annihilated cities. Since then, it appears that no new progress has been made on nuclear bombs. Do you get my point?
In the years leading up to 1945 the Germans were perfecting ballistic missiles and were firing them at the UK.
WWI is completely different than WWII and there's like 20 years difference.
NVIDIA is valuable because of the software; AI is 99% software. The cool thing SpaceX did was all software: likely model predictive control.
The true argument is China creating a massive vertically integrated manufacturing apparatus in the past 30~ years that's increasingly automated. But Thiel's argument is implicitly US oriented.
1 Like
You are just brain dead. This stuff is so hard and the gains are so little that the US literally has to hand out tens of billions of dollars to people to even enter the space. There are zero new entrants and the established players like Intel can't actually compete anymore.
Does this sound like an environment where "progress" is being made?
Technology has been advancing rapidly, I'm not sure why anyone would say nothing is happening.
That was true, but now Nvidia is claiming that the bottleneck is hardware and infrastructure.
And the bottleneck is hardware and infrastructure because... ??????
Why even go that far back? For me, growing up, the internet existed but was not commonly used.
I don't follow it that closely but in a recent conference Jensen was talking about how all we need to do is throw more hardware at the problem and it will (mostly) stop hallucinating.
Thiel's argument is that all progress in non-software fields stopped at the end of the last century
That's one of his core starting points in Zero to One and a common motif in all of his interviews in the years since then
Jones here is just aping Thiel talking points back at you
Time to update the model Jones. Thiel is saying something new. Something has actually happened