(And I've heard he stole Mosaic code, which I don't know if it's true but would be consistent)
https://web.archive.org/web/20191221082346/http://ludumdare....
https://web.archive.org/web/20210722173354/https://www.youtu...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgAujBKarXXoMxJDyi1Am...
Facebook used their lucky cash cow money to eliminate the threat, by offering way more than any reasonable market value. Absolutely crazy money. An offer they couldn't resist, especially the investors.
No bet, just an ice cold rational calculation. Anyone wealthy and crazy enough could have done the same. No skills needed, no risks involved. It's like betting tomorrow will be another day.
There is neither knowledge nor talent here, he stumbled into it, and that's fine.
I wonder how it works in his mind's eye. Does it make decisions? Does it dispense little Zuckian wisdom proverbs? Does it try to become your friend?
Edit: RE Anthropic haha: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47750086
It might be elimination of whole tiers of management. It will be AI's all the way down.
But I'm surprised that the risks seem to be so underestimated.
Once this clone exists, what happens if it gets out into the wild? Imagine everyone having full access do what is effectively a digital model of your personality. Imagine your competition putting your own model to use against you.
And the better the approximation of this model, the worse the damage to yourself.
This is magical thinking. "Presence" and "time cost" are inextricably linked. You can't have one without the other.
When you use AI to decouple them, you're telling your audience/colleagues/attend that you want them to listen to you but not the other way around.
But it was helpful to me!
Reading it I mean. The commenter putting into words why exactly someone would think that this would be a good idea.
Of course, you're 110% right that it isn't, but it's still nice that HN provides some subtiles for those that are out of the loop and out of substances in their bloodstream.
Hence why I'm so surprised that MZ, of all people, is arguing in this direction.
I would think that the potential for malicious abuse alone should have scared him off of this.
I imagine that this is part of the original plan. “Okay, we wasted 80 billion dollars on VR, and that hurts. But if we can somehow to convince all of our competitors to also waste 80 billion dollars each, then it’ll even out. How can we trick our competitors into thinking more like Zuckerberg?”
Am I arguing against this? I don't know - I'm not an economist. But I would like to point out there is such a thing as shareholder fraud and the venn diagram between "sacrifice quality to please shareholders" and "deceiving shareholders" has to be one big intersecting circle, you know? Especially when the guy (Zuckerberg with dual-class shares) can't ever be fired
The FT piece says "They added that the character was being trained on the billionaire’s mannerisms, tone and publicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies, so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it."
Surely the more likely outcome is that employees feel less connected to "the founder" because they know that there's a high chance they are simply talking to an AI clone?
Also... is that a thing most people want?
Is this a meaningful replacement for that? Probably not, but I’m not prepared to rule it out. Give 1 in 1000 Claudes a Zuckerberg persona and you’d get some chuckles out of it I bet.
https://www.ft.com/content/02107c23-6c7a-4c19-b8e2-b45f4bb9c...
That way AI-AI can chat and save humans’ time.
Zuckerberg has unique power among CEOs in public companies. He controls the board and he owns a majority of voting shares.
Sure they can theoretically sue him for some kind of gross mismanagement of the company or disloyalty, but why would the owner class do that? Investors are all in on AI replacing human workers. If they think Zuckerberg doing this is wrong, they would imply AI should not work in place of humans.
They can really only sue for breach of fiduciary duty. Zuckerberg controls the majority, but there are still limits on abusing the minority. I’m not sure making an AI clone falls afoul of any rules.
If the AI clone is not empowered to make decisions on Zuck's behalf, what's the point? If it is empowered to make decisions on his behalf, who is accountable for bad decisions it makes?
There have been too many high level conversations that can be summarized as: "If I send you an email, and an AI responds, I do not want to work with you."
Communication at work requires a reasonable boundary about what it means to have a professional relationship with another human being. You chose to work with a person because you trust their judgment, their word, their ability to commit to something in conversation and follow through. An AI clone can't commit to anything. It can't be held to what it said. It can't own a decision.
When you email someone, you are asking to talk to that person. When you sit in a meeting with someone, you are expecting that person's attention and judgment. Especially with business to business, the relationship is the product. There is no relationship with AI.
Respect and social contracts aside, right now, AI does not have the general intelligence to perform the executive function needed to find productivity and connect the dots, soft skill, stakeholder alignment etc.
