Again, this isn't anything new.

With respect to SpaceX / Tesla Musk has always been a charlatan at varying levels. He sold FSD for over a decade claiming: next year the entire time. He also made similar claims with DOGE. If accountability mattered Musk wouldn't be where he is today, yet here we are. But, I can't wait for our space data centers that surround our planet with more garbage!

But beyond Musk I don't think many people actually pay any attention how bleak things look on the credit side in the US [0]. Again, if you experienced 2008, the dot com bubble or both - well, I don't think this impending train wreck is going to be any less painful.

[0] https://chartive.org/visualizations/us-federal-debt-percent-...

Ahhh, yes this trope. You do understand their target market, right? There are people that grow up in unfortunate circumstances that live through those lyrics regardless of these music-led influencers you speak of. People relate to those lyrics, it's part of their world view and so, yes, they're being marketed to, quite simply.

Also, why stop here? Let's ban all books that encroach on this topic! Because we all know games, books and music yield nothing but the 80% of all the lyrics you consume. /s (<--- because who knows given the absurdity here)

Also, Meta does fund these initiatives. They choose who to give money to in these programs. You'd think that money being paid would also mean a higher level of scrutiny. I'm really curious how these conversations play out internal to Meta. Does everyone just pretend this isn't an issue? Seems like there's a lot of great book material that will be dropped in the coming decades as these efforts wear on and break people.

We know that the Murdoch empire knows they are losing ground as well - which is why they need to acquire a platform like Roku [0]. But honestly the legacy of Murdoch may end up closer aligned to Succession than the empire that Zuck has under his finger. Also Zuckerberg has global influence that's unrivaled, Murdoch has contributed all of his efforts to erosion within, mostly, NAM.

TL;DR - Zuck is worth 9-10x more than Murdoch ($211B vs $21B) and reaches 20-30x more people (3.6B vs 3M) on the daily. A 20% drawdown of Meta swallows TWO Murdoch empires with a hell of a lot of spare change.

[0] https://theankler.com/lachlan-murdochs-fox-roku-surprise-and...

Zuckerberg deserves all of the negative attention he draws, and I'd argue that his spotlight is his own doing. He, individually, could choose to do good at the global level. He chooses not to. That, to me, means that your finger pointing is inverted. "Legacy media" may have had that level of influence in the past but properties like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now hold those cards. One can only hope Zuckerberg ends up being displaced in the same way.

Also Cyberstarts exits, especially for those working in their startups, have been rather shitty. Clearly they've honed in on squeezing every last penny and screwing over anyone who put in the work. I won't name names but post-BH this week I was talking to a person who is working for a Cyberstarts backed company that just got acquired. They were telling me the company was sold off for less than outstanding debt by $1M so their options were under water, yet the CEO pocketed >$10M. Also they mentioned that employees were only given short term contracts on the buyout and that they had to "find jobs" within 6 months in the acquiring org which led to his next statement that they were still selling the product on the public market but had no intention of continuing to support it after the code they wanted was migrated to a much larger platform (forced sell into this platform is the idea, not unique to the acquirer - this is happening a lot). I've seen and heard about a bunch of these startups backed by Cyberstarts that all have very similar exits and they continue to get more brazen in hosing lower level employees in the sell off. Israeli startups are often toxic anyway, but this has added an entirely new facet of enshittification on the exit.

Regardless, it's a scam fund built on sand. Sure, I am following this as everyone else is and my comment is rooted in the ignorance surrounding all of the cyclical financial engineering in broad daylight. This truly stems from the AI psychosis I reference and many industry stalwarts are pointing the finger in this direction as well.

But I truly love your jab at the end, very classy. Yes, I am the psychotic one for thinking that all of the companies targeted in this fund are built on AI revenues that include a huge percentage of funds that they themselves have propped up via investments is rather telling. But hey, this is the world we live in: it's easier to lie and stand with the masses.

I just recommended an N5 Air [0] to a friend because it's got a powerful CPU, can expand to 96GB of RAM, has a great mix of NVME and HDD and has a PCI slot they can run an Intel A310 in for local transcode. It's the perfect Proxmox host to run everything they'd want to do including local services but also fault tolerant storage for a reasonable price.

[0] https://youtu.be/y8WFoV4ZSTg

Anyone who's done any amount of investment can see this through the lens of history and I'm right there with you. This is the Lehman Brothers stage of the game and SA could be that "one". But Bro, we're still up 80%! - even WSB isn't filled with this level of ignorance.

The scary part very few are talking about is that every compute device is Turing complete. So everything from the phone in your pocket to a DGX Spark is a threat to national security now since, technically, every device can run any model (how well is not a question of concern when you start to argue hardware should be gated just the same as Dario likes to gate models). I mean, along these lines of thinking Linux should not be available to the masses! What if someone runs some code that's not approved by the benevolent dictator for life, Dario? People will say: that can't happen, but the reality is it already is. If everyone has reasonable access to compute to run models that are mostly capable comparative to burning Anthropic tokens, why wouldn't they? It's risk reduction and price protection. Yet we can't buy those systems because of future production already being purchased by these organizations.

But back to the models themselves... We played this game with Metasploit back in the day: many who had no clue claimed exploit tools should be regulated and only available for use by those blessed, illegal elsewhere (I believe the closest this got was the Wassenaar delegation in the US, but only through collateral inclusion of "cyber weapons "). Except in that timeframe the authors of these tools weren't advocating for protection. Today the world is fine, systems improved because of security FOSS tooling. The same thing will happen with LLMs. Unless, that is, Dario gets his way. I'm not a fan of Altman but I think he's standing back watching this play out knowing what Dario is doing: either he succeeds and OAI benefits or Dario ends up the Chicken Little of AI and Anthropic fails to launch (their IPO).

The reality is Dario is only doing this because this is a real risk to his business. China's constraints in building competitively have given them an advantage: they are doing more with less. And if you think that their distilling from US models was in any way anti-competitive or illegal, then I guess maybe "deal with it", much akin to Anthropic, Google and OAI's response around taking the (copyright) content in the first place with no repercussions.

People who don't work in the AI bubble don't care at all about any of these people. They could all be gone overnight and the world would continue to innovate, probably in a much more productive manner, without them.