If you want to have the biggest possible impact in tech, I think you should still move to the Bay Area.
The people here, and the network effects caused by that, are worth it.
It's hard to overstate the magic of lots of competent, optimistic people in one place.
The future will certainly be more distributed, but I think that a large fraction of the most important US companies started in the next decade will continue to be within 50 miles of SF.
It's easy to not be in the Bay Area right now, because there's not much to miss out on. As soon as stuff restarts, and the most interesting meetings, dinners, events, and parties are here, I predict FOMO brings a lot of people back fast :)
Zoom isn't the same. It's fine when everyone is using it for their meetings, but it will be different when only 50% of people are.
All of the problems are true--the city and state are horribly mismanaged (and so the quality of life, particularly relative to the costs, is bad), it's over-regulated, the monoculture is not good, etc etc.
Someday the Bay Area might be the wrong choice. The incompetence of state and local government could eventually become intolerable. Or VR could change everything.
But for now, I think fight instead of flight is the better choice. Let's help fix things.
I am super thankful for the opportunities I've had here. I'm excited to pay it forward.
This is the best time in a long time to move here, actually. The people coming are the ones who are earnestly motivated, and the costs are lower than they've been in a long time.
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The expected value of your impact on the world is like a vector.
It is defined by two things: direction and magnitude. That’s it.
Direction is what you choose to work on. Almost no one spends enough time thinking about this. A useful framework for this is to think on a long-but-not-too-long timescale (10-20 years seems to work),
Giving capital to promising people “too early” in their career is a great idea with much further to go, and the power law provides an interesting way to finance it.
YC is a great example. You can imagine taking that further—giving $25k to the smartest and most determined 100,000 people you can find each year to work on whatever they want, in exchange for the right to invest in their next startup. A country could make the economics work.
Giving 10 years of “tenure” to a group of 20 super promising 22 year old researchers finishing up undergrad is not that expensive relative to the value it would likely create, and there seem like a bunch of ways to capture a part of it.
Hi Jerome! It's great to get feedback from someone with so much experience deploying AI at scale.
We share your concern about bias and safety in language models, and it's a big part of why we're starting off with a beta and have safety review before apps can go live.
We think it's important that we can do things like turn off applications that are misusing the API, experiment with new toxicity filters (we just introduced a new one that is on by default), etc.
We don't think we could do this if we just open-sourced the model.
We do not (yet) have a service in production for billions of users, and we want to learn from our own and others' experiences before we do. We totally agree with you on the need to be very thoughtful about the potential negative impact companies like ours can have on the world.
Policy suggestion, from @naval: forgive all student debt, and don't allow any more to be issued (i.e. nothing from government and it doesn't survive bankruptcy.)
Higher ed need some forcing function to improve; this would induce rapid change. There have to be better models.
Pay attention to who opposes this, and why.
The current system doesn’t align incentives—it’s too easy to saddle people with huge debt without increasing their income potential.
(Obviously not for everyone, but for a lot of people.)
EG heresies, fervor at big sermons, pressure to believe the whole thing and a general all-or-nothing mentality, fealty, excommunications, moralities, redemption, authoritarianism, rituals, high switching costs, crusades, etc...
This seems true for both major US parties.
Oh and questioning central beliefs too much is highly discouraged.