I mean, what other options does he have? FAIR was just gutted in favor of Meta Superintelligence, which is to be led by Alex Wang whose pedigree comes from founding a human-labor-API/ Amazon MTurk for AI.
All the veteran researchers still left have to be reading the room by now.
Clearly, Meta is signalling that they care less for foundational research and more for habit-forming products like Chatgpt/Sora that can give them another 10-15 years of runway like Instagram did.
Even if you want to give OpenAI the benefit of the doubt by comparing it to other software primos, they're doing terribly. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. were profitable almost immediately after their founding. In the cases where they accumulated losses it was a deliberate effort to capture as much of the market as possible. They could simple hit the brakes and become profitable at will.
In OpenAI's case, every week yet another little-known lab in China releases a 99% competitive LLM at a fraction of their costs.
It's not looking good at all now or in the long-term.
Which is, tbh, a bad-faith tactic for wearing down the electorate. It’s similar to how Brexit advocates kept the issue alive until they gained enough momentum to push it through. Nearly a decade later, most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized, and the UK has borne significant self-inflicted economic costs.
Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.
Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.
Wait, so people who maintain strong beliefs that disagree with you long enough to ‘win’ are acting in bad faith (brexit), but working for 10 years to re-enter the EU wouldn’t be?
It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them.
We, the UK, will never be able to rejoin the EU on the same sweetheart terms as we had previously. That’s gone and can’t be replicated.
In much the same way as those campaigning for Scottish independence continue to campaign forever no matter how many referendums they loose, no one will be able to recreate the UK if they succeed.
You need the thinest majority to win and you can keep campaigning forever.
Which is why there was so much outside interference and breaking of the Brexit campaign rules. No matter the cost it can’t be reversed.
> It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them
No such rule exists. Historically, it's been almost impossible to remove any piece of regulation or bureaucracy once it has taken root. Radical dismantling of institutions is a rare thing. That's the same for public services or, say, chat control. I did not expect Brexit to succeed: in fact it only happened because David Cameron had a whimsical moment of fairness and respected a referendum result, against general expectations since he had nothing to gain.
Looking back up the thread, we're equating nagging to construct something (chat control) with nagging to dismantle something (UK EU membership). And I suppose Scottish independence would have aspects of both construction and destruction. The pernicious things that are hard to change are attractive-sounding policy ideas, whether they build up edifices or tear them down.
The issue was that support for "Brexit" was a bad-faith fabrication by Murdoch-owned media with a dash of foreign-funded interference.
When you put down any specific Brexit implementation and asked people to vote on it, you generally got supermajority opposition.
This is similar to, for example, the nitwits in Kentucky who fiercely opposed Obamacare but were vociferously supportive of Kynect and the ACA--all of which are the same thing.
It does read the way you describe in your question. My interpretation of OPs example is more about the asymmetry in how much more (relatively) feasible it is for one party to re-introduce a vote for something than it is to rally political will en masse in a way that reflects what the electorate ultimately wants.
An example that comes to mind is the string of legislation like SOPA that despite having lost, the general goal continued to appear in new bills that were heavily lobbied for.
You’re right. That aspect of how Brexit was carried through was not acting in bad faith. The anti-European faction has been fighting since we joined to reverse it. Many other aspects of the process were in bad faith but people must be allowed to change their minds, disagree, pursue their faith.
The real problem here is that it should be easier to take powers away from them government than to grant them.
If you have a system where passing a law requires three separate elected bodies to approve it, the problem is that it makes bad laws sticky. If a sustained campaign can eventually get a law passed giving the executive too much power and then the executive can veto any future repeal of it, that's bad.
The way you want it to work is that granting the government new powers requires all government bodies to agree, but then any of them can take those powers away. Then you still have all the programs where there is widespread consensus that we ought to have them, but you can't get bad ones locked in place because the proponents were in control of the whole government for ten seconds one time.
The first one mostly works but it generally has two problems. First, they just put "re-pass all the old junk that was about to expire" into this year's omnibus and then there's so much of it at once that the bad stuff gets re-enacted by default. That's better than the status quo but only a little. And second, you don't really want constraints on the government to expire. To some extent you can put those in the constitution, but a lot of this is things like anti-corruption laws that, if the current government is corrupt, they're not going to want to re-enact.
The second one is great. Direct democracy but you can only use it to repeal things. Let the general population veto the omnibus and make them go back and split it out.
As a EU citizen I'd ask for at least a 2/3 majority to let the UK back into the EU, maybe 3/4. They came, they were always skeptical, they left, they want to come back? Please demonstrate that you made up your mind and won't start thinking about another Brexit in less than 10 years.
Brexit can't just be undone. The UK would have to go through the full accession procedure. This would be much easier for the UK than for countries like Georgia, since the UK system hasn't diverged much, but the special agreements and exceptions the UK had would have be renegotiated from scratch.
Adding a new member state always requires unanimous consent from existing member states, for good and ill.
> “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever.
1. Take back control was about a lot more than immigration - it was primarily about regulation.
2. It has stopped EU immigration which was far larger scale than illegal immigration and there was no way of refusing to allow people in or removing them.
> most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized
Nor have the costs. The government predicted an immediate severe recession if we so much as voted for Brexit, let alone implemented it.
If I setup a $10b trust fund to buy up Texan land, I can't unilaterally invade Texas and build my ethnostate on it after I've purchased, say, 6-7% of it. That's the percentage of Palestine the Zionists bought before expelling the indigenous people in the Nakba genocide.
Likewise, if you legally purchase double-digit percentages of Indian, Chinese, Brit, Australian land, it doesn't give you the moral or legal precedent to expel the natives from the rest of their land and declare it your state.
Do you mean Elon Musk? Bryanston High School and Pretoria Boys High School were all-white, so any beating he received (I'm assuming you're referring to the same savage incident Kimball was) was at the hands of other white boys.
So, being attacked and nearly killed by other white boys does not validate his opinions on apartheid.
Stop the self-deception. America hates accountability so much that it has laws on the books guaranteeing that it'll invade the Hague (killing thousands of Dutch citizens, inevitably) if US servicemembers are ever detained there for crimes against humanity.
This is just a rogue state going mask-off.
Imagine if China or Russia even suggested the same willingness during a press conversation, let alone making a law to that effect.
That's a lot of fancy words to say, "America is a rogue regime that believes might makes right despite all the human rights, morals, and God bless America bullshit."
I actually don't mind tyranny on some level if I can't do anything against them. it just feels good having the mask of righteousness & honor fall off so that the world can see the ugly, unvarnished, hypocritical beast under the makeup.
> lot of fancy words to say, "America is a rogue regime
I’m saying all the great powers are rogue regimes by this definition. The only place the ICC applied was Europe, but now even it is ignoring its rulings.
The consensus that restrained the might makes right default of international relations has failed.
Here's why I don't apply the same metric/standard to China & Russia. They don't pontificate about their morals. They're mask-off about their Schmittian approach to power.
Western countries preach about morals, human rights, rules-based order, and all kinds of bullshit but always seem to violate their acclaimed principles every Wednesday.
China sells weapons to everyone who has money, works with all kinds of regimes, and generally have a non-interventionist policy. That's why smaller countries tend to prefer partnering with them. They're not your fairy godmother, but at least they're honest about what they want.
Not every country is the same - that's a line used by bad actors to avoid scrutiny. And they are not honest about it - they say they don't interfere and are not acting for political interests, but they do.
> All the third-world countries that have had their debts to China blow out of control have been able to renegotiate.
I haven't read that but would be interested if you know of something. Also, what did they have to give up?
> They don't pontificate about their morals. They're mask-off about their Schmittian approach to power
What? China regularly sells itself as a peaceful alternative to America. Russia used to make that pitch until the irony became too ridiculous to maintain.
> China sells weapons to everyone who has money, works with all kinds of regimes, and generally have a non-interventionist policy
They’ve been brazen about Taiwan!
> why smaller countries tend to prefer partnering with them
I can denounce Nazis while admitting an objective point made by Schmitt. Churchill himself was a ghoul who considered Indians, Africans, etc. inferior and while he denounced the Nazis' tactics, he had no problem using similar ones to suppress colonized natives.
In other words, Churchill might have hated the Nazis (because they threatened his beloved England), but he believed in the state of exception they promoted. He believed he wasn't obligated to obey basic decency when dealing with non-European natives because, like Schmitt would say, "sovereign is he who determines the exception."
But, on the flip side, coercive power cannot stand on its own without money too. The CCP's Politburo know beyond a doubt that they have coercive power over billionaires like Jack Ma, but they try to accommodate these entrepreneurs who help catalyze economic growth & bring the state more foreign revenue/wealth to fund its coercive machine.
America's elected leaders also have power to punish & bring oligarchs to book legally, but they mostly interact symbiotically, exchanging campaign contributions and board seats for preferential treatment, favorable policy, etc.
Putin can order any out-of-line oligarch to be disposed of, but the economic & coercive arms of the Russian State still see themselves as two sides of the same coin.
So, yes: coercive power can still make billionaires face the wall (Russian revolution, etc.) but they mostly prefer to work together. Money and power are a continuum like spacetime.
Did you mean to say nah? Mba actually means just that in at least one language I know.