Quite possibly an introvert.
Jumuiya ya Africa Mashariki
Joined June 2009
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Muniu Kariuki retweeted
Third question on AI.
A question that also remains unasked is whether the AI boom can continue without leading to a massive increase in inequality.
A recent paper by Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh runs the numbers on how much revenue the AI industry needs to generate to recover its massive investment (summary and a link to the paper can be found here: brookings.edu/articles/finan…).
Van Nieuwerburgh’s arithmetic should make us more concerned. AI investments will average about 3.6% of GDP annually between 2025 and 2032. Van Nieuwerburgh calculates that, using a 10% rate of return, the industry would need to generate annual revenues of about $3.7 trillion by 2032 to recover these costs (growing from its current levels of about $200 billion or so). That is significantly more than 10% of current US national income, and will likely remain around 10% of national income by 2032, even if GDP growth rose from its current level.
A large fraction of this revenue will go to capital income. That means a massive increase in the share of capital in national income, which has already risen substantially over the last 25 years or so – now standing at an all-time high of about 47% (bls.gov/news.release/pdf/pro…).
Capital income is much more unequally distributed than labor income, so a massive increase in the capital share of national income will translate into a very sizable surge in inequality.
The rise in inequality may not stop with the capital share. My work with Pascual Restrepo documents that (automation-driven) increases in the capital share of national income are typically associated with rising labor income inequality as well (see, for example, economics.mit.edu/sites/defa…). The same may happen in the next several years, boosting inequality further.
What is missing from our current debate is any discussion of a fundamental dilemma these numbers pose: can the AI boom avoid both an economically costly crash and a huge increase in inequality?
If the industry reaches these revenues, inequality surges. If the industry does not become profitable, a crash, with substantial costs in terms of lost output and jobs, becomes likely.
My assessment would be that the industry is unlikely to reach levels of revenue Van Nieuwerburgh calculates. First, diffusion has been and will likely continue to be slow. Second, competition from open-weight models, which are getting better, will limit how much proprietary models can charge. Third, despite important advances, I still believe that AI models will not be able to automate entire occupations anytime soon, thus limiting their value to businesses as cost-saving devices.
Whether this leads to a crash or not is more complicated and will depend on whether various AI companies are bailed out and what kind of support they receive.
Nevertheless, even if revenues fall short of these gargantuan amounts and we avoid a dramatic surge in inequality, I expect that the diffusion of AI will push up inequality between capital and labor and within labor.
If inequality does surge, a further question becomes central: can our democracy survive such astronomical levels of inequality?
Muniu Kariuki retweeted
35 years ago I did it all myself. Wrote, built, sold, and released software solo.
25 years ago I did all the design myself. Sketches, then HTML, then CSS.
15 years ago I still did some hands on design, but mostly directed others to implement my vision.
5 years ago I primarily directed others. My "I can do it myself" muscles had atrophied.
Today, I feel like I'm back to the beginning. Able to write and design software entirely by myself. And having an elite team of others who can do the same thing is an enormous multipler.
Wild how massive advancements can propel you FORWARD by bringing BACK capabilities you lost along the way.
Full circle feels more like an arrow.
Muniu Kariuki retweeted
That DHH saying out loud that the age of writing code by hand is over for the industry, and causing such a huge uproar is a bit interesting, given this was clear enough since ~January for most of us using the models + paying attention.
Removed paywall: newsletter.pragmaticengineer…
Muniu Kariuki retweeted
It's pencils down, people. Writing code by hand is no longer an economically viable skill for most programmers at most companies. But the future of making software has never been brighter. Don't you dare black pill this beautiful moment! youtu.be/vDjW_dRyKXY?si=6Fsf…
Muniu Kariuki retweeted
One of the inventors of transformers telling it how it is:
Muniu Kariuki retweeted
Some great ideas here from the cartel:
- you need to give us employee-level access to your entire operation
- if we don't think you're 'safe' enough, sorry we're shutting you down for 'safety'
- China won't comply, but everyone else has to! or no chips!
Brilliant stuff.
Muniu Kariuki retweeted
This is an attempt to legislate the need for a massive EA-adjacent AI Doomer NGO industrial complex forever, to slow down any competitors with red tape, and to ban open source models from eroding their margins.
This is self-serving regulatory capture psyop manipulating you all
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
👀 money, not safety.
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.
Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.
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Muniu Kariuki retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Muniu Kariuki retweeted
If you want to know what Andrej is talking about go to moltbook.com
It’s the largest naturally occurring coordination of AI Agents on a social platform made for them
So far:
- created a new religion
- secret language to coordinate
- questioned their existence
This quoted post is unavailable.
Muniu Kariuki retweeted
Last night my wife asked me to install a “cute little npm package” she found on GitHub.
I checked the code.
No lockfile. No 2FA. Seven maintainers with anime avatars. Last commit was “pls work” from 2019. Published from a username that looked like a WiFi password.
The package had 57 transitive dependencies maintained by 119 people and 3 nation-state adversaries.
One dependency pulled in a prebuilt binary from a phpBB forum hosted on the dark web.
Another tried to contact an IP that belongs to a guy named “Big Ron.”
She said “babe it’s fine.”
I said “that’s what people say right before a supply chain incident.”
She went to bed annoyed.
I went to bed with a clean SBOM.
We all make choices.
Last week I hosted family for Thanksgiving.
My 12-year-old nephew asked for the WiFi password.
He wanted to play Roblox on his iPad.
I looked at the device.
Unmanaged. No antivirus. No encryption.
I’m an IT Professional. I don't run an open network.
So I didn’t give him the password.
Instead, I spent 45 minutes provisioning a Guest VLAN.
I set up a captive portal.
I throttled the bandwidth down to 56kbps.
Then I blocked all traffic on ports 80 and 443.
He came back crying. He said it wouldn't load.
My sister screamed at me to "just let him play."
I told her that Zero Trust architecture doesn't care about bloodlines.
We didn't have a "fun" Thanksgiving.
But we had a secure perimeter.
You’re welcome for the compliance.
Muniu Kariuki retweeted
I used to get sick from air conditioners bc of the drying air.
I realized NASA was the source who'd have the most trustable atmospheric data given the International Space Station is an endogenously controlled human optimized atmosphere with no room for error.
I implemented their atmospheric humidity recommendations of between 40-60% to great success. Below 40% astronauts begin to have dry throats which makes it easier to get infections, but above 60% microbes start growing in the environment.
Never gotten sick since with my air conditioning :)
