152 - Noise Paradox
I was recently given feedback from an investor that our startup needed to "Make Noise". We didn't have a knee-jerk reaction to this, and in fact, it is something we've tried to do in a variety of ways and to varying degrees since 2021 when we heavily and publicly documented the previous research system. However, after dedicating several days to thinking this over, it is another catch-22.
The problem is three-fold:
The first issue is that information silos have not only already formed, but they've grown extremely dense and robust against all information not originating from a given echo chamber. This is true in academic, social, and corporate domains. For example, NeurIPS and GTC exist only to self-promote.
The second issue is that popularity breeds more popularity, so everything focuses on prior centers of gravity, to the exclusion of the new or lesser known. This effect is greatly amplified within echo chambers.
The third is that the clock is ticking, and all forms of global damage currently occurring compound and cascade across one another in a hyper-connected and hyper-complex system. Even if the previous two issues could be overcome within 5 years by a given entity moving from obscurity to popularity, massive and possibly irreparable and existential harm likely would have been done within that period.
Investors consciously recognize that all of the metrics and filters they use are just weak correlative proxies for trust under the best of circumstances. Of course, the best of circumstances are extremely rare in practice, with bad actors gaming those metrics (like Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) far more frequently in practice. Those metrics are, on average, inversely correlated with competence and integrity under real-world conditions, where bad actors are highly active.
I've seen a sense of helplessness in the Investment space related to this. People recognize the problem but seem paralyzed, and being bombarded with trash AI startup ideas all day and every day they shut their doors to all but the bad actors within Silly Con Valley insider networks. I've begun to wonder if many people can simply no longer recognize what competency, candor, and credibility look like.
Not everyone is "noisy" either. I'd personally rather live with zero presence on social media, but my role requires that my presence be maintained. Delivering the 3 C's above also means sacrificing the adversarial advantages of viral noisy activities, but I value those C's more than a few more likes.