Tay any% speedrun
although I suppose “only one day after launch” doesn’t break the record:
It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch.
but it’s great that the billionaire owner of the LA Times is trying. this sort of innovation is why billionaires like him are so important.
a salary that guarantees $1 million a year post-tax
to keep the mind-boggling numbers in perspective:
you’re paid $1 million/year post-tax, like you said.
and say you have no expenses to speak of - you take all your meals in the Google cafeteria, take the Google shuttle to work, and live with your parents or in some other form of housing that doesn’t cost you anything. this means you can put that entire $1 million/year into a savings account.
even in that contrived scenario, you would need to work 1000 years to accumulate one billion dollars.
at which point, you would have 1/145th of Sergey Brin’s current wealth. if you wanted to match it, you would need to work 145,000 years.
here is the original source of the article, published on a site called Futurism: https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value
it got syndicated by Yahoo News because Yahoo does a ton of that in a increasingly desperate attempt to be relevant
judging by the “more top stories” on Futurism’s home page right now, they lean pretty heavily on clickbait:
Trump White House Tells Elon He’s Stepped Over the Line
Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI Value
Shark Steals Camera, Capturing Amazing Footage From Inside Its Mighty Jaws
here is the primary source that the article is based on: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella
there’s a transcript that I suspect is almost certainly AI-generated, so some of these quotes may not be completely accurate:
Satya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. So just in a second, we’re going to get to the two breakthroughs that Microsoft has just made. And congratulations, same day in nature. Majorana Zero chip, which we have in front of us right here, and also the world human action models.
right off the bat, we have the context that this is a friendly interview for Nadella to promote some new “breakthroughs” that Microsoft has. this may be explicit spon-con or just “regular” access journalism, it’s hard to say.
around 15 minutes in, the host asks:
You recently reported that your yearly revenue from AI is $13 billion. But if you look at your year-on-year growth on that, in like four years, it’ll be 10x that. You’ll have $130 billion in revenue from AI if the trend continues. If it does, what do you anticipate… we’re doing with all that intelligence?
Like this industrial scale use, is it going to be like through office? Is it going to be you deploying it for others to host? Is it going to be, you got to have the AGIs to have 130 billion in revenue? What does it look like?
and Nadella responds:
Yeah. I see the way I come at it, Dworkish, is it’s a great question because at some level, if you’re going to have this sort of explosion, abundance, whatever commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth, right? Before I get to what Microsoft’s sort of revenue will look like, I mean, there’s only one governor in all of this, right? Which is, this is where a little bit of, we get ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype, which is, hey, you know what? Let’s first see if, let’s say develop, I mean, like, remember, like, the developed world is what? 2% growth, and if you adjust for inflation, it’s zero? That, like, so in 2025, as we sit here, I’m not an economist. At least I look at it and say, man, we have a real growth challenge. So the first thing that we all have to do is let, and when we say, oh, this is like the industrial revolution, blah, blah, blah. Oh, let’s have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10%. 7%, developed world, inflation adjusted, growing at 5%. That’s the real marker, right? So it’s not just, it can’t just be supply side, right? It has to be, in fact, that’s the thing, right?
I think there’s a lot of people are writing about it. I’m glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly, productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate.
When that happens, We’ll be fine as an industry. But that’s, to me, the moment, right? So it costs self-claiming some AGI milestone. That’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is, is the world growing at 10%.
that word salad is a lot of things, but I don’t think it lives up to the “generating basically no value” hype that Futurism tried to give it.
also, I like that the transcript includes the seamless ad transition…which is of course for an AI product:
A quick word from our sponsor, Scale AI. Publicly available data is running out, so major labs like Meta and Google DeepMind and OpenAI all partner with Scale to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Through Scale’s data foundry, major labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities.
As AI races forward, we must also strengthen human sovereignty. SCALE’s research team, SEAL, provides practical AI safety frameworks, evaluates frontier AI system safety via public leaderboards, and creates foundations for integrating advanced AI into society. Most recently, in collaboration with the Center for AI Safety, SCALE published Humanity’s Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark for evaluating AI systems’ expert level knowledge and reasoning across a wide range of fields. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer and you want to learn more about how SCALE’s data foundry and research team can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities, go to scale.com slash Dwarkesh.
did these fucking dweebs seriously name their AI research team the “SEAL team”?
