Good! And welcome back (after keeping your promise to dang for ~611 days [0] (and counting)) :)
If you have time to elaborate on how you make a little money on it at some point, I’m sure lots of people here would love to hear more details and thoughts on that!
"Understand" is up for debate, but it's clearly learning something. The fact that it's possible to learn general structure as well as we can from unlabeled data does seem like a significant development.
I think people should be impressed, but also recognize the distance from here to AGI. It clearly has some capabilities that are quite surprising, and is also clearly missing something fundamental relative to human understanding.
It is difficult to define AGI, and it is difficult to say what the remaining puzzle piece are, and so it's difficult to predict when it will happen. But I think the responsible thing is to treat near-term AGI as a real possibility, and prepare for it (this is the OpenAI charter we wrote two years ago: https://openai.com/charter/).
I do think what is clear is that we are, in the coming years, going to have very powerful tools that are not AGI but that still change a lot of new things. And that's great--we've been waiting long enough for a new tech platform.
On a core level, why are you trying to create an AGI?
Anyone who has thought seriously about the emergence of AGI equates the chance that AGI causes a human extinction level event ~20%, if not greater.
Various discussion groups I am a part of now see anyone who is developing AGI to be equivalent to developing a stockpile of nuclear warheads in your basement that you're not sure won't immediately shoot off on completion.
As an open question. If one believes that
1. We do not know how to control an AGI
2. AGI has a very credible chance to cause a human level extinction event
3. We do not know what this chance or percentage is
4. We can identify who is actively working to create an AGI
Why should we not immediately arrest people who are working on an "AGI-future" and try them for crimes against humanity? Certainly, In my nuclear warhead example, I would immediately be arrested by the government of the country I am currently living in the moment they discovered this.
The problem is that if the United States doesn't do it, China or other countries will. It's exactly the reason why we can't get behind on such a technology from a political / national perspective.
For what it's worth though, I think you're right that there are a lot of parallels with nuclear warheads and other dangerous technologies.
There needs to be a level of serious discourse that doesn't appear to currently be in the air, around what to do, international treaties, and repercussions.
I have no idea why people aren't treating this with grave importance. The level of development of AI technologies is clearly much ahead of where anyone thought it would be.
With exponential growth rates, acting too early is always seen as an 'overreaction', but waiting too long is sure to be a bad outcome (see, world re: coronavirus).
There seems to be some hope, in that as a world we seemed to have banned human cloning, and that has been around since dolly in the late 90s.
On the other hand, the USA can't seem to come to a consensus that a deadly virus is a problem, as it is killing its own citizens.
You don’t know the distance! And you are conflating distances! Distance between agi behavior and gtp3 behavior has nothing to do with the distance in time between the invention of gtp3 and agi. That’s a deceptive intuition and fuzzy thinking... again my point is that the “behavior distance” between AIM chat bots and gtp3 would, under your scrutiny, lead to a prediction of a much larger “temporal distance” than 10 years. Nit-picking about particular things that this particular model can’t do is completely missing the big picture.
By damn, I just love when the big kahunas still involve themselves in the community they cultivated so long ago. Cheers, Sam; the best of luck to you and the team at YC.
Re-reading this made me notice the overlap between the two posts. Most of the suggestions across both posts fall into a few common themes. I find having a shorter list of "keys to success" helps me keep them top of mind day to day. I see four main themes here across both posts:
1. Be internally driven. Gain energy by working on things you are excited about. Think independently. Don't get pushed around. Don't default to doing the same thing everyone else is doing. Don't chase status. Have almost too much self belief. You can only motivate yourself to work hard and sell your ideas to others if you genuinely believe in them and your motivation is internally driven.
2. Have clear goals. Have bold goals. Make them achievable by breaking them down by day, by week, by decade. Take advantage of compounding to make small daily accomplishments snowball to reach bold long term ambitions. Compounding works not just for financial wealth, but also for building knowledge, developing skills, relationship, and health. Taking new risks constantly will help you learn new things faster and speed up compounding in all domains. Try to create enough buffer to be able to take risks and experiment in all areas of your life.
