I did indeed mean it that way, but I agree with you. It sucks, but it's just the unfortunate reality of the world. Many of the most disruptive and successful startups made it there by ignoring legal or moral limitations.

Incentives can produce locally rational and globally harmful behavior. (See also: "Moloch", although I'm less of a fan of the concept lately since it focuses exclusively on the harmful aspects of emergent systems, deleting the neutral and positive ones in the process.)

A relevant metaphor is the nuclear arms race. Nobody wants a world full of nukes pointed at each other, but if the other guy is gonna do it...

The argument in this case is, we can't slow down, because China certainly won't, and do you want those guys to build the machine God first? So it's "rational" to maximize p(accidental_skynet).

Their core selling point is customer trust that their product works as advertised.

From my interactions with them, is that they really care about customer success, and everything including AI is a means to an end to them.

I think building a cool product with undefined reliability and capabilities, then selling fantasies about what it will possibly be able to do down the line isn't really what they do - or what their customers are paying for.

If the people that do stuff well fail, what does that leave us with?

> That they even bothered to do all that stuff is good. That others don’t is bad

good and bad isn't what Meta and AWS is running with. If AWS trains willy nilly on user data like Meta does, AWS is toast. AWS is already taking a huge risk by now using their own take of AWS FDEs competing against their established ecosystem of consulting companies that used to recommend all 583 of AWS products to host a static webpage. Turning of more customers by training on their data is too much of a risk. That's the "good" - a risk analysis.

Meta doesn't care if you stop using Facebook, Whatsapp etc. Frankly, if you are embedded in the Facebook, Whatsapp ecosystem, you don't have a way out as a normie. Even if you are technically capable, good luck publishing your custom Mattermost build for iOS.

Meta has a significant amount of investment in hardware, originally due to Metaverse. The way to monetize that investment is inference and training. That's a do or die decision for Meta. Meta isn't releasing open-weight models because they are "good".

Meta is releasing open-weight models for the same reason Alibaba, NVIDIA or IBM does. Or Google releases Gemma.

There's no "good" or "bad" - the moment Alibaba, NVIDIA, IBM or Google's objective functions change, "Do no evil" will quickly morph into "Do as much evil as necessary without the costs of getting caught exceeding E(outcome)"

Seems like what you would get if you were customer-centric and building a cloud platform for enterprise and govt to trust which was all set up pre-AI

00000000: 6e6f 7420 6576 656e 2061 7320 6120 726f not .even as a ro

00000010: 626f 74

I think it's coasting on that prestige of being FAANG. People still want it on their resume. I share this from time to time but I interviewed there at the same time I interviewed at Facebook (right before the name change). And the difference was night and day. Amazon truly treated me like cattle. Get in, do the automated Leetcode/HackerRank thing. Canned conversations. Facebook at least _seemed_ like they were rooting for my success the entire time.

If you chart money in your pocket per unit time, it takes a dip around 18 months where your average pay is less than your first month’s pay. (When I was there, using RSU numbers for that time.) Guess when average quitting time was?

HR swore it wasn’t on purpose and I was somehow measuring pay “wrong” by looking at money in my pocket over time; but knowing their HR, I’m sure the valleys in transition from signing bonus to vesting are intentional.

Works great for the business too. I recently worked in a business unit with a 2 year vesting model. I loved the work and challenges.

.. and then got let go at 22 months in favour of the AI budget.

Gotta respect the hustle.

Because all humans are 100% fungible with all other humans. So, you can take whatever old humans you have, throw them away (or make them want to leave), and then replace them with all new humans, with zero negative effect on anything. Rinse and repeat.

Human experience means nothing. Anything that does have meaning gets encoded in the system for the mindless humans to implement.

That’s my take on the view from the top, based on my time working at AWS.

Oh for sure, these many years AWS has set a high bar in the service space for conscientiousness in offerings. When I compare to my personal work experiences with gcp and azure the amount of times I've been rug pulled over the years has been essentially zero for AWS.