Paul Graham (born 1964) is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), cofounding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Crédit photo: Sarah Harlin (Public domain / CC0)
The power of established ideas is so great that even the most independent-minded people only rarely overcome it. The difference between independent-minded and conventional-minded people is that the former see past established ideas 1% of the time, and the latter 0%.
The sweet spot for present-day AI seems to be projects that were constrained by the rate at which humans could produce text. That's why it works so well for programming. Basically programmers produced valuable text. But there are lots of other projects with this quality.
Any organization with a large, protected income will tend by default toward administrative bloat. It's the same in government, at Harvard, at Google. Unless you take explicit measures to avoid it, you'll overhire.