3. Be focused and don't waste time on things that don't matter. Minimize cognitive load. Minimize personal burn rate. Being focused does not mean sacrificing exercise, eating well, and sleeping. Most people would gain by spending more time thinking about which critical priorities to focus on. Start by killing the most obvious bad uses of time like TV and twitter.
3. Work hard. Whether your goals are in business, family, fitness, or altruism, working hard at something that naturally excites you is not only easier than working half-heartedly on things you hate, but is also the only way to achieve your goals. Working hard goes beyond putting in hours - it also means being willful, pushing through rejection, being persistent to bend the world to your will. Being a doer not a talker is just the first step.
4. Surround yourself with smart ambitious people who may join your team, teach you something, energize you and give you ideas. Invest in relationships by putting others first: be quick to do favors, don't judge too quickly, be forgiving, do not burn bridges, pause to think before acting especially if you're angry, be nice to everyone including strangers.
These lists are always the same and never say anything new. Work hard, have goals, be focused, etc etc. No fucking shit. Everyone has heard this stuff X1000. The problem is, you can read the same shit again and again, but if you're not that way from the beginning, reading the same crap isn't suddenly going to change you.
Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change, no matter how many billionaires come along and say "hard luck chum, just work harder and set some goals."
I agree a tough background makes it a lot harder. But I don't think that takes away from the fact that people find these kinds lists helpful in moving forward from their starting point. I can think of a few famous examples of people who attribute their success partly to crafting and refining their own personal guidelines. Charlie Munger of Bershire Hathaway and his "mental models". Ray Dalio of Bridgewater documents the principles that helped him in a landmark book called Principles. Now I'm curious to look up people's backgrounds to see what successful people from tough backgrounds put in their lists.
> The problem is, you can read the same shit again and again, but if you're not that way from the beginning, reading the same crap isn't suddenly going to change you.
> Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change
I both wholeheartedly agree with the above statements, but not necessarily the intent they seem to have.
I came from an incredibly disadvantaged background - single parent household, below the federal poverty line my entire childhood, unstable household (moved 20+ times before I turned 18, and spent several years of my childhood technically homeless and couchsurfing). I was fully self-supportive by the time I turned 17.
While I've had a lot of missteps and baggage due to my childhood, I also owe my current success and drive to it. The same coping mechanisms I developed them have served me well in my professional career:
- My brother and sister used our circumstances to give up, whereas I used them as motivation to try harder to get the hell out.
- I developed a very pragmatic and flexible mental framework. Growing up with zero power in any situation and zero support to fall back on, I learned to pragmatically accept what is while simultaneously evaluating any potential leverage points to change what is. I became incredibly effective at identifying those leverage points, and mutually-beneficial ways to exploit[1] them.
- I didn't make waves, but I learned how to ride the ones around me in ways that didn't rock others' boats. Having no resources of my own, and in some cases being wholly reliant on the benevolence of others, I intimately learned the value of introducing as little friction as possible into situations.
- I became very aware of implicit assumptions around me, and the friction and potential hardships[2][3] created by them. I make a conscious effort to address assumptions explicitly, because of that.
- Being under chronic stress for my entire childhood, I have an incredibly high tolerance for high-stress situations and how to cope with them.
Not everything that came out of my childhood was positive, but I've been able to translate much of it directly into incredibly valuable and fairly unique capabilities in a professional context, and I've made a successful career using those as a foundation. It could be argued that I may have been more successful at this point in my life if I had started on better footing, but it could have also gone the other way if I had never had the impetus to develop the internal motivation and skills/abilities I have today.
[1] I don't mean exploit with any negative/malicious intent, but exploit as in "don't waste an opportunity".
[2] I was able to get accepted to Columbia, and qualified for a free ride due to both academic and financial reasons. I passed on it because even though the school and room/board was free, I wasn't sure how I'd handle the logistics costs of moving there, summers/holidays, incidentals, etc. Turns out there are resources for these types of needs, but I didn't know that at the time and their acceptance literature didn't address it at all.
