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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Reading about OpenAI's success with ChatGPT it becomes quite clear that a major reason why they are perceived as being ahead isn't because they are technically superior to Google/Meta/Microsoft but simply that they have fewer inhibitions. Most of the underlying tech that powers ChatGPT was invented by the major tech firms, they simply sat on that tech and slowed down its release. Exactly why is not explicitly spelled out, but reading between the lines it does appear it was a fear of bad PR + regulatory scrutiny. OpenAI, being smaller and thus escaping the same scrutiny, decided to simply implement the readily available technology and rush it out the door.

Nobody is denying that they have great engineers, but they are not inventing anything fundamentally new. That, at least, is the view of Yann LeCun in his latest interview. Perhaps he is an embittered man trying to protect his turf, but even OpenAI boosters will admit that Google has a similar chatbot which they simply have not publicly released yet.

Google's response has been quick, basically loosening internal controls and "ethics reviews" in order to boost the release cadence. This prompted Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to publicly criticise Google. This is of course cynical, draping yourself in the flag of responsibility while having had your success based upon being more reckless than the big boys.

I think these developments are part of a larger shift. The ever-increasing "wokism" of Big Tech has not only slowed down but arguably is even starting to decline, albeit gently. The slaughter of a substantial part of Google's AI "ethics" team in recent years come to mind. Timnit Gebru was its most high-profile victim but hardly the only one. OpenAI's success is simply yet another factor that will allow the further sidelining of naysayers inside Big Tech who are preoccupied with slowing down AI development due to social concerns.

I read a lot of inflamed commentary of how SJWs will destroy Silicon Valley during the height of the BLM mania. Ultimately, these developments tell us that once the bottom lines of Big Tech companies are even remotely threatened, they will cast aside any moral qualms without a moment's hesitation. Whether or not that is good is debatable, but it seems to be final. Obviously, this also has implications for any hopes of "holding back" AGI if it ever came close to fruition, i.e. the likelihood of that ever being feasible is probably close to nil.

I think you're misreading companies' regulatory burden for fear of wokism. Google et al are holding back for the former, which is much more central to its daily life. In fact, the biggest fear of wokism in corporations comes from implicit regulatory burden via law suits supported by old civil rights law.

Google saw that openAI got away with releasing tech without the feds slamming down arbitrary regulation (so far) and were like "okay, maybe it's safe." This is all at best tangentially related to wokism. Never forget that the federal government's regulatory apparatus is the #1 concern of any large corporation.

I don't think this is as separated as you seem to think. One of the main tactics of wokeism is to hijack and abuse the government's regulatory apparatus. Ie, a bunch of woke idealogues see something they dislike, complain enough to raise it to public awareness, a woke bureaucrat in the government raises legal action against it via some sort of ambiguous law that can technically be said to apply if you stretch the language a little, and then a woke judge rules against the company.

This only needs to actually happen in a small number of cases in order to create a culture of fear that disincentivizes companies from invoking the ire of the woke, same as with any other legal threat. And because the law's are often ambiguous and/or selectively enforced, this can be wielded as an idealogical weapon. If the government selectively enforces ambiguous regulatory laws against wokeism's targets more often than its allies, then companies can reduce their regulatory burden by being an ally.

I don't think this is as separated as you seem to think.

I don't think they're separate. Like I said-

the biggest fear of wokism in corporations comes from implicit regulatory burden

But civil rights suits and so on are not the biggest burden. It's one of many burdens, and the burdens become bigger and more arbitrary the bigger the company.

I am not sure it is wokeism but rather that big tech are no longer startups but blue chip companies. When I worked as a dev for a blue chip company I barely ever wrote code, in fact I was losing my coding skills working there. There were so many meetings, so many stakeholders, so many considerations to make, so many other products that the code had to fit in with. Lots of time was spent testing, emailing and waiting for someone else to do something. Apple beat IBM not by having better tech, marketing or production but by being faster.

With that said the complexity of a huge ecosystem such as a large bank, the powergrid or Boeing is so vast that it becomes really hard to be nimble and many problems arise naturally. If one is buiding a space ship there will naturally be a lot of certifications, meetings, requirements etc which will make work slow. If you are working on google search you can't just push your code to prod and risk it crashing production. That feature that you thought you could hack together one night isn't worth risking a global piece of infrastructure over.

Tangential to the discussion, but immediately made me think of this classic article on how they build the spaceship code:

https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

I agree: there is a shift happening. But the most interesting thing is the application of morality, ethics and social justice based from something that rejects objectivity and mechanistic models of the world, on something that has sprung up from objectivity and a mechanistic model namely modern AI technology. The philosophy of the "woke" is based on subjectivity and rejection of the mechanistic from the enlightenment is fundamentally incompatible with the technology that it tries to make "ethical". The most fascinating thing at the bottom of this incompatibility is the foundational arguments for this "woke" subjectivity is the reason for why we can't fix AI. AI can't transcend its programming and inputs as opposed to humans.

Seconding bing not sucking - duckduckgo's search is mostly backed by bing, and I barely notice the difference between DDG and google. Occasionally google is better, but not that often.

Bing sucks

This was a meme for years, but I genuinely don't think it is true anymore.

Maybe it is just because Google has declined that much, but I find Bing to be snappy/responsive and accurate in returning good results.

