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I hate to lean on credentialism and experience, I really do. But is Karpathy the only one of these who is a) an engineer and also b) over the age of 30? Why ar
by runako 1y ago
I hate to lean on credentialism and experience, I really do. But is Karpathy the only one of these who is a) an engineer and also b) over the age of 30?
Why are these relevant? Engineer, because we are talking about a set of technologies that are engineering projects. There is no substitute for hands-on experience in systems. And likely an engineer has taken at least one course that included some history of AI to give a sense of the time scales involved in getting from the perceptron to Sonnet 4.5.
Over 30 primarily because that's roughly old enough to have seen at least one tech hype cycle through which to filter the AI hype cycle. (Some people are old enough to remember the predictions that nobody would use screens in 2025, everything would be a voice interface. Or how economics had fundamentally changed and companies didn't need to make money in the New Economy. Or how Tesla would for sure have 1 million robot axis on the road in 2020. Etc.)
IMHO it's a bearish sign that boosters are not looking to experienced engineers for this kind of analysis.
- 827a 1y agoAnother thing age often brings: There's a ton of young people (20s-early 30s) in SV right now who didn't get to materially participate in the first (1990-99) or second (2010-19) tech revolutions. There must be a third, because FOMO.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoWhat was the tech revolution of the 2010s?
- ajkjk 1y agoIt was... the 2010s? the era where tech came back and everyone got rich again? startups and VCs and big goog and facebook and AI? all that?
- runako 1y agoThe sibling comments focus on the money side, but the tech drivers were mobile & cloud. The boom kicked off right around 2008 when the App Store launched.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoBoom? That was the "Great Recession". Not exactly the label you'd expect from a boom period. In 2010 I tried to apply to the place where I'd interned the year before and was told "we'd love to hire you, but we can't, because Amazon declared a hiring freeze".
- runako 1y agoI'm sorry to hear that. The data from the decade[1] shows that tech hiring ~doubled over that period of time. The slope was not as steep as the dotcom boom, but the downturn in tech ended in 2009. 1 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6054150001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6054150001
- 827a 1y agoThe decade of largest stock market growth in the history of humanity, primarily led by the growth of mega-tech conglomerates and venture capital-fueled exits? Maybe you missed it?