Elon Musk and Sam Altman

To the point. Musk has been left out of the staging of an "infrastructure" announcement, and he is acting as if he is very unhappy about that. What this portends for the coming months and years of the second Trump administration I do not know -- let me know, dear reader, if you figure it out.

On Tuesday, January 21, Donald Trump's first full day as POTUS the second time, he announced a joint venture that would be backed by the US and that would involve as operating companies OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank. It was supposed to use the billions those companies are pitching in, in order to build data centers and computing infrastructure across the US with an idea to advancing the development of artificial intelligence while creating more jobs than it costs -- though surely some humans will be rendered redundant in the process.

Little were they to know that the Chinese were about to steal a Long March on them with the release of a quite different AI system, DeepSeek. But we will speak of that Sputnik-type event on Friday, if the good Lord is willing and the creeks don't rise.

Trump was surrounded by technology titans when he made his announcement about the US AI program. Sam Altman (of OpenAI) was there. So were Larry Ellison and Masayoshi Son. One question people (notably Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC) started asking immediately was: where is Elon Musk? He is, or affects the image of, a cutting-edge-of-technology sort of guy, as well as a Trump confidant and an enthusiastic giver of salutes. Why was he not involved in this announcement?

Well, it turns out ... he doesn't believe in it. He is very dubious that the program will do any good and outright derisive about the notion that his fellow tech bros have ponied up the sort of money POTUS, during the announcement, said they had. What is more, he has no interest in doing the "team player" thing --- accepting the fact that he has lost out in one intra-administration dispute and keeping his mouth shut on the point -- maybe standing by quietly during an announcement.

Nooooo. Musk has made his views of "Project Stargate" KNOWN.

Indeed, Musk has gone so far as to retweet an image of a crack pipe and a caption, "leaked image of the research tool OpenAI used to come up with their $500 billion number for Stargate."

As the reference to OpenAI there hints, one of the pro-Stargate faction in particular, Sam Altman, seems to serve as Musk's Nemesis here.

Musk versus Altman. Should we care? Well: if some Night-of-the-Long-Knives happens and either Altman or Musk ends up out -- probably not in the same decisive manner that Röhm was out in July '34, but out -- will that help or hurt the cause of liberty? Quite aside from the matter of the spectatorial glee of those of us who do not, ever, salute a political leader in Sieg-Heil fashion?

That is the question. I don't have an answer. But if you want to contemplate the question further, you might consider two posts concerning Altman that I wrote on this blog in 2023, to the effect that he was a young and ambitious man on the rise.

I was right about that. https://jamesian58.blogspot.com/2023/11/who-is-sam-altman.html

https://jamesian58.blogspot.com/2023/12/more-about-sam-altman.html

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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