That’s just it.

We’ve entered a new era. Big companies don’t need your startup. They only need your smart guys. Just those few guys. You keep the rest of your engineers and figure out what to do with them.

And lately, the answer has been, “wind it all down”.

This sucks so bad for most of their employees. But it’s a signal to the labor market:

Be very honest about what you are when you’re considering working at an AI startup. Are you an AI expert? Or a TF/Pytorch monkey? There’s an enormous difference between those two things. If you’re not the key guy, require a good salary up front. Because I don’t see a future where the “acquiring” companies start needing you as well.

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MrGilbert 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> But it’s a signal to the labor market:

Or... Maybe we should start to think about how we let corporations get bigger and bigger? What happens if an entity (read: company) becomes so valuable, that it is basically indestructible? Does it have the power to change politics to their discretion? And as such, also influence the legislative?

I find that highly concerning.

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Draiken 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You mean like Google/Apple/Meta already are?

I don't see how we're not already there. There's no competition, only an oligopoly splitting their spoils.

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danaris an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, exactly.

Unfortunately, the time to be having these conversations was 40 years ago.

But you know the old saying: the next best time is right now.

It is, sadly, a near-impossibility that we could get decent antitrust under the current administration. But if we techies, as a sector, were able to pull ourselves together, genuinely recognize that the level of consolidation we have is very bad, and start collectively advocating for real change—for something more like what Lina Khan was doing under Biden, reversing the Reagan-era shift to the intellectually and morally bankrupt Chicago School interpretation of antitrust, and going back to actually forcing companies to prove that acquisitions will be good for everyone else, rather than forcing opponents to prove that they'll be bad in very specific ways...

Then we might have a chance to make real change, over the course of the next few years.

	▲	bilbo0s 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Here’s the thing, this isn’t an acquisition. This is Nvidia hiring a few guys. What’s the government supposed to do? Tell those guys they can only work for one startup and they can never leave it? You can’t tell people what jobs they can and can’t take right now. (Probably not ever in the US given our history with slavery.) Now, how do you stop that? Companies don’t need to buy startups, they just need the expert that startup hired. Once they have the experts, everything else takes care of itself. Point is, antitrust works fine. It just fixes the wrong problem. That was really the problem with khan. She never really figured out that the technologies have passed the legal framework by. She should have tried to come up with solutions to the problem of monopolizing intellectual capital rather than the problem of monopolizing markets or intellectual property.

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stefan_ 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nvidia didn't buy Groq because they need any "smart guys" at all.