It's always so sad to see updates from Stephen. The folks who were at the AI lab in the early days describe him as someone so motivated and arrogant that he was

It's always so sad to see updates from Stephen. The folks who were at the AI lab in the early days describe him as someone so motivated and arrogant that he was certain that one day he'd earn a Nobel. Now all of these years later he's basically wasted his career with delusions of grandure. Sometimes over a beer we wonder what happened. Did he crack because he realized he maybe wasn't the God he thought he was and then created some fantasy land for himself? My hypothesis and the reason I write this is that he fell prey to what often happens to truly exceptional folks when they get to exceptional places (I've seen it first hand many times). You show up and discover that there are people who are nominally better than you in every possible way. It takes time to understand that raw talent can eventually be beaten by hard work. And that there are so many problems in the world that ok, so someone is astronomically better than me in every way, fine, I can still change the world by what metrics matter to me if I work hard. And the people who are astronomically better, they often can't handle serious long term failure and overcome it with grit, that's a hard lesson to learn. There's a very different notion of grit that you have when you're at the top of the pile than at the bottom. And if you've never experienced the latter it can hit you hard. I'm not writing this to be mean to Stephen. He's a tragic case. But we rarely talk about the effect such places can have on people even though it happens a lot.