After dissecting the minutiae from the ongoing battle of the bozos [Note: To save you a click: it is about the Musk-Altman trial. ] , Andrew Sharp’s weekly column ends with this paragraph:
The reality is knottier. Had the OpenAI founders not launched with a nonprofit structure in 2015, they probably never recruit the talent required to compete with Google. And had they done anything else other than exactly what they did in 2018 and 2019, all of computing would be less interesting today, and the company probably wouldn’t exist eight years later. Musk’s trial has been clarifying on that point, at least for me.
The AI side of technology is one of those rare occasions where biotech may indeed be like tech: people with knowledge, skills and ambition to make the early steps towards creating something new generally don’t do it for the money. Accolades, titles, a few more increments on their h-indices sure, but unless they are seriously delusional a lab postdoc coming in on a weekend to split the cell culture generally has no hope of getting into the top percentile in income. Up until a few years ago AI research was much like that, until it wasn’t.
Sharp writes that OpenAI had to flip the switch if it were to survive in these shark Google-infested waters once they smelled blood profit an opportunity to tell a new story to investors. Same can be said about any biotech: become successful enough, and there will come a time when the academic founders are asked to step away and let someone with different motivations run the show, lest they be lost in a sea of copycats, smoke-peddlers and competitive intelligence officers. The whole business has just become too expensive for some Jonas Salk-wannabe to dabble in.
A person of bad intent may propose that the adults coming to run the show once it becomes too expensive are the ones making it expensive in the first place to justify their existence, contributing the health care cost ouroboros on the way. But that is of course nonsense. The proof is in the pudding, what with famously efficient drug development pipelines, low health care costs and improving lifespans.
So let’s do what a genuine financial scion once proposed: invert. Instead of asking ourselves how to make drug development more efficient and cost-effective, let’s see how we could make it more expensive. Number one thing to do would making it all about the money: let’s portray people who don’t capitalize on their inventions as losers not heroes, make Nobel Prize winners notable only if they are billionaires (who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last year, again?), measure success of drugs in dollars earned not lives improved, extended or saved, have everyone skim a percent or five of the money swishing around in the ecosystem as their primary source of income without any penalty for ultimate failure [Note: For more on this, do read Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game, which is about much more than the titular phrase which has become — much like his The Black Swan — a phrase people throw around without having any idea of the underlying concepts. ] guaranteeing that they will have every incentive possible to grow the pie, and I think you see where this is going because the system functions as designed so why should you complain? After all, there is no alternative.
Except that, of course, there is. It would be a big lift, to remove incentives of skimmers to inflate the balloon, stop various influencer platforms from inducing FOMO in everyone and anyone, recalibrate the median science journalist’s value system from Mr. Market to something more reality-based. Big, but not impossible, provided there is a will.
Therein lies the problem: that kind of thinking is somewhat at odds with the shared American culture, at least as recently described by Chris Arnade, that “you can live how you want, eat what you want, live (up to a point) how you want at a thin level, as long as you ultimately believe in making big money through hard work and playing by the rules.” Determining if the other two legs of the three-legged money/work/rules American stool are performing as intended I will leave as an exercise for the reader.