100% agree. There is no reason for employees to be loyal to a company. LLM building is not some religious work. It’s machine learning on big data. Always do what is best for you because companies don’t act like loyal humans, they act like large organizations that aren’t always fair or rationale or logical in their decisions.
To a lot of tech leadership, it is. The belief in AGI as a savior figure is a driving motivator. Just listen to how Altman, Thiel or Musk talk about it.
That’s how they talk about it publicly. Internally I can attest that the companies for two of the three you list are not like that internally at all. It’s all marketing, outwardly focused.
"Tech founders" for whom the "technology" part is the thing always getting in the way of the "just the money and buzzwords" part.
Now they think they can automate it away.
25+ years in this industry and I still find it striking how different the perspective between the "money" side and the "engineering" side is... on the same products/companies/ideas.
> Just listen to how Altman, Thiel or Musk talk about it.
It’s surprising how little they seem to have thought it through. AGI is unlikely to appear in the next 25 years, but even if, as a mental exercise, you accept it might happen, it reveals it's paradox: If AGI is possible, it destroys its own value as a defensible business asset.
Like electricity, nuclear weapons, or space travel , once the blueprint exists, others will follow. And once multiple AGIs exist, each will be capable of rediscovering and accelerating every scientific and technological advancement.
The prevailing idea seems to be that the first company to achieve superintelligence will be able to leverage it into a permanent advantage via exponential self improvement, etc.
> able to leverage it into a permanent advantage via exponential self improvement
Their fantasies of dominating others, through some modern day Elysium, reveal far more about their substance intake than rational grasp of where they actually stand... :-)
Tech leadership always treats new ventures or fields that way, because being seen to treat it that way and selling the idea of treating it that way is how you attract people (employees, and if you are very lucky investors, too) that are willing to sacrifice their own rational material interests to advancing what they see as the shared religious goal (which is, in fact, the tech leader’s actual material interest.)
I mean, even on HN, which is clearly a startup-friendly forum, that tendency among startup leaders has been noted and mocked repeatedly.
