> Anything that removes the power of CEOs and gives it to the worker should be highly encouraged.
The only thing that will do this is if workers are the resource bottleneck.
> Economic democracy is the final frontier of human empowerment and giving workers then means to have democratic control over the economy can only unlock more human potential, not less.
This already exists. It's called free enterprise and freedom of association.
Unless of course you mean that nobody can own or expend resources without (nominally) everybody agreeing... which has also been tried, and failed horribly.
For one such example, see the years long fights in city halls over resource usage or utilization, such as building new developments for example. A corporation trying to get something done moving at that pace would, well, not get anything done. That is why worker owned co-ops, which you can create today even in this capitalist system we have, do not outcompete capitalist structures generally speaking.
> Do those CEOs think their job is more complex than a software developer job, which they are so eager to replace?
You can estimate the difficulty of a job by what fraction is the population can successfully do it and how much special training this takes. Both of which are reflected in the supply curve for labor for that job.
> How many times more urgently do we want to replace the CEO, considering salaries? How about we put as many times the amount of money into that, as we are putting into trying to replace developers?
Pretty sure that (avg developer pay * number of developers) is a lot more that (avg ceo pay * number of ceos).
Since businesses need to start somewhere/when and most startups fail, I think most people who even get into the role of CEO, are doing it successfully. However, this is a lot due to circumstances and many factors outside of their control. There are also many CEOs ruining their businesses with bad decisions. It is not certain, that an "AI" wouldn't do at least as good as those failing CEOs. Similarly, many developers ruin things they touch, introducing tons of complexity, dependencies and breaking user workflows or making workflows cumbersome without listening to user feedback and so on.
In short many people do a bad job and businesses are carried by others, who do a good enough job to make a net positive for the final product. Or consequences of messing up are happening slowly, like a slow user drain, or a user replacement with bad actors until good actors start to leave, or any other possibility.
About the pay argument: Well, these days you still need a good crew of developers to make the shiny AI toys do what you want them to do, so you are not replacing all of the developers, so you can't calculate like that. If we calculate some Silicon Valley CEO making 2 million and a developer making 100k-200k, then we are still at a ratio of 10x-20x. If we manage to make only one CEO obsolete or 2 out of 3 CEOs 1.5x as efficient, we have achieved a cost saving of 10-20 developers! Yay!...
Maybe first get the automated vending machines to work properly, and then revisit this question to find what tasks that allows to be peeled away from the role?
Vending machines are static experiences. They sit there and wait until told to give an item and paid for it. Why would you need an LLM for that? There’s nothing to solve there
The comment is a reference to a well known benchmark in which LLMs inevitably lose money attempting to run a simple simulated vending machine business.
You know those puff pieces are to assuage our fears of job loss and provide an folksy aww-sucks patina to the plucky LLM who can't run a vending machine.
I'm not sure you can get around the principal-agent problem that easily. Who sets the policy levers on the automation and governs it? They inherit the ceo's negotiating leverage with shareholders.
It seems like you'd need some sort of fairly radical control structure (say, no board, just ai interacting directly with shareholders) to get around this. But even this ignores that the automation is not neutral, it is provided by actors with incentives.
They measure/model aboveground biomass, and present the change in that measurement as being a source/sink in the carbon cycle, ie as coming from / going to the atmosphere.
But I also see multiple places they mention the changes as being at least partly due to logging or wood harvesting. Which seems like biomass being removed and yet not going into the atmosphere.
Prior to the recent RAM insanity(a big caveat I know) a 1u supermicro machine with 768GB some NVME storage and twin 32 core Epyc 9004s was ~12K USD. You can get 3 of those and and some redundant 10G network infra(people are literally throwing this out) for < 40k. Then you just have to find a rack/internet connection to put them in which would be a few hundred a month.
The reality is most sites don't need multi region setups, they have very predicable load and 3 of those machines would be massive overkill for many. A lot of people like to think they will lose millions per second of down time, and some sites certainly do but most wont.
All of this of course would be using new stuff. If you wanted to use used stuff the most cost effective are the 5 year old second gen xeon scalables that are being dumped by cloud providers. Those are more than enough compute for most they are just really thirsty so you will pay with the power bill.
This of course is predicated on assumption you have the skill set to support these machines and that is increasingly becoming less common though as successful companies that started in the last 10 years are starting to do more "hybrid cloud" it is starting to come back around.
