Item — HN Reader

These "talent wars" are overblown and a result of money having nowhere else to go. People are banking on AI and robotics for human progress to take off and that's just a result of all other ventures fizzling out with this left for capital to migrate to.

If you talked to any of these folks worth billions they arent particularly smart, their ideas not really interesting. it took us a few years to go from gpt-3 to deepseek v3 and then another few years to go from sonnet 4 to kimi k2, both being open source models on way lower funding. This hints at a deeper problem than what "hypercapitalism" suggests. In fact, it suggests that capital distribution as of its current state is highly inefficient and we are simply funding the wrong people.

Smart AI talent aren't going to out there constantly trying to get funding or the best deals. They would want to work. Capital is getting too used to not doing the ground work to seek them out. Capital needs to be more tech savvy.

VCs and corporate development teams don't actually understand the technology deeply enough to identify who's doing the important work.

2 comments

I wonder at what point this becomes like guaranteed salaries in sports, like prominent NBA players, where you work hard to get the salary. And then once you've made it, you are basically done, and it's hard to get up and motivate yourself. You've got acolytes and groupies distracting you, you're flush with cash without ever having really shipped anything or made any money. You're busy giving TED talks...

At that point, are you the 18-year-old phenom who got the big payday and sort of went downhill from there?

I imagine the biggest winners will be the ones who were doubted, not believed in, and had to fight to build real, profitable companies that become the next trillion-dollar companies.

Not that it would be bad to be Mark Cuban, but Mark Cuban is not Jeff Bezos.

And for posterity, I respect Mark Cuban. It's just that his exit came at a time when he was fortunate, as he got his money without having to go all the way through to the end.

I think one of the main issue is that the 10x or 100x talents in AI have not yet really show their value yet. None of these AI companies are making any money, and they are valued over highly successful and profitable companies out there because of their "potentials". ARR is nothing if you sell goods valued at 1 dollar for 90 cents.