Sam and the Goliath

There was the Goliath, and then there was David. But in our story, let's call him Sam. So this is the story of Sam and the Goliath. The Goliath was a giant grey entity. This giant grey entity was grey not only because we didn't know if the intentions of Goliath were evil or not but also because even Goliath didn't know if it was evil or not. While Goliath pretended to be not evil, Goliath still did a lot of evil things. And while Goliath did a lot of evil things, it strangely did a lot of good things too. So no one -- not even Goliath -- knew if Goliath the Grey was evil or not. Goliath was just Grey. Goliath had a lot of giant and powerful friends. Let's call one of Goliath's friends as Musky Fungus, or Fungus for short. Fungus -- and this is only according to Fungus -- asked Goliath if the magic beans that Goliath had access to was going to be used for good or bad. Goliath responded in the most grey and nonchalant way that Fungus took it one hundred percent to mean it to be bad. So Fungus went to a bunch of his friends, his small and tiny human friends, and asked them to help him build the good-goody goodest of all magical bean things. This is where our David, Sam steps in. Sam says unto Fungus, "Hey Fungus. I will set up a company with you. I am the president of a prestigious factory, and can make magical anythings." To which Fungus replies enthusiastically and quickly gets in bed with Sam.

And then Sam and Fungus lived happily ever after, married, had three kids. Named one of them P Sarva Muthu Doubledecker Bus (if you know this reference then you are a person of culture - congratulations), I am kidding of course, nothing of the sort happened. Here is what actually happened. All was great during the first honeymoon years of this arrangement. Fungus was going around smoking weed on podcasts. Sam was going around manipulating anyone and anything around him to gain the maximum amount of work he could possibly gain. And Goliath was happily stealing people's data and churning a fat profit on trash ads. All this while, Fungus suddenly wakes up, and is like - Yo. Something is wrong, and by wrong, he meant something was going right but not with him as CEO, which is ultimately wrong. And he was right, for you see, Sam and his bunch of nerds were actually making progress, and it seemed like they could actually do this. So Fungus posited to the board that, hey, why don't y'all make me CEO, since that is what I am known for right, taking something really good, and slapping my name next to the CEO designation. So why not go ahead and just do it. Cause you know - I am Fungus Musky. And Fungus thought that everyone would go "Fuck yeah. Fuck yes, Fungus Musky", but they did not. They very much did not go "Fuck yeah. Fuck yes, Fungus Musky", in fact, quite the opposite, the three heads of the company went "Fuck you Fungus. Fuck off you moldly musky shit. Bastard", and so Fungus did. Fungus left, taking his money with him, and Sam stepped up and became King of the Magic Bean Making Thing and Is Really Open About It.

What happened next was truly crazy. Come 2023, Sam defeated the Goliath. Sam actually defeated the Goliath. How this came to be was actually quite strange. For you see, in the making of these Magic Bean things, Goliath was somewhat of an obvious bet. No one expected anyone else to solve the problem of the magically beaning beans other than Goliath. For Goliath had the magic (the resources of money, graphics cards, power, and computation, the money to actually work on it as well, and the greatest technical talent in the world. Infact, there is a number that floats around, and it is that they had the worlds top 75 percent of technical talent in the ML field) and the beans (the hardware, software, and the mathematical algorithms too -- the T in GPT stands for Transformers, which is a concept that was developed and perfected by engineers from Google), so obviously everyone thought that Goliath would do the magic of the beaning. Who else?

Well, turns out Sam believed in it more, than Goliath ever did. For you see, something strange was come-upon. The magical beaning that was only hypothesized and later perfected by Sam's team of nerds, was based on a guess -- that if you throw enough soil rich nutrients, pour enough water, and bake it in enough sunlight, all of which are extremely scarce in this land (this is important, these things though may be trivialized in relatively small forms like water, nutrients and sunlight, they are in fact extremely difficult to come by and massively expensive, to be exact thousands of humans were employed for pain-staking correction, feedback, and human-in-the-loop work, billions and billions of units of water, money, and electricity was poured into this, to give just a small staggering metric, around 40 thousand Nvidia GPUs were used for the training. That is an absurd number), and know for sure that all of this is very scarce in this land and hard to come by. Anyway, if your threw enough of these resources at the magic bean, the magic bean would partake in the magic beaning, that is, it would start behaving in wondrous magic bean ways that Sam and the rest of the world aspired for. What they didn't realize was that the magic bean, after eating up loads and loads of these resources -- would end up magic beaning in ways they didn't predict, the beans branched out to wondrous lands, like the lands of reasoning, opened up new avenues like context, things that truly magic beaned the shit out of the magic beans more than was anticipated. And this guess, was not shared by all the nerds of magic, in fact, it was considered a loose idea. Majority of the nerds in the field did not believe that throwing enough magic at the bean would end up in the bean being able to generate human like responses. It was considered a dead end but not for Sam's Nerds. No, they believed it would work, and it actually did.

Now, at this point, you may ask, "Mr. Author, if Goliath had all the resources, hardware, software, math, money, and more, in the world. Then why didn't they do it? Why couldn't they get there first? Why did have to play catchup like this?", and I welcome that question, Miss Reader. For you see, Goliath had all the resources in the world to make it happen but what would it do with it? Think about it, if Goliath released the Magic Beaning, like Sam had done, wouldn't they themselves had shot themselves in the foot? Do you know what makes up a large, a significantly large chunk of their profits? Advertisements. If they made this thing, the first and true Google killer (think about it, how much do you use Google now? Or do you simply relent with a half baked prompt to ChatGPT and get it to figure it out -- and now, think about how many more people do that too) in decades, they would lose so much in ad revenue, to something they are not even sure about as to how to pump it up with ads. So Goliath, played it easy with the magic beans, thinking - it's probably a problem for tomorrow - and then tomorrow came and shat on Goliath in the face.

This is precisely (give or take) why and how Sam shat on Goliath in the face. Just because in his factory, he had enough people believing in throwing resources would lead to the land of wonder and amazing magic bean things that other factories did not believe in. Did Sam use up a lot of resources in the process? Fuck yes. Did Sam end up creating a dark industry that would probably destroy lives, countries, and fuck a lot of resources in the ass -- abso-fucking-lutely fuck yes. But hey, at least you can now ask the Magic Bean if you should stop taking your meds or do taxes for you or whatever, and it will answer.

At the end of the day - Sam shat on Goliath in the face. The