Observations during an eventful week
Nvidia Fallout
From ‘This Is an Insane Scandal’: How Jensen Huang’s Downfall Could Change Everything:
It’s sketchy for chief executives to have affairs with their employees and major clients; sketchier still for them to have affairs with clients whose business is suspected of violating federal law; even sketchier for that paramour to also be a suspected secret agent of a foreign government; maximally sketchy if that foreign government is America’s top geopolitical adversary; and beyond all reckoning of sketchiness if the US government knew of these allegations and revelations and did approximately f*ck-all about it for months.
This is what is really interesting and relevant. Who, both inside and outside the government, was complicit in allowing Nvidia products to leak into China? What did they know, when did they know it, what did they try to cover up? Knives are out for Lutnick already.
Nvidia post Jensen
Interim Nvidia CEO Colette Kress Has Tried to Tame Nvidia’s Riskiest Bets and Nvidia without Huang is like Apple without Jobs: A cash spigot without real innovation. Jensen Huang has had a huge appetite for business risk, and good judgment about what business risks to take. That loss of risk capacity and judgment is going to hurt.
And a big part of a leader’s job should be building the culture and organization to operate in the leader’s absence – no one can be everywhere all the time. It famously doesn’t seem as if that development has happened at Nvidia.
AI Usage
From Everyone is hiding AI:
Drilling down:
Among managers, 43.7 percent say they have concealed AI use.
For executives, the number is 37.1 percent.
And pulling up the rear, 27.1 percent of individual contributors say they’ve concealed their AI use.
Also — and maybe this should have been the lead — 32.8 percent of executives said they trusted their own judgment less than they trusted AI. And 34.8 percent of managers said the same.
That’s about twice the rate for individual contributors or line workers, among whom 16.3 percent said they trusted AI more.
It is interesting/sad that leaders are being less truthful about AI usage than line workers. Doesn't bode well for an organization when the leaders are the most enthusiastic deceivers.
AI Usage, Again
From Eric S. Raymond:
I have deliberately chosen to keep the way I interact with large language models extremely simple, even primitive. I don't get all tangled up in spawning subagents, accumulating skills, or trying to build a software factory that runs while I'm not there. I have conversations with my robot friend in which I ask it to analyze and generate code, and that's it.
…
The reason I choose to keep it simple is because it seems to me that all these elaborations are ways to cope with the frontier models not yet being quite smart enough. But the models are always getting smarter.
...
Yes, I'm applying the bitter lesson to my own workflow. AI isn't powerful enough yet? Do the Zen thing; wait, and be aware.
This is exactly right. There is no point in becoming an expert in harnesses and prompts and agent tools because the models are racing ahead of all that knowledge. It is just dead weight you will carry ahead.
Life Advice
JA Westenberg has some generally great life advice here — If You’re 21 And Terrified, Read This. Ignore Job Titles. Chase Skills. Build Equity. Some points really resonate — focus and develop skills; learn to sell; learn to write; build equity, not salary.
The “learn to sell” point really hits — regardless of your job, you need to be good at selling — to customers, to investors, to coworkers, to potential recruits, to managers. Selling is not just for salespeople.
I am less convinced by her point to save and invest even at the beginning of your career. Software developers often talk about the sin of premature optimization — there is no point in fine-tuning code until you have solved the bigger problems in a project. And I’m not convinced that savings and investments in your early 20s are that material — it is a form of premature optimization. Better to build your technical skills, your writing skills, your selling skills than to obsess about your savings. You shouldn’t spend frivolously or descend into debt, but your financial outcomes will probably be dominated by the equity you build.