That may very well be true, but none of those has published anything of comparable importance and quality as any of the many publications of von Neumann.
Whether some people have really superior intellects is completely irrelevant for the rest of the humans unless they distribute to the others some useful products of their intellect.
Von Neumann is one of the hundreds of people from the past who have left a priceless intellectual heritage to me and to the remainder of the mankind, so I am indebted and grateful to them.
I have no reason to feel any debt or gratitude to any of the employees of OpenAI or Anthropic.
Jane Street has published a few useful articles, so I have some gratitude towards them, but none of those was even remotely similar in importance to any page written by von Neumann.
It's an interesting discussion topic. If we have people today who are just as smart and industrious as Neumann, why aren't they making a worldwide impact? Or, if they are, why is the attribution going to the companies they work for instead of them?
It raises questions like, is it even possible to work for a company while getting credit for world-changing results?
And it implies that at any point in time, there might be thousands of Neumanns in the world, and that initial conditions matter a lot more than ability.
If there are thousands of JvN in the world, many of them surely have better initial conditions than the real JvN had. All those supposed Anthropic-geniuses ought to have a nearly perfect environment to reach their potential, but it seems it is not happening. I believe von Neumann was simply a _very_ rare kind of person.
Individuals as well as companies, that have worldwide impact, do get noticed, whether via the results themselves or peer-nominated recognition such as as Nobel Prizes, or the Fields Medal.
However, intellectual geniuses are better measured as people who revolutionized or significantly advanced the fields they worked in, and may have received recognition for doing so, not necessarily those who had highly visible worldwide impact, which is often more a matter of luck and different character attributes.
The people we recognize and celebrate as geniuses also tend to be people who had many accomplishments (because they were geniuses, not just one-time lucky), sometime seeing success on whatever they focused their attention on.
We wouldn't consider Tim Berners-Lee as a genius even though he certainly had world changing impact. Ditto for Demis Hassabis - certainly very smart, but hardly a Feymann. Someone like William Shockley also changed the world, and got plenty of recognition despite working for a commercial lab, but perhaps better regarded just as a bright engineer, right time right place.
AI is an interesting case, certainly changing the world, but the people who invented the tech, primarily Jacob Uszkoreit and Noam Shazeer, are really more akin to Berners-Lee and Shockley.
People like Von Neumann and Feymann, who shocked other geniuses with their intellect, really are a very rare breed. For people like this I'm not sure that "initial conditions" make much difference - they play by their own rules, and the world comes to them.
I don't think you can compare few-times-per-generation people like Von Neumann and Feymann with run of the mill smart PhDs.
It seems the really smart people tend to gravitate to jobs/environments where they can use their intellect rather than just looking for money. You are not going to find an Ed Witten or Terrance Tao working for Jane Street, nor would Von Neumann or Feymann be found at such a place if they were alive today.
If we had a national Manhatten project for next-gen AI, recruiting the brightest and best, then a present day Von Neumann might be there, but I'm pretty sure he would not be sitting at his desk vibe coding RL training environments.
brcmthrowaway · · focus · HN ↗
azan_ · · focus · HN ↗
adrian_b · · focus · HN ↗
Whether some people have really superior intellects is completely irrelevant for the rest of the humans unless they distribute to the others some useful products of their intellect.
Von Neumann is one of the hundreds of people from the past who have left a priceless intellectual heritage to me and to the remainder of the mankind, so I am indebted and grateful to them.
I have no reason to feel any debt or gratitude to any of the employees of OpenAI or Anthropic.
Jane Street has published a few useful articles, so I have some gratitude towards them, but none of those was even remotely similar in importance to any page written by von Neumann.
sillysaurusx · · focus · HN ↗
It raises questions like, is it even possible to work for a company while getting credit for world-changing results?
And it implies that at any point in time, there might be thousands of Neumanns in the world, and that initial conditions matter a lot more than ability.
brcmthrowaway · · focus · HN ↗
kaffekaka · · focus · HN ↗
HarHarVeryFunny · · focus · HN ↗
However, intellectual geniuses are better measured as people who revolutionized or significantly advanced the fields they worked in, and may have received recognition for doing so, not necessarily those who had highly visible worldwide impact, which is often more a matter of luck and different character attributes.
The people we recognize and celebrate as geniuses also tend to be people who had many accomplishments (because they were geniuses, not just one-time lucky), sometime seeing success on whatever they focused their attention on.
We wouldn't consider Tim Berners-Lee as a genius even though he certainly had world changing impact. Ditto for Demis Hassabis - certainly very smart, but hardly a Feymann. Someone like William Shockley also changed the world, and got plenty of recognition despite working for a commercial lab, but perhaps better regarded just as a bright engineer, right time right place.
AI is an interesting case, certainly changing the world, but the people who invented the tech, primarily Jacob Uszkoreit and Noam Shazeer, are really more akin to Berners-Lee and Shockley.
People like Von Neumann and Feymann, who shocked other geniuses with their intellect, really are a very rare breed. For people like this I'm not sure that "initial conditions" make much difference - they play by their own rules, and the world comes to them.
fourseventy · · focus · HN ↗
HarHarVeryFunny · · focus · HN ↗
It seems the really smart people tend to gravitate to jobs/environments where they can use their intellect rather than just looking for money. You are not going to find an Ed Witten or Terrance Tao working for Jane Street, nor would Von Neumann or Feymann be found at such a place if they were alive today.
If we had a national Manhatten project for next-gen AI, recruiting the brightest and best, then a present day Von Neumann might be there, but I'm pretty sure he would not be sitting at his desk vibe coding RL training environments.