They just happen to have an online config tool that is somewhat close to what you would pay if you didnt engage with sales which is useful for a hackernews comment.
When foundry came out the demo looked next level. I'm sure you could do much of the same thing with FOSS but IMO the problem that the NHS has been struggling with for multiple decades really looks like a lack of Technical Leadership due to the complexity of the environment and care needed when dealing with patient data.
Hopefully Palantir has the necessary skillset to navigate the political environment which involves developing a platform that:
1. protects patient privacy
2. supports needs of providers (e.g. hospitals, gps, specialists, DoH)
3. allows providers to use data to support their operations
4. allows NHS to use the data to improve patient outcomes and efficiency
I’ve heard Foundry is not only insanely expensive, but to actually accomplish something comparable to the demos in your domain requires a huge amount of integration work to build it out in a way that locks you in.
They have a track record of failed IT projects, because they have a very high bar for handling data properly.
Palantir have a track record of successful IT projects, because they do what they want and hope there's limited blowback - they've modelled their biggest customer very well, there.
As somebody born in an NHS hospital whose life has been saved by the NHS on at least 3 occasions, I'm more than happy to defend their record.
Palantir, given what we know that has leaked about what they do and how they do it, considerably less so.
> Palantir have a track record of successful IT projects, because they do what they want and hope there's limited blowback - they've modelled their biggest customer very well, there.
Research what? The claim that Palantir "just does what it wants to do and hopes there's no blowback?"
I literally can't even parse what that means. Palantir works in very close coordination with their customers' leadership and while the company and product "have opinions" about how to do things, it doesn't at all wash out to Palantir "just doing what it wants to do."
Such a claim doesn't even make sense in the context of a business that works the way Palantir does.
Do you mean sometimes customers pay Palantir to do things that other people or the public disagree with?
And who do you think "their biggest customer" is that they're modeling their own approach after?
As somebody that works in the biotech/health space, this page is not that exciting?
The bottleneck in drug development is not discovery; we have to test more hypotheses more efficiently, not generate more hypotheses. You don't need a product like foundry to have reproducibility or share pipeline templates; there are already free, scripting-language-agnostic workflow tools.
Healthcare use of foundry != biotech/bioinformatics use of foundry?
A former work colleague works in health ontologies. They are complicated and include EMT and ward staff using terms of art with inverse meaning.
Perhaps I misread your intent, belittling complexity in somebody else's information space (eg a function of multiple parallel legacy systems and organisational change) seems unhelpful. You weren't excited, maybe people on the management and health economics side were?
Yeah, ontology is a key word. Its like the best concepts from things like Informatica and Pachyderm and Snowflake, structured in a semi-sane data security model and certified with all the fedramp whatnot you need to make cloud saas work for enterprise.
I think you misread it a bit. On the bioinformatics point, I was addressing some text in the link. I don’t mean to belittle people that work in healthcare, just suspicious how Palantir secured contracts.
Yeah, it is dead boring until you hit the real world of trying to make a data request from an IRB which doesn't talk to the IT folks who don't really know the ins and outs of the data they steward but have their own forms and approvals and bespoke deidentification process, . . . once your org is in that state then Foundry starts looking really good. Taking months to sort out getting a csv into your free agnostic workflow tools wasn't fine before, but c19 really made the tool's strengths clear and people want to retain that increased velocity.
Like the iPod, if you are Cdr Taco it is "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." If you are a normal person struggling with meaningful data in the enterprise and see all the things packaged together tidily, then iPod economics happen.
Its possible I was too dismissive. This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap? I think I'm jaded/cynical because there is an endless graveyard of bad software tools in this world.
> This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap?
I'm not certain that it is better equipped than any hypothetical or specifically focused system. Given any part of it, I see a lot of products that can be composed into a similar offering. That misses the point though because the problems are socio-political in nature, not technological. It is expensive, which means that if an organization adopts it, everyone from the top down better get into alignment or you will waste a lot of cash. Internal alignment like that can be achieved without spending a lot of money probably maybe, but not likely.
It is also externally aligned a little better than IBM/Oracle (saw Watson, Deloitte "data democracy" etc) as a SaaS with training and consulting.
They were already contracted by NHS to monitor vaccine distribution and covid data in 2020, that contract was terminated and moved to Mozaic Services after public outcry over data privacy concerns. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/uk-ends-one-of-its-data-shar...
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