On the Future
Yea... you can tell this is the first thing I've written in public
The future has been bothering me a lot more than usual recently.
I have always had a bit of existential dread in me, and I guess I am also about to graduate college in a year so maybe it’s a combination of the two?
Regardless, I want to sit down and write out my thoughts on why I am so caught up about the future. I’m hoping that I find some thread of wisdom in the jumble of thoughts I have been having.
I’m not saying I’m a visionary but I have my opinions on how things will play out and what that means for how I should direct my life in the short term.
Thoughts on OpenAI
Before Mr. Leopold had his talk with Dwarkesh (first podcaster I have thoroughly enjoyed conversation contributions from), I always had an idea of how scaling laws would play out but it wasn’t entirely clear.
Back in Fall 2023, it had already been a year since OpenAI finished training GPT-4 and rumors of the algorithm “Q*” being integrated into GPTs. Clearly, they were making progress on adding logical reasoning and internalized chain-of-thought into GPT. Now it is Summer 2024. They still haven’t released a “reasoning” model yet but once they do I’m sure it’ll be a game changer for economically important jobs like programming.
Okay, so what are they generally setting the stage for? Models that will be capable of automating away entire industries. All jobs that entail digital information manipulation work like software engineering or financial analysts, will start to be eaten. This will collapse job markets for industries from the bottom up. Having a job with responsibility and/or equity will ensure some level of job security however. Moreover, AI agents that can do the grunt work will need to be overseen as it isn’t possible to hold them accountable or punish them as they have no stake.
I think a couple years down the line we will also see a resurgence in Sam Altman’s Universal Basic Income project, Worldcoin, although the price will most likely stay the same or dip lower in the short-medium term since it has terrible tokenomics (continuous dilution & selling pressure).
Implications for My Future
I have gotten a lot better at many things but I still have yet to master something. The closest I’ve got to mastery was when I #2 in Florida for tennis doubles and #7 for singles when I was 10 (if you’re reading this I would love to play sometime). However, I am not the 100x programmer. Not the 8-figure trader. Decent org president. So how can I end out on top? My mentality.
[Insert TikTok Rizz party meme]
The path that I won’t go down is becoming a junior software engineer at some large software company. GPT will outpace me before I am given meaningful equity or responsibility and the ladder will be pulled up in no time.
Equity and responsibility are going to be the two biggest deciders in wealth generation as we careen towards AGI automating jobs that can be done on a computer. So these are the two things I will be indexing for in the life paths that I am deciding to take out of college.
So if I won’t follow the traditional route and try to work my way up the ladder, what should I do?
I am lucky that I am not on an H1-B or that I am not in need of a constant salary (at least not for the first 6 months out of college). What this means is that I have been afforded the opportunity to take risk, courtesy of my parents, who didn’t have such a privilege. And since I can, I will, especially with the traditional door not offering the same value it used to.
There are two paths I can think of taking instead of the traditional one: create/join a startup doing meaningful work or do a lot of in-depth research on a specific subject and put my money where my mouth is.
My goal is to acquire status and capital for my work as soon as possible. This is because I believe we will have AGI sometime in 2026 so I won’t have much time post grad to position myself properly.
As much as I want to do research or hone my skills in grad school, time is of the essence and I can’t dilly dally while my window of opportunity closes. Making my impact as soon as possible is my number one priority. This means I will, for now, be going the startup route.
So how can I create or join a startup? What would it be about? I mean I have already covered how there’s basically nothing too special about me, so it seems like getting selected to join a cracked early team would be difficult without solid connections. This leaves me with most likely having to create my own. This would help me kill two birds with one stone as my lack of experience would fade away as I work on my own project. Even if what I end up building isn’t a masterpiece, it will be a project that can get my name out there. Which could lead to me getting solid hires and/or me getting hired by a solid startup or anything else interesting that comes my way.
This seems like the best way to go given my thesis so here’s to making shit happen.