[3] To this day, I have an intense aversion to birthdays. It's incredibly common to have kid's birthdays at places which have incidental expenses for participation or admittance, such as game centers or theme/water parks. And rarely do people make it explicit on the invite what those are and if those incidentals are covered as part of their event fee or expected to be paid by the person invited. For my daughter's birthday, I always ensure and state that all activities are covered, and also explicitly state that gifts are optional, won't be opened during the party, and that they please be anonymous if anyone chooses to provide one. For most people, neither one of those parts of the invite will be very meaningful. But for some people, simply stating that can be the difference between them declining the invite outright, accepting it and it being a hardship and causing undue stress/friction for them, or accepting it and enjoying themselves. The same sorts of scenarios exist both professionally and personally, and being cognizant of them can bring a lot of success in life.
The only point that I really disagree with is that money can buy freedom. Only enlightenment brings freedom and it can't be bought. Keep up the good work!
The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks.
Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible.
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.
What basic income will most likely do is send vast swaths of average people to entertainment and drugs. It's already happening, as social nets get bigger and wider.
This is a huge concern. I have known several people who, when they lose their seasonal jobs, coast on unemployment insurance until the very last minute, sometimes even going as far as welfare and couch surfing before a new job finds them (they won't go looking for it themselves).
All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...
Like you say, these stunted people already exist. They already do everything in their power to minimize their work time, including trying for disability or welfare. UBI won't create more of them, and it won't end the ones we have, but it may add stability to the working poor.
How do you know that UBI won't create more of them? It's a common refrain, like with legalization ("anyone who wants to smoke weed is already doing it"), and I know several people who didn't smoke before it became legal, and are now smoking regularly. It seems reasonable to think that UBI would enable some class of people who would otherwise exert themselves, to no longer bother.
Because there's already social safety nets those people can use. And yes, absolutely, there are probably going to be groups of people who are barely working now that will stop, but given there's already means to not work, I can't see this being a huge group, and really, this is an optimist / pessimist face-off, which is sad, because that's how we probably see the possible outcomes too. The only way we can know if it'll work or not is for someone to try it - which, thankfully, YC is.
Not sure if you've ever used those social safety nets, but they are not easy to qualify for and/or sign up for, so only the stubborn and/or desperate actually take advantage of them. There are also disincentives, like misinformation, run-arounds, and social shaming. From what I've heard, these reasons are exactly why UBI is a better strategy than those social safety nets--and why we can expect more people to take advantage of them.
The modern welfare state (post-1930) did create a huge number of these stunted people. UBI will create many more, and it'll be a generational compounding effect, as the stunting increases through generations and we develop familities where no ancestor has worked for 3+ generations.
Just reflect for a moment on how many of such stunted people existed in 1925, compared to today. Now apply that difference again a few more times, to a segment of the population with above-average fertility, and guess how many generations such a system can last.
If there were no stunted people, why did the welfare state get created? And do you have any evidence of this increase, or did it just codify the problem that already existed?
>>All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
Honestly, this says more about your need to judge those people, than those people themselves.
What is wrong with wanting nothing other than beer, weed, and video games? Seems like a nice, simple life. If it makes them happy, why does it make you sad?
Is it because your happiness is shackled by some utopian (or rather, dystopian) dream where everyone "realizes their full potential" or some such nonsense?
He just feels it's not his responsibility to enable it, and that the government forcing him to is violating his freedom of choice.
At least, that's one of the things that bothers me about it.
Civilized society is all about trading individual freedom for group stability, and perhaps UBI is on balance a good idea.
I'm not sure myself, but I tend to be skeptical of claims that "X will solve society's woes."
Giving people wealth doesn't change them, and it has really fouled up some places - look at what happened to Haiti after the earthquake when all the aid poured in. Local farms largely died out because they couldn't compete with free food, and as a result the country became less self-sustaining and wealthy.
So, yeah, I guess I have similar concerns for UBI.
