similar to how Anthropic released Claude 4 shortly after the Sam & Jony announcement.
it's super competitive, which should be good for innovation, but there's also significant incentive to use PR tactics to sell that innovation for much more than it's worth.
Sam's comments about how we're super close to AGI fall flatter-than-ever, after the latest model releases (from all players) and the Apple paper confirming what everybody already knew.
> Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point
This is super idealized. How many layoffs have been going on in startup land recently?
While I agree it's very idealized, a lot of those startups probably are legitimately financially threatened in the immediate term in a way that Meta most certainly isn't.
You’ve identified the problem with many Bayesian approaches, not just this one. Without sufficient data to make the probabilities accurate, it just shifts the uncertainty to the process of choosing probabilities.
I disagree. The question at hand is how we should update our beliefs in response to the evidence of Zuck making the statement. Given the priors of P(M|R) and P(M|~R), it tells us that we shouldn't really update. Different priors would lead to a different update.
Sometimes this sort of thing happens where our priors don't allow for a belief update in response to evidence. For example, does me writing this comment change your best guess as to whether my favorite color is blue? That depends on what you think of P(favorite color blue | comment) and P(favorite color blue | ~comment). Both of those are probably the same right? If so, my comment doesn't allow you to update.
Professor Quirrell looked at Harry. "Mr. Potter," he said solemnly, with only a slight grin, "a word of advice. There is such a thing as a performance which is too perfect. Real people who have just been beaten and humiliated for fifteen minutes do not stand up and graciously forgive their enemies. It is the sort of thing you do when you're trying to convince everyone you're not Dark, not -"
"I can't believe this! You can't have every possible observation confirm your theory! "
"And that was a trifle too much indignation."
"What on Earth do I have to do to convince you? "
"To convince me that you harbor no ambitions of becoming a Dark Lord?" said Professor Quirrell, now looking outright amused. "I suppose you could just raise your right hand."
"What?" Harry said blankly. "But I can raise my right hand whether or not I -" Harry stopped, feeling rather stupid.
"Indeed," said Professor Quirrell. "You can just as easily do it either way. There is nothing you can do to convince me because I would know that was exactly what you were trying to do. And if we are to be even more precise, then while I suppose it is barely possible that perfectly good people exist even though I have never met one, it is nonetheless improbable that someone would be beaten for fifteen minutes and then stand up and feel a great surge of kindly forgiveness for his attackers. On the other hand it is less improbable that a young child would imagine this as the role to play in order to convince his teacher and classmates that he is not the next Dark Lord. The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, Mr. Potter, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable."
Harry blinked. He'd just had the dichotomy between the representativeness heuristic and the Bayesian definition of evidence explained to him by a wizard.
> Have you ever laid someone off or fired them? Was it so easy?
I've heard this sentiment from people who have laid those off and it always falls flat to me.
Laying off 1 or 100 people compared to being laid off - especially when the person doing the firing, usually a Director or above, is making 3-4x at least what the line employees are - is like comparing pricking your finger with a needle to cutting it off with a dull knife.
It should be difficult if you're not a sociopath, but they're so incomparable it's not even a statement worth making or considering.
I’m not arguing that laying people off is nearly as hard as getting laid off.
I’m arguing against the idea that if you’re a manager or have money, that moments like this are easy or that there’s no empathy. i’m not saying that anyone should feel bad for directors, CEOs, or whoever, but they shouldn’t paint a ridiculous straw man either.
You could even argue that in Zuck’s position, money is a non-factor. He has more than enough money. What he doesn’t have is a beloved and future-proof company, and these layoffs only push him further from that.
Billionaires are that because they have exploited the surplus value of their underlings. To say that they “care” about them is clearly a contradiction.
To be sure, laying off employees would be not be easy. Imagine if these were people you had lunch with, chatted with in the office every day, knew their husbands, wives....
Do you think Zuck was that close with any of the 11,000 people who were laid off?
If it was a small startup (been there done that) then yeah, when you see people day-to-day, and get to know them and their lives outside of work? Really hard to fire people, knowing how it will affect the other people in their lives.
A multi-national, multi-billion dollar company with 80,000+ employees? I'm not so sure.
it's super competitive, which should be good for innovation, but there's also significant incentive to use PR tactics to sell that innovation for much more than it's worth.
Sam's comments about how we're super close to AGI fall flatter-than-ever, after the latest model releases (from all players) and the Apple paper confirming what everybody already knew.