https://ia601309.us.archive.org/20/items/historyDEEPWEB/The%...

This is a way different sentiment than “programmers aren’t needed anymore” - I’m just seeing ambition, motivation, and fun go up in lockstep.

I first heard this in November and slowly one by one it’s everyone whose opinion I respect.

FWIW the other popular topic is how abysmally stupid and limited these amazing tools continue to be, despite also being magic.

Oh and that none of us have gotten token maxxing to succeed, despite lots of trying.

My professional career has been 20 years of physical ai research and now industry. My dad insisted I take corporate accounting in undergrad.

It’s a skill I use every single day, double entry bookkeeping is one humanities great inventions and deeply related to conservation laws utility in various other areas. Could not have built my business without having gotten so into this Topic.

Google and Meta are ads businesses with a lot less surface area for such a mandate to have similar impact and, frankly, exciting projects people want to do.

Meanwhile they still have tons of cash so, why not, throw money at solving Atari or other shiny programs.

Also, for cultural reasons, there’s been a huge shift to expensive monolithic “moonshot programs” whose expenses need on-demand progress to justify and are simply slower and way less innovative.

3 passionate designers hiding deep inside Apple can side hustle up the key gestures that make multi touch baked enough to see a path to an iPhone - long before iPhone was any sort endgame direction they were being managed to.

Innovation thrives on lots of small teams mostly failing in the search for something worth doubling down on.

Googles et al have a new approach - aim for the moon, budget and staff for the moon, then burn cash while no one ever really polished up the fundamental enabling pieces in hindsight they needed to succeed

These techniques are the key unlocks to robustifying AI and creating certifiable trust in their behavior.

Starting with pre-deep neural network era stuff like LQR-RRT trees, to the hot topic today of contraction theory, and control barrier certificates in autonomous vehicles

Actually your comment is probably more correct - adds a whole step to move the wallet. Misaligned incentives and mismanagement are probably more equal across public/private than we like to believe

It’s exceptional that people centrally organized a huge amount of effort and resources towards something imagined by countless humans since prehistory, was far from being a sure thing, had no possibility of revenue and only indirect value, planned and executed a full decade toward a single objective, and succeeded in a single moment shared by almost everyone with a television.

Arpanet, the transcontinental railroad, the pyramids…amazing still but lacked the 0 to 1 all at once factor. Starship is inspiring and also not a moonshot.

This was how the internet was created, darpa stitched together dozens of performers to get the key ingredients (eg bbn gateways, academic subnets, experimental applications, protocol research.

They even led the last ditch marketing Hail Mary after years of no-one caring about the program besides the zillions of engineers from all around building it by organizing a press day in a hotel ballroom for a demo day.

As a taxpayer I’d strongly support 5B/.1% of the fed budget for a few years just to learn what happens in the attempt.

At the least, without darpa the whole Bay Area machine would not exist today, so it’s at least necessary if not sufficient.

Not just darpa but nih, nsf, doe, onr, arl, nasa, and the national labs are definitively necessary causal dependencies on of every company and industry driving US national pride and all of the most valuable companies.

Even if the firm never takes a grant, their talent, supply chain, and component pipelines all depend on these grantor agencies thoughtfully allocating taxpayer capital at the national level.