My uncle is a perpetual slacker and alcoholic. Last winter he got frost bite on his feet so bad that they ended up amputating both of them. He couldn't be bothered to get up and stoke the fire.
It's all of our little brothers. It's an entire generation of lost souls spending their lives on World of Warcraft and Fortnite, feeling like they are accomplishing something by earning another loot crate. When fantasy becomes more compelling and stimulating than real life, it's no wonder.
In the past those people would have loitered around shops (remember when that was a thing), spent afternoons in fishing holes, or just gotten drunk all day, or spent all time reading low-brow fiction.
Escapism is a fact or life and there's not much evidence that people are doing it a substantially higher rate than before. Or, that escapism is actually any worse than being forced to work miserable jobs until you rot away.
Where are you living that social nets are getting bigger and wider? It seems to me that the modern idea, since the 1980s, has been to constantly cut them back.
There will be people that go to entertainment and drugs as well as people that take that money to add to society. The question is what the net effect is.
Basic income solves the problem of how to get spending money to consumers. This is an important problem. If consumers don't have spending money, then the economy won't function properly.
It is true that, in today's economy, we try to get spending money to consumers in other ways. Are these alternatives somehow more effective than basic income?
For example, should we be making up unnecessary work for people to do as an excuse to give them spending money? Should we be distorting the labor market by "creating jobs" or artificially boosting wages?
A big part of what a properly calibrated basic income does is that it allows the labor market to be efficient.
You're certainly right that we don't want people to become miserable blobs. That's not a happy life. But what's the best way to prevent this? Is it to withhold money from them and force them to work at unnecessary jobs? Or can we do better?
I also have a hard time buying that. Wouldn’t that mean that high tax countries with more welfare would be more probable to have big drug problems? E.g. Sweden does not have a bigger problem with drugs then the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevale... (and of course you are not saying that social welfare is the only parameter)
I think it can be balanced by the amount of UBI. UBI should just be enough to make sure no one goes hungry or has to sleep out in the cold. That, in addition to public health care and education and access to libraries and opportunities for self-growth. Anything more can and will be misused. Anything less makes it too risky for people to experiment and fail. At least that's the theory I have in my head. How exactly to determine this amount fairly? I don't know.
Even assuming you had any facts to base your assumption, why is that a bad thing? There is nothing holy about work, especially work for the enrichment of others.
I, an i suspect many people here, get paid handsomely to move bytes from one place to another and this funds either our ambitions or tastes. I think it's hard to argue that your general well paid tech employee is contributing to society moving bytes around appreciably more than a stoner chilling out on the couch.
It will probably do both. "There are people who will take risks that they otherwise wouldn't be able to with a basic income" and "there are people who will do nothing of value to anyone besides themselves if they have a choice in the matter" are not mutually exclusive.
I don't know why I couldn't upvote you but this absolutely. Also in India where there was universal basic income one of the positive side effect was that it reduced domestic violence as it gave financial freedom to women.
What most people don't understand is that UBI is not about giving free money. It's about giving the poorest of the poor a fighting chance to survive and shine in this unequal world.
Sure a certain percentage of the crowd will take advantage and be a "dole bludger" but these are persistent even in unemployment benefits schemes.
I know there's a lot of people for whom BI would help them do great things: I think this is a small minority that we in HN community are familiar with.
But I grew up in a bad neighborhood, and I know a lot of people, who wouldn't be so benevolent and wouldn't be using those funds in the way you imagine. I personally know people who would leech the system dry before they ever contributed anything meaningful anywhere.
> Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
Some would argue that is what builds character, and the grit to succeed. Not saying extreme poverty is “good” necessarily. Just that the jury is still out on whether or not humanity as a whole is better without suffering (specifically if it leads to a decline in the human race).
Universal basic income has been suggested and to some extent tested for thousands of years. None of succeeded, but the devil is in the details and perhaps soon the machines will take care of us.
For reference: I came from a poorer background (not extreme, but enough I noticed). I view it as my greatest strength, as it forced me to learn faster, specifically taught me the importance of relationships, community, hard work, determination.