Bloomberg reports that “Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms,” per an HP executive.
congrats to HP on the launch of their new “you thought inkjet printers were shitty now? hold my aquifer and watch this” division.
but also:
HP is buying Humane’s CosmOS, bringing on Humane technical staff, and will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, Humane says in its press release.
this is a relatively cheap way for HP to set itself up as an AI patent troll and extract rent from other companies that are trying to do AI-related bullshit. (from 2017: Stupid Patent of the Month: HP Patents Reminder Messages)
I fear I’ve become something of an accelerationist in the past few days…
yeah, go ahead and pass this, you tech-illiterate xenophobic fucks.
we need to divide and conquer the fascist coalition. make them hate each other. make them consumed by infighting. give them more “oh I didn’t realize there would be negative consequences that affected me personally” moments.
there’s a whole lot of Silicon Valley techbro types who are on board with Musk and Trump because they think it’s all lower taxes, less regulations for their startups, and less “wokeness”. go ahead, pass a law that makes it a federal crime for them to click a GitHub download link. make it so that every Hacker News thread about AI is filled with American engineers bemoaning that they’re legally prohibited from keeping up with the state-of-the-art. make their startups uncompetitive because they’re required by law to pay inflated prices to subsidize OpenAI and other “American-made” plagiarism machines.
there seems to be a pretty strong sentiment that TikTok users are all idiots (especially compared to us incredibly smart, sophisticated, and attractive Fediverse users) and therefore they deserve whatever happens to them.
it reminds me of the predictable response every time Florida gets hit by a hurricane, or Texas by a snowstorm, or whatever, and a bunch of liberals come out of the woodwork with the same tired old “they live in a red state, fuck em, I don’t care what happens to them”.
Its pure speculation but
you know you can just…stop typing after that, right?
i suspect china may have purposely pushed for the tiktok is spyware narrative and fueled the china bad bandwagon themselves.
you’re making the same racist assumption that underlies the TikTok ban itself - that Chinese people are inherently nefarious, untrustworthy, always hatching schemes and plots and subterfuge.
the US does not need to be “tricked” into passing laws that are rooted in anti-Chinese bigotry. it’s basically a national pastime.
It’s like they made their stores as hostile as possible to shop in.
I saw a tweet that called it a “weird deodorant museum” and that phrase is now permanently etched into my brain. it’s such a perfect description, similar to “private taxi for your burrito” for Doordash etc.
the only place that consistently has my medication
is there a Costco near where you live? if so, you might give their pharmacy a try (you don’t need to pay for a Costco membership if all you’re doing is getting a prescription)
I had similar challenges finding a pharmacy that consistently has my ADHD medication in stock. a few months ago I tried Costco based on a recommendation from my doctor, so far they’ve been able to fill my prescription every month no problem.
me sowing (signing a bill into law and bragging about its bipartisan support): haha fuck yeah!
me reaping (hearing that the Supreme Court has ruled 9-0 to uphold the law that I signed): well this fucking sucks. what the fuck.
there’s always fierce competition in the category of Dumbest Own-Goal by a Democrat…but here comes President “only mostly dead…still slightly alive” Biden with a last-minute buzzerbeater and…MUH GAWD HE’S DONE IT!
tapping the “there are no good billionaires” sign
remember when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, slapped “Democracy dies in darkness” on the masthead, and a bunch of MSNBC-brained liberals thought it was going to be the newspaper that led the resistance against Trump?
I just woke up from a years-long coma. could someone tell me how that worked out?
And you think Xiaohongshu is run by the Chinese workers?
oh yes daddy, harder. shove those words right into my mouth.
And I’m pretty sure that’s the approach that lawmakers have taken with this
well, sometimes…I linked in this comment to some statements made by the Republican congressman who sponsored the original bill. he was pretty clear that he wanted the ban because he thinks TikTok is pushing propaganda, not just from the Chinese, but the Chinese Communist Party (which has been a long-standing right-wing bogeyman - that congressman was even the chair of the “House Select Committee on the CCP”)
I believe that’s the primary angle they’ve taken to get around First Amendment concerns.
this is true, in the same way that Trump in his first campaign promised a “Muslim ban” and then when they tried to actually implement it they realized they needed to frame it as a “travel ban…applying to countries that happen to have a lot of Muslims…oh and also North Korea because look at us, we’re definitely not discriminating against people based solely on religion”
everyone (except the right-wing hacks on the Supreme Court) saw through the “travel ban” facade pretty easily. it’s been disappointing to see how many people uncritically repeat “well, there’s a data privacy angle to it too…” as if it’s a legitimate justification and not just another facade.
I’ve been very cynical about the TikTok ban, and assumed people would work around it by sideloading the APK on Android phones, after it was removed from the app stores (which, as I detailed in this comment, could theoretically get random users who share the APK with friends prosecuted by the federal government and charged with a $5000 per user fine)
but this is exceeding my wildest expectations
“oh, but it’s full of Chinese propaganda!!!” people will whine. cool. don’t care. Twitter and Facebook are full of American propaganda, no one seems to be falling over themselves to ban those apps from app stores.
if propaganda is the concern, have schools teach critical thinking and how to recognize propaganda techniques. they won’t do that, of course, because they want people to be susceptible to American propaganda.
haha class solidarity go brrr. the average American worker has more in common with the average Chinese worker than they do with an American oligarch. all of the American propaganda about how Chinese people are inherently untrustworthy and nefarious is gonna fall apart as people interact with actual Chinese people and realize “oh they’re pretty much just like me, other than the language barrier”.
and TikTok-style shortform video is very nearly the ideal medium for surmounting that language barrier. it was already commonplace to have captions in TikTok videos. start captioning videos on RedNote in both English and Chinese and bang, language differences don’t matter nearly as much anymore.