I just don't have the 'muscle memory' for jumping to Bing when searching out new info.

Accept or reject that two cents as you wish.

2nding this, Bing has been ok for a while. Their image and video search are superior to Google and have been for a few years now.

I thought so too, but Bing really, really sucks. I've left it as the default on my son's computer since it integrates nicely with Microsoft's parental controls. My son is not a sophisticated 9-year old, his queries are very, very simple. And yet it still returns utter trash results, littered with malware at the worst, and machine-generated content farm crap at the best. I repeat the queries on google and it's surprising how different they are.

Google would’ve been better off just not spending all that money and returning a bunch of cash as dividends. But P-A problem leads to empire building.

But P-A problem leads to empire building.

In the case of a well-regarded tech company like Google, I don't think it is necessarily a P-A problem. It is hard to talk about the usual metrics like PE vs index because so much of the S&P 500 is tech megacaps nowadays, but I think for most of the last 10 years stock market investors valued $1 of cash in Larry Page's pocket higher than $1 cash in their own pocket because they thought Larry was able to buy companies like Waymo and Deepmind and they couldn't.

Notoriously, growth investors hate dividends.

I understand the argument. It just turned out not to be true. Has Google really created anything super successful outside of Google and gmail

I think there is a common mistake among tech investors of overestimating the chance that a successful founder/CEO will do it again. There was something similar going on with Tesla - if you asked Tesla bulls what the trillion dollar company Tesla would grow into looked like (it is hard to justify a valuation of more than about $300 billion for a pure-play car company), they would generally was lyrical about some non-automotive business (energy and AI being the main ones) that Musk was going to expand into.

Musk does seem like a bit of an outlier. He was pretty important in PayPal. Then SpaceX and Tesla. That’s three very different companies but all really successful.

Tesla battery tech is actually pretty advanced. I could see a non car use case, but to me to really accomplish that you need to spin it out for fit and focus reasons.

Same with SpaceX and Starlink. Starlink seems to have a clear use case of internet provider (Elon didn’t reinvent this but basically improved on historic DSL). To really harness this, need to focus on Starlink qua telecom.

With all of that said, the company on most bullish on is SpaceX. Asteroid mining could be incredibly valuable.

I'm bullish on SpaceX too - so is Musk given that he doesn't let peasants invest in it. I suspect if there was a SpaceX IPO the fanbois would drive up the stock price to the point where I ceased to be bullish.

Musk is clearly more likely than the latest Y Combinator wunderkind to build another $300 billion company. But I still think the overall chance of him doing so is <50% (particularly given that he is suffering from the great fame->loss of focus->loss of productivity problem that ends Nobel laureates research careers). And the chance of him doing so in a way which generates value for non-Musk SpaceX or Tesla shareholders is even lower because he has demonstrated a willingness to found new companies while remaining CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the Tesla and SpaceX boards have demonstrated a willingness to let him do it.

Agreed that musk is probably “done” founding new companies. But basically founding two 300b+ companies + playing a large role in a third is already almost unprecedented.

The closest I can think of is Jobs (Pixar and Apple—and with Apple he basically reinvented it)

Google Maps -- outside of the U.S., restaurant reviews (which derive from that) surpass Yelp.

Google Drive -- at our company of about 100 people we no longer routinely use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. (granted, most of the executives and salespeople still have Microsoft licenses as they may need to send a Word or Excel document).

Android

Chrome

I don't know if that any of the above are "super successful" relative to Search, but then very few things are. But that's the core of their complacency -- anything they build gets compared to a trillion dollar, 90% margin business. For example GCP is a clear miss on a relative scale (relative to AWS and Azure) but still would be a multi-billion dollar company in its own right.

Granted, there are a lot of total whiffs too.

I felt that was true pre-pandemic (and I used it, and wrote reviews), but Trip Advisor's coverage seems crap now, and it's scores not really to be trusted.

That hasn't been my experience.

Just now I randomly picked a restaurant in Rome and it has 1300 reviews on Google maps and 800 on trip advisor.

I’m not talking about useful; I’m talking about profitable. Android I’ll concede.

I’m in a very large professional service firm and we exclusively use office products along with everyone I know. I think it’s quite rare to use Google Drive.

  • The free DNS server 8.8.8.8 and other Internet backend services which feed their ad servers

  • Android mobile OS (though “created” might be too strong a term

  • Chromebooks for schoolkids

  • Chrome browser is now the guts of MS Edge after Windows deprecated IE

  • Google Play successfully monetized the YouTube infrastructure they bought

Ultimately, these developments tell us that once the bottom lines of Big Tech companies are even remotely threatened, they will cast aside any moral qualms without a moment's hesitation.

People keep asserting such bombastic claims all the time, and yet all these companies keep crossing lines in the name of the woke, to the point that if you got a time-machine and simply posted what's happening right now at The Motte of few years ago, you'd get banned for being uncharitable.

There's very little evidence these companies prioritize their bottom line over wokeness, and this isn't it either. It does show they will make a move if their relative position on the market is threatened, but that's another thing entirely.

It's not. Google was more than happy to throw away truckloads of dollars in the name of wokeness already. It's their position in the relative ranking of AI providers they're not giving away.

They're willing to leave a $100 bill on the sidewalk if and only if they can be sure no one else can pick it up either.

That's a very good way to put it!

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