Is there a way to build character and the grit to succeed without forcing people into extreme poverty?
Or a broader question is what do we want out of people? What values do we want them to have? What's the most efficient way to teach them those values? Poverty is pretty expensive. Is poverty so important to our society that it's worth paying the price?
"For example, sugar tastes sweet because we evolved in a world where calories were extremely scarce. Sex feels good because children are the continuation of humanity. Work seems important because, throughout much of history, we benefited from having more labor. But in modern times, we have artificial sweeteners, birth control, and hobbies."
How can we hack human society to take advantage of what we evolved to feel good about?
I can appreciate your intention, but unless you really believe that 10,000 monkeys can type the complete works of Shakespeare, the "big swings" you envision have to be informed by some level of education, morality, and social sensibility. Basic income alone is not the solution.
A basic income will only cause inflation if the amount is too high.
The problem is that the economy won't produce what consumers don't have the money to buy. So we need a way of getting sufficient spending money to consumers to activate the economy's full sustainable productive potential.
A properly calibrated basic income is exactly the amount that would get us there. It allows consumers to receive the full potential benefit of what the economy can provide for them.
Inflation occurs when the level of consumer spending outstrips production. If you set your basic income too high, then you'll get inflation until the level of consumer purchasing power falls back in line with the economy's productive capacity.
But the full benefits of the basic income are still there. The fact that we underwent a period of inflation doesn't change the fact that the economy would now be producing at its full potential for consumers.
The general price level in the economy is arbitrary. In the end, any price level is just a redenomination of any other price level. What's disruptive to the markets is when the price level changes. So the challenge is to figure out the level of basic income that's consistent with our current price level. This will allow us to transition into the smoothly.
We can't know the optimal amount of basic income ahead of time. It's also true that the economy's productive potential changes over time. So the only sensible way of determining the appropriate level of basic income is to continuously calibrate it algorithmically. You can know you've reached your optimal level of basic income when you get to a point where the central bank won't be able to keep prices stable if you increased it any further. In other words, we reach the limits of monetary tightening.
Depends where it comes from. If it's just printed by the government, yes. If it's taxed and redistributed then in theory no, but accounting for all the incentives that taxes create on both sides of the transaction is tricky and the result in most cases is "unintended consequences."
The idea that a tax will prevent inflation is an intuition that a lot of people have, but it's not correct. If your basic income is going to cause inflation, then a tax is not going to help. What matters is the level of consumer spending and the level of production that the consumer spending is chasing.
If you're curious, I've written a few blog posts about this:
Please do. I have read your work and it is great. Anytime I am struggling with my projects/ideas...I always go back to your work and start from the fundamentals...carefully reviewing my work to see where it could be improved and how to better satisfy the needs of my customers.
There's generally less great content on the idea/0 to 1 compared to the 1 to n stage imho. I've found work from Michael Seibel, Des Traynor, Mathilde Collin, Brian Balfour and others to have been very helpful for the super early product design thinking stage in addition to the playbook.
Hi Sam! Can you please interact a little more with the HN community? I realize you are an extremely busy man, but drop in here once in a while and just...comment. Not to stir up a hornet's nest, but weighing in on YC related news once in a while is not a bad idea.
Eg- No doubt you and YC are well intentioned people and the YC china move, while controversial, is probably a reasonable move. A private company can only do so much when dealing with powerful nations, and as long as you are not directly aiding governments do all the controversial things you hear about in the news, that's about as good as you can do.
What was disappointing for me was this: YC is starting to feel just like any other big company, staying silent on controversial topics and not responding to criticism. I'm starting to feel like there's a disconnect between the community and the company. This makes me sad since YC was pretty much the opposite of what big companies stand for.
My advice : be open, respond to criticism, don't stay silent on touchy topics, encourage YC staff to share their opinions on controversial topics. It's ok if your own staff don't agree with you, it's ok to agree to disagree. In short : don't become just another big company.
Please note that this comment was made in good faith and please remain respectful in the comments.