“tiktok” does not appear to me to be a viewpoint
seriously? have you not paid attention to any of the arguments in favor of the ban that boil down to “it’s pushing evil Chinese Communist propaganda into the minds of our precious children”?
here’s the original bill - H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
it was introduced by Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin).
here’s a tweet of his from March:
“This is my message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users. America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States.” - Rep. Gallagher
and from November 2023, in a Fox News appearance:
Rep. Gallagher on why it’s critical to ban or force a sale of TikTok:
“It would be national self-suicide to allow the dominant media platform in America to be controlled, or at least be influenced by, the Chinese Communist Party.”
the advocates for the ban have been very clear, from the start, that they believe TikTok has a viewpoint - specifically that it’s controlled or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. and they want to discriminate against that viewpoint.
id say you have a stronger argument than viewpoint discrimination by saying it violates the first ammendment of the users of tiktok, personally, though the courts might disagree.
have you read the bill? the actual law, not news articles or summaries of it?
I linked it in this comment. go read it, it’s short, and not terrible as far as legalese goes.
the gist of it is that the law makes it illegal to run an app store (or anything that looks like an app store) that offers downloads of the TikTok app.
so the two big obvious targets of the law are Apple and Google…but it applies equally to everyone. F-Droid could violate it, in theory, by hosting the APK for download through their servers.
or for example, say the ban took effect, and TikTok gets removed from app stores. some tech-savvy high school kid knows how to copy the APK from their Android phone before it gets deleted, and shows their friends how to sideload it onto their phones.
then a bunch of other people ask for it too, so this kid uploads it to some filesharing service, passes around the link, and eventually it gets around to 100 other classmates.
that high school kid has violated the TikTok ban. the federal government can levy a fine against them of half a million dollars ($5,000 per user who downloaded it)
does that satisfy your desire to have the ban infringe on the free speech of “real” people, and not just Apple and Google?
tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use
but again - nothing about that is unique to TikTok.
do you think the federal government should force Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app, because of the risk that Elon Musk might use it to spy on politicians to get leverage for the 2026 midterms?
or, since Musk has said he’s starting to meddle in European politics as well - should the EU require Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app on European soil, out of a similar fear that the Twitter app could be used as spyware?
beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda.
of the 3 apps that I mentioned - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter - aren’t all 3 of them “poisoning our society with propaganda”?
why is TikTok singled out for the ban, do you think?
does it have anything to do with the long-standing right-wing grievance and fear and distrust towards Ghyna (or the “ChiComs”, if you prefer the pre-Trump right-wing nomenclature)?
because as far as I can tell, every argument about this ends up boiling down to “sure, lots of apps do it…but it’s uniquely bad when an app written by Chinese people does it”
you arent responding to their point about framing this as a 1st ammendment issue being problematic.
I’ve posted previously about why “the federal government can require Apple and Google to remove apps it doesn’t like, and that has nothing to do with free speech” is a laughable position. I didn’t feel like rehashing it here.
the platform’s collection of user data
this “oh banning TikTok is good because TikTok collects a bunch of user data” talking point has hoodwinked a whole lot of tech-savvy, generally-left-of-center people who really should know better.
thought experiment: I go out and buy a brand-new phone. Apple or Android, it doesn’t matter.
I install some apps. let’s say TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.
all of those apps use the platform APIs published by Apple or Google respectively.
all of them are equally capable of collecting user data.
TikTok is not unique or special in any way when it comes to data harvesting.
oh, except TikTok is owned by Ghyna, and everyone knows that Ghyna is evil and scary. surely that makes it different, right? US-based companies can harvest our data all they want, and sure maybe an EU-based company too. but Ghyna harvesting our data? that’s a bridge too far!
and that’s why we need to ban companies owned by Ghyna from harvesting our data!
here’s the problem with that. I install another app. I don’t like the stock Weather app that comes with my phone, so I install Totally Trustworthy Weather from a developer named Absolutely Not Spyware LLC.
that weather app needs location permissions, obviously. and network access. and to be allowed to run in the background constantly.
because it’s given permissions to run in the background, there’s a decent chance the weather app can actually collect more info about me than TikTok/Facebook/Twitter/etc.
but, why would a weather app collect data like that? what’s it going to do with it? it’s just a weather app, surely it doesn’t care, right?
wrong - it’s going to sell all the data it collects on me to a data broker.
(read Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer if you’re skeptical of how much money is thrown around in order to collect data of this sort)
if those nefarious people in Ghyna want data about you…they’ll just buy it from a data broker, the same way everyone else (including the FBI) does.
if Congress had passed some sort of GDPR-ish law, that applied across the board to all forms of data harvesting, I’d be all in favor of it. but obviously they’re never going to do that.
instead, what started out in 2020 as a “Ghyna bad” policy from Trump now has bipartisan support and people on the left defending it on data privacy grounds. we live in the stupidest goddamn timeline.
I’ve been using Kagi for ~2 months, after a friend gave me a similar invite code. this news from Google affirmed my decision to pay for Kagi once the 3-month trial is over, instead of going back to Google.