Posted by spenvo 7/1/2025
He just mixed up who the "Missionaries" and who the "Mercenaries" were.
When you hear this reiterated by employees, who actually believe it, then it's sad. Obviously not in this situation, but I've actually heard this from people. Some of them were even pros. "There is no fool like an educated fool."
People are now shocked when a company cuts a loved product or their boss fires them when someone cheaper comes along.
https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-...
HN Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24602956
This has always applied to tech workers.
Anyone who has worked at OpenAI or is currently working there has lost all credibility in my eyes. When their dear leader, Sam was "fired", they staged a coup to save their paychecks.
These people are just out there to may a buck and scam people with "AGI" and now that there is plenty of competition and superior models, I'm hearing crickets from them.
All they had going for them was first to market and they managed to damage the brand, lose their top talent, deliver a subpar product and convert a nonprofit into for profit.
Real Madrid Transfers Cristiano Ronaldo: $80M transfer (2009), $15M/year. Gareth Bale: $120M transfer (2013), $17M/year. Kylian Mbappé: $115M bonus (2024), $36M/year. Strategy: Big fees and wages for “Galacticos” to dominate.
For many investors the product is the hype.
You sell it to people who don't want to pay other people while getting the same productivity.
Wonder if that applies here.
However, skilling people up on specialized skill sets in a reasonable time frame requires having people around to teach them. And those people need to know not just the skills, but how to teach them well. And it takes time away from those people doing the job, so that approach will slow development in the short run.
But the companies are trying.
you are on the right, but only for companies investing for the long term
It is definitely worth spending a couple hundred million to make your stock price go up tens of billions for several months.
Presumably not all of that hundreds of millions in investment will be waste, too.
Meta knows they have close to a 0% chance of overtaking ChatGPT or Gemini.
If the person next to you gets paid 20x more than you, you might be a bit unhappy when they are not 20x more helpful.
Meta doesn’t really have a product unless you count the awful “Meta AI” that is baked into their apps. Unless these acquisitions manifest in frontier models getting open sourced, it feels like a gigantic brain drain.