The thing I can't quite square is that it doesn't really fit my lived experience. I have known sincere, genuine people in the types of positions that I'm sure someone like you would declare to be sociopathic.
But beyond that, I just don't know why it would actually be true that everyone at the top is a villain. Why couldn't someone like Dario (or even Altman, gasp) be sincere? Because if he is, it does seem like a lot of the moves he's made would make sense given his worldview.
But if you assume he's just a villain, then you can twist any of those moves to just be further evidence of that which you already believe.
I don't know, I just find cynicism interesting, and a little sad.
You don't have to assume anything. A true "good guy" doesn't openly say that he's fine with autonomous, AI-powered weapons being used against me, and mass surveillance applied to me and my family just because I don't live in the US. A true "good guy" doesn't say "privacy is a human right", and then immediately (and completely) bend the knee to an authoritarian government on this issue.
And about the mass surveillance, I don't see why the military should not use AI to do surveillance abroad.
If you are dropping bombs on someone I'm unconvinced the use of AI will make them like you more or less.
I remember a long time ago it came out that the US had been doing mass spying on the Danish people, my dad was very upset about it and disliked the US for the rest of his life. Of course the only thing he did about it was not watch American movies anymore or visit the US.
Anyway, I assume it will be a case of a million little paper cuts, each thing putting off a group of people until someday it adds up to real meaningful economic impact.
I went in the opposite direction - how far can I push myself to see multiple facets of a story? That is a wild ride, and it gets progressively more wild.
Please, I'm dying to hear the optimist's take on Mark Zuckerberg's career. It wouldn't happen to be embarassingly foolish, would it?
Lots of nerds for some reason have made cynicism a personality trait. They think optimism/honesty is hopelessly naive, therefor cynicism is the correct default.
It is the result of experience. Working with and creating systems (even embarrassingly simple ones), then seeing them fail in a myriad of ways more often than succeeding, colors your expectations about throwing humans into the mix.
Children learn to lie as part of their natural development, but do not always externalize that until faced with media (Airheads candy commercial or equivalent). Either way, honesty is expected as a default for utility and not an expectation in leveraging goals.
All have collaborated with the current US regime. All have shown signs of being quite willing to compromise their principles in order to make money.
History.
Also, nobody said 'everyone' or 'villain'. How Paul Graham of you.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Given enough money and increasingly perverse incentives to gain even more has a very high potential to corrupt.
Did they start out as corrupt, or was it the influence of the power that came with the obscene amount of money?
It's really a chicken and egg level of calculus.
Doesn't matter which came first, either way you get feathers and chickenshit all over the yard.
Do some very rich people still seem very nice in person? Sure. Of course they must, because otherwise no one would willingly work for or with them. As the total amount of money goes up, the incentives to remain 'seemingly nice' go down and either you get to see who they really are, or who they became through the choices to make that much more money. Doesn't matter which is true.
The examples of non-villainous billionare are rare.
Of non-villainous multi-billionaire; lets see there's about eight of them that stand out for giving significant amount of the massive wealth to helping the world around them, who live normal lives like the people in the communities where they reside, and who participate at the companies they own by eating in the company cafeteria among the people who earn the wealth they enjoy.
Thats 8/3400 global billionaires ... about a quarter of a percent.
And of the 'pledges' like Giving Pledge by the billionaire class, the actual amount delivered - not parked in a family or private trusts for tax deductions; but actually delivered to the front lines of any global crisis amounts to 0.18%, less than one fifth of one percent of the $20.1 TRILLION dollars held by that class of owners. thats less than $2.00 on every $1000.
That's not to say that donating to public needs is 1:1 for non-heinous behavior, but it seems like a basic tool for distinction. the 'can make a significant difference in global suffering : chooses not to' ratio as a surrogate for villain may be useful metric and doesn't require cynicism as the underlying rationale for calling someone's behavior as unkind in general or mean in particular.
Why should I treat Sam and Dario with special white gloves? Are they different, this time? They have peers in China that do the same research and actually release it to the public. They let you run the production weights on your own machine. Am I a cynic, for comparing these CEOs to their populist superiors? Am I stupid for assuming their hostility when they refuse to give us the benefit of the doubt?
I'll believe their actual altruism when I see it. Both are seeped in "boy genius" puffery and lie out their ass. If this is the future of intelligent innovation, then America is truly declining.
This is not hard to understand. Do you really think DeepSeek would publish their algorithms if they led the American companies? Lmao.
Even when they're reaching parity with American models, Z.ai, Qwen and Deepseek are upholding their end of the bargain. I'd criticize them too, if they were due any scrutiny.
It is a great model for the price, but it has much worse autonomy and long context performance, and I don't trust it for anything beyond personal projects, whereas I use Opus/Fable and GPT for work.