Blowing Bubbles
Silicon Valley venture capital investors used to focus on startups which had at least one of the following:
- Team — which could pivot, or be acquihired off elsewhere if a venture hit the skids.
- Intellectual Property — which could be sold off elsewhere if a venture hit the skids.
- Buzz — implying that equity could be offloaded to other investors at a premium, which is the VC game in its purest sense.
Sometime between the pandemic and Trump 2.0, Andreessen Horowitz and other VCs in their close orbit appear to have concluded that they could blow off these requirements and rewrite the rules themselves. Instead, they’d simply pick a narrative and sell that as an investment vehicle. Back an idea with enough capital, pay off enough US Senators to neuter regulations, and someone will probably arrive at a close approximation, close enough to issue a press release about victory— so the thinking goes.
Unfortunately their timing was off. Silicon Valley at the time was flirting with sad fucking excuses for human beings as “philosophers” for its burgeoning far-right shift: Bostrom, Yudkowsky, Kurzweil, Goertzel, Bankman-Fried, MacAskill, Yarvin, and so on. Complete fuckwads, whom you wouldn’t let through the front door if you knew them. Best just to spit upon. Scum. These asshats “focused the lens” through which oh-so-many Sillycone Valley investors — people who talk big but by and large wouldn’t know a line of source code if it slapped them in the face — would come to evaluate technology and business opportunities.
Rolling forward a few years, you can bet hard cash on the fact that anyone who’s ever used the term “accelerationism” non-ironically is full of shit. Same goes for the terms “AGI”, “super-intelligence”, and frankly any usage of the term “AI” with a pronoun — as if it were a thing.
Because that’s the narrative on which SV power brokers and their cronies have bet so heavily: that “AI” is a thing, that they’ll own it, and that everyone else needs to kiss their ring in advance, thank you very much.
Artifical Intelligence is a practice. It concerns teams of people and machine collaborating to achieve capabilities together which individuals could not attain. Period. No pronouns. No superintelligences. No fucking AGI.
Granted, there are many, many AI startups which are substantive and on track to do well. There are startling capabilities within this space to be leveraged. Many incumbents have almost no idea of what’s about to hit them. However, typically, this isn’t where the big investments go.
Meanwhile there’s a load of fluff in AI, and collectively it’s doomed.
Big tech firms bet hard over two decades ago on using online marketing as their collective perpetuum mobile. In response to more recent SV vibes they’ve bet hard on flexing their online marketing muscle to proclaim their AI muscles, so they could stay in the game too.
Prior to the rise of OpenAI, Microsoft would’ve been lucky for its AI teams to get rated at #5 or #6 worldwide, compared with Google at the top. Thanks to MSFT’s trained monkey Altman, that all changed. Every time OpenAI makes some weird flex in media, execs at Alphabet scramble to respond. They fumble, almost by definition. Wall Street notices whenever Alphabet execs fumble. Then MSFT gets another boost in the market — system working as intended.
Meanwhile there’s a load of fluff. If you drive through San Francisco currently, advertisements at most of the bus stops ask, “Are you still hiring humans?” I would rephrase this as: “Are you still believing the nonsense coming from asshats and fuckwads?”
My other question is whether A16z will be able to unfuck themselves before the bubble of “Today’s AI” bursts?
TL;DR: if you want to know how I really feel about this, go watch some Olivia Tiedemann videos and notice her hand gestures.
PS: I’d be remiss not to add, Carole Cadwalladr was recently on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and said brilliantly what you really really need to hear:
Also check out more from Carole at https://the-citizens.com/ (subsequent to The Guardian’s takeover)
