Surviving Internet Hate

`1:23:22`

You're not gonna miss anything. This is the part that actually grinded my gears in the early phases of this transition. Everyone was so up in arms that if you didn't... It's loops now. Oh, no, no, we're done with loops. It's graphs now. Oh, no, no, we're done with that. It's, it harnesses this, right? They're, they're constantly churning through the frontier, which in one way is actually very exciting. This is what happens when a new field opens up. It's like a new portal, and it's all spilling out. That's exciting. But it also means that if I had just been backpacking for the last year, hadn't touched a computer, hadn't witnessed this agentic moment, and I just showed up yesterday, do you know what? I would've been caught up in two weeks. There's not any accumulation, which is in some ways a great relief. If you missed the past year, you can catch up to the frontier in two weeks. If you're a programmer who was out hiking the Himalayas for a year and you come back, you can catch up in two weeks. And this is actually the great credit to the progress we're experiencing. We have so many experiments running simultaneously right now that are constantly and ruthlessly sorting what works, what doesn't work. You don't have to remember or even be part of that entire journey. You can just show up for the results.

`1:25:04`

You might as well have been in the cryo chamber for 100 years

`1:25:12`

It's startling, and I actually... I mean, I'm putting some of this on slightly for effect. I also recognize that it's okay to grieve for a hot moment. That's not my disposition. It's not how I do it, but I accept that that's a time-tested mechanism for coping with a sense of loss. And it's okay to have a sense of loss that the world that you knew and maybe you were very fond of is no longer the same.

`1:25:58`

But it all amounted to this moment. That is, to me, what makes the entire journey so meaningful. AI did not arrive from the sky. It was not alien technology that had blasted through the universe and suddenly showed up on our shores. AI has been around for as long as computer science has been around. In the '50s, they thought the problem was gonna be cracked in about a decade, the smartest people at the time. It took a little longer, but the reason it took a little longer was in part because we took some blind turns on the road to AI and neural networks and thought that there were other symbolic representations that were gonna carry the day, and they didn't. And that probably set us back about 15 years. So some of it was also we had to, Go through the gaming revolution, 3D games. If we had not had Quake, if we had not had Duke Nukem, if we had not had Unreal Tournament, we'd never have gotten AI because we would never have gotten the GPUs, and therefore we would never have been able to get AI in the shape it is now. So everything we did up until this moment was required to get there. You were part of that. Holy... What a blessing. What a blessing to have contributed in your small part, either by training or by playing video games. Literally, you could just choose to think of it that way. All those times you spent in, for my case, in the '90s just playing video games, they were-

`1:27:24`

Yeah, I was contributing to the AI revolution right there and then moment.

`1:27:39`

Take a moment. It's okay. Take a... And also, you don't even have to accept that it's all dead. Like, if you are still very attached to the hand chiseling, which if you'd asked me a year ago, I would have predicted that I would've been more attached. I'm surprised-

`1:27:59`

... a little that I've not been more attached. But the reason I've not been more attached, I think, is that I found something more fun. And if it hadn't been like that, if AI had just replaced the thing I loved and gave me something I hated, I'd probably be a little bitter.