Smart people doing remarkable things don't seem to have a place in our society anymore, neither in academia nor in the private economy. Sure there are exceptions.

Microsoft Research, Google X and of course a handful of universities that actually work as they are supposed to, but for most of my ex colleague's these weren't real options as noone ever instilled the courage in them to find their way there, or survive the competition.

It's strange that most of them are building CRUD Software, Writing Shaders for Game Engines or work in marketing, instead of pushing us towards breakthroughs in CV and with that AI.

I think the bar for top talent is higher than is obvious, and it's lower than it used to be.

It's not at the level of 'smart and gets a lot of stuff done' - it's at the level of good as McCarthy and K&R and the guys (and occasionally the women) who invented coding in the 60s and 70s.

Most of them have been forgotten, but many of them had phenomenal skills - the kind of people who would work for a couple of months on a project, type in all the code on a single day, and have it work perfectly first time.

Or who would sketch out a fully functional timesharing OS for a new hardware architecture over a weekend and have it finished and working a couple of months later.

Or the small team at Xerox PARC led by Charles Thacker who decided to clone an entire DEC PDP-10 mainframe as a side project, because management wouldn't let them buy one and they wanted something nicer to code on.

What happens when this level of genius in small groups is cut loose on financial markets where "Make money is the only goal"? You get these space shuttles. They are so complex because that's all these people ever think about.

What are these places?

Outside of a research lab, even if you had infinite money and hiring power, would you even want to staff a company where "where every single engineering position is occupied by a bonafide, legitimate, super-genius"?

If you're doing engineering (as opposed to pure research) the reality is that there's always a lot of unexciting work. Your super-geniuses don't care to do that, what you need is people who are smart enough, but more importantly reliable and willing to keep showing up and doing the work even when there's zero chance it puts them on track for a Nobel price (or field equivalent).

Hire thousands of half genius from the best Universities in the World.Torture them with algorithmic party tricks, give them infinite budget and time for years... And....When they are unable to create competitive products outside of the usual cash cow, blame the CEO?

But they put up with it because it's a career and not a job. Many of them couldn't handle a minimum wage or working class job. No breaks, short lunches, no wriggle room for life, permanent fast-tracks to firing.

Likewise the most talented scientists, engineers, and developers I know are always the ones who have a harder time finding work. Why? Because they can intimidate potential bosses and co-workers without meaning to. Because they're indifferent a lot of marketing schlock or the jargon flavor of the month. And because really smart people constantly undersell themselves. In fact, smart people who don't are most likely narcissistic. (Yes, this means most 'rockstar' 'talent' is neither.)

The average person, regardless of what hip SV types spouting the kool-aid say, is unlikely to feel comfortable hiring someone who makes them feel threatened, confused, or inferior. Even with the best intent to hire people 'more talented' than the manager or existing developers, there're many other divides that preclude there being more than a small difference in skill.

Intellectual output can be much more easily and freely copied than physical labour (e.g software,music etc) so do we really need billions of mediocre scientists/programmers/artists or just a few million good ones who's work everyone else can reap the benefit from?

Overall: I am cynical wrt OpenAI. I just don't think that OpenAI is acting in the best interests of humanity and these appointments are strategic decisions taken to prolong survival long enough to execute their strategy and dominate. That was what I was originally insinuating.

Technological development keeps intersecting into the space of ethics. Time and time again man proves that he cannot rise above his own personal world views to focus on universal values when developing technology. We’ve seen this repeatedly. These people designing these APIs and building the underlying models are making consequential decisions on behalf of mankind. In a way the world is delegating all this power to unelected individuals who have very little in common — in terms of values and ethics — with mankind at large.

I'm "smart" relative to the general population, but you could have thrown all the education in the world at me and I'd never have become Alexey Petrov.

I have a hunch that the Alexey Petrovs -- the upper 0.001% or whatever -- of the world do tend to get recognized and/or carve out their own space.

I think the ones who'd benefit from your plan would be... well, folks like me. I mean, I did fine I guess, but surely there are millions as smart as me and smarter than me who fell through the cracks in one way or another.

I suspect fairly quickly we'd run into some interesting limits.

For example, how many particle physicists can the world actually support? There are already more aspiring particle physicists than jobs or academic positions. Throwing more candidates at these positions would raise the bar for acceptance, but it's not like we'd actually get... hordes of additional practicing particle physicists than we have now. We'd also have to invest in more LHC-style experimental opportunities, more doctorate programs, and so on.

Obviously, you can replace "particle physicist" with other cutting-edge big-brain vocation. How many top-tier semiconductor engineers can the world support? I mean, there are only so many cutting-edge semiconductor fabs, and the availability of top-tier semiconductor engineers is not the limiting factor preventing us from making more.

There are also cultural issues. A lot of people just don't trust the whole "establishment" for science and learning these days. Anti-intellectualism is a thing. You can't throw education at that problem when education itself is seen as the problem.

Even in general at very large scale, a world of limited and shrinking economic opportunity but unlimited and expanding education (well, until the future student loan crash arrives), means you can try to pile on busywork but the people shamming and pencil whipping it are better at shamming and pencil whipping and everything else, than any other cohort in the history of humanity...

As a cultural touchstone look at the movie "Office Space" still relevant today. He stares at the walls for an hour or two every day trying to look busy. Sure you might have to pass three interviews with ten people while proving P=NP and writing a javascript compiler to GET the job, but to DO the job you have to update TPS report headers every couple weeks and that's about it, other than loading letter size paper into the laser printer and staring at walls looking busy. Not to spoil the plot of the movie but the lead actor is not a theoretical physicist although if he were, it would be a dream job for him, work about an hour a week then look really busy the other 39+ hours while working on physics.

I get the feeling that the IQ of the average developer is dropping by the month. The software industry is growing at very high rates, requiring more and more developers. There are only so many smart people.