Who are these new AI tech founders anyway?

Tech bros share insights after b-nut secured

You may have heard about Meta’s recent “investment” into Scale. I put investment in quotes, because it wasn’t so much an investment as an aqui-hire. Probably one of the most expensive in history, although Apple’s recent acquisition of Jony Ive’s studio for $6.5bn is up there as well.

The details were weird.

Meta has agreed to take a 49% stake in data labeling firm Scale AI for $14.8 billion, two people familiar with the matter said. The unusual deal will be structured so Meta will send the cash to Scale’s existing shareholders and place the startup’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, in a top position inside Meta, the people said.

...

Scale shareholders also would maintain their existing holdings in Scale, which will now be valued at $28 billion, including the cash invested, up from $13.8 billion last year.

Matt Levine describes it as basically paying off Scale’s investors to hire away its founder Alexandr Wang. Why would they buy 49% otherwise?

Investors are pretty happy, and presumably they still have some upside. Wang likely made a few b-nuts from the deal. And Zuck presumably knows what he’s doing. So who is this guy anyway?

Alex Wang: What I mentioned is basically I want to wait to have kids until we figure out how Neurolink - or other brain-computer interfaces, other ways for brains to interlink with computers - until they start working. There's a few reasons for this.

First is, in your first seven years of life, your brain is more neuroplastic than at any other point in your life, by an order of magnitude.

…

Now, Neurolink as a concept - hooking your brain up to a computer - I take a pragmatic view on this. My day job is working on AI. I believe a lot in AI. I think AI is going to continue becoming smarter and more capable, more powerful. AI is going to continue being able to do more and more. We're going to have robots, other forms for that AI to take over time.'

Humans are only evolving at a certain rate. Humans will get smarter over time, but it's on the timescale of millions of years because natural selection and evolution is really slow.

He’s some tech dude that want to wait to have kids so he can, as infants, hook them up to Neuralink and AI for … reasons?

But what about the risk?

Alex Wang: There's the obvious thing: some corporation hacks your brain. If a corporation hacks your brain, which even that's pretty bad, they'll send ads directly to your brain or make it so you want to buy their products. But then even worse, obviously, a foreign actor, a terrorist, an adversary, a state actor hacks into your brain and takes your memories or manipulates you or all these things. That's obviously pretty bad.

I think that's definitely a huge risk. If you have a direct link into someone's brain and you have the ability to read their memories, control their thoughts, read their thoughts - that's pretty bad. I've talked to a lot of scientists in this space and people working on this stuff, including the folks at Neurolink. Mind reading and mind control - that is where the technology will go over time. It's something that we have to not screw up, like any advanced technology, but it's going to be pretty critical if we want humans to remain relevant as AI keeps getting better.

Um... I think the bigger risk of putting in an experimental interface into your newborn is you brick the kid.

What does this even mean anyway? Letting you search facts faster? Recording everything you see? Watching Instagram reels on the back of your eyelids?

Doesn’t matter. We just need to do it.

These guys are essentially living in a sci-fi novel. They can’t see beyond their favorite piece of media. They think they’re wise sages because they’ve seen this all play out in fiction, but they have no practical wisdom like precautionary principle.

His argument for hooking up to AI is basically, “we have to, bro” and some vague nods to an elementary understanding of evolution. Not to mention the bigger questions around the human condition. Don’t worry though, he’ll upload his consciousness to the cloud. When pressed what that even means, he just says “they’ll” figure it out.

Now some of this is self serving of course. He’s selling an AI adjacent product and rode it to a 11 figure payout. But come on.

I’ve seen a bit of this before, ironically from the AI doomer crowd. To them it’s completely obvious you want to upload your consciousness into the cloud and interface with AI. That’s if it doesn’t kill us first of course.

I wrote about this before, but wire-heading is very common with AI doomers. It’s a horseshoe theory of politics where both extremes end up in the same place. Whether you want a one world government regulating math or selling AI vaporware, you’re willing to sacrifice your children to the alter of AI.

Here’s doomer Eliezer Yudkowski on wireheading:

Eliezer: So suppose I go up to somebody and credibly say, we will assume away the ridiculousness of this offer for the moment, your kids could be a bit smarter and much healthier if you’ll just let me replace their DNA with this alternate storage method that will age more slowly. They’ll be healthier, they won’t have to worry about DNA damage, they won’t have to worry about the methylation on the DNA flipping and the cells de-differentiating as they get older. We’ve got this stuff that replaces DNA and your kid will still be similar to you, it’ll be a bit smarter and they’ll be so much healthier and even a bit more cheerful. You just have to replace all the DNA with a stronger substrate and rewrite all the information on it. You know, the old school transhumanist offer really. And I think that a lot of the people who want kids would go for this new offer that just offers them so much more of what it is they want from kids than copying the DNA, than inclusive genetic fitness.

These people aren’t serious. They don’t have the wisdom or insight of the prior generation of tech leaders.

Steve Jobs for one didn’t allow his children access to an iPad, a device he created:

Two years later when he was asked “Your kids must love the iPad?” He said “Actually we don’t allow the iPad in the home. We think it’s too dangerous for them in effect.” The reason why he said that was because he recognized just how addictive the iPad was as a vehicle for delivering things to people. That once you had the iPad in front of you, or when you took it away from the home with you, you’d always have access to these platforms that were very addictive. That were hard to resist.

Bill Gates didn’t allow smart phones until his kids were 14. Pretty much anyone in the industry at a senior level and over the age of 30 is extremely skeptical of technology and its impact on their own children.

But now we have a new generation of AI visionaries, like Wang, who don’t have a similar level of introspection of technology. The guy is obviously smart. Both his parents and one of his grandparents are physicists. Both siblings are PhDs and he excelled academically and in business. But he seems a little too bought in to the AI hype zeitgeist.