I think it's a bit different - we're in an era where computing has essentially plateaued while there is still a lot of capital sloshing around the market that is addicted to three decades of tech highs and trying to find the next "big thing." AI comes up, promising to revolutionize everything, and that money is flooding the market with everyone trying to get a piece of it. Of course, there's only finite amount of capital even the most promising AI companies can absorb, so a lot of that money flows to riskier, less capable firms that just slap AI on their products. We'll see a culling just because many of those will inevitably collapse and the dumb money will retreat until the market surges again.

They may not tag you so that the public can see, but that doesn't mean Meta couldn't use any uploaded data for "training" or "R&D" purposes.

Given Meta's style, they'll one day turn on facial recognition for all users leveraging their full database of all tagged imagery they've gathered throughout their history (that they claimed they deleted). Then they'll say oops, my bad, then hide behind their lawyers.

This is one of those issues I struggle a bit with. There's a whole discussion on if we're wasting tremendous amounts of potential food by cutting off the choice parts and throwing away the rest. So we create things like chicken nuggets to maximize the usage of each chicken we slaughter. You can probably make those nuggets in a healthier way, which is a good discussion to have, but it doesn't make sense to just throw out concepts like the chicken nugget.

Kind of like Google with it's "Don't be evil" motto. Great in theory. You can resist for a while. However, it inevitably falls apart whether they are public or private. The masses have shown over and over again that they prefer free with ads to subscriptions. Even if they can make subscriptions work, the inevitable growth in costs will drive them to subscriptions with ads that we see streaming services hawking today. It is in the impossible position of resisting three powerful forces: the greed of corporate leaderships, the insatiable demands for returns from shareholders, and a consumer base that is unwilling to pay the real cost for services received.

I would be really worried about SpaceX's core business. If Gwynne Shotwell and her leadership team now have to spend precious resources and attention to put AI servers or just deal with the chaos of the entire AI market as a whole, it could really harm their efforts on the space side on very complex efforts like Starship, Starlink, going to the moon, etc.

Agreed. Seeing the eye-watering returns that some of the big, blue chip players made, you've got a lot of people chasing after them. Problem is, the blue chip guys are able to get the best deals, and these smaller ones are having to rely upon riskier opportunities. No surprise them that they thus have more difficulty meeting their returns. I shed no tears - risk is an inherent part of capitalism. They made a risky bet with this midsized firms, so if, surprise, they don't make their money, then it's on them.

This is the real truth, the one that is unspoken. The reason the Internet is what it is today is because it shifted from the hobby of a close knit group of academics to the entire breadth of humanity, for better or worse. The masses aren't interested in the grand, philosophical vision those academics had - rather they seek the same things they search for in real life: money, influence, power, escape, entertainment, gratification, community. Internet content reflects that. Notably, the Internet enables marginalized groups that society ignores or actively suppresses to come together and mobilize. It's not all bad - niche hobbies, oppressed minorities could find a voice. Yet it also enables other extremists to mobilize and create an outsized voice. It feeds extremism in all societies.

Great, we're no longer just the product. Now we're paying to be the product!

A different perspective is that the high prices being paid by US consumers is effectively subsidizing sales overseas where governments negotiate aggressively. If the US began to seriously negotiate as these foreign governments did, then we'd probably see the overall vaccine prices across the rest of the globe rise.

There is a bit of a nuance here that's best captured by industry coverage with a less click-baity headline ("Boeing Warned Of MD-11 Part-Failure Risk In 2011, NTSB Finds"):

This has broadly been my frustration with US discussions on AGI. The US is so focused on the hypothetical threat of AGI, saying that we need to take drastic actions, without really explaining how we're going to get to AGI in the five to seven year time frames they claim. I want to hear them out, maybe even give them the benefit of the doubt, but the jump from the LLM's we're dealing with today to a full blown AGI is theoretically still so massive, it's hard to take the warning seriously without some explanation of why I should take their timelines seriously.

What makes this even more frustrating is that while Silicon Valley goes in circles around the hypothetical AGI threat, China is more tightly focused on how to apply LLM's and maximize their value / reduce risks to all aspects of society. I feel like they're going to jump ahead in actual LLM implementation.

In Elon's mind, only he is brilliant enough to protect us from AGI. Therefore, only he should be allowed to lead humanity on its course to pursuing AI.

This is just asking for an American with Disabilities Act (ADA) lawsuit. However, maybe that's what Trump wants - an opportunity to take ADA to court and chip away at what has been a pretty ironclad set of protections in the US. Like many other things, it probably is something his MAGA supporters who benefit from ADA don't understand... until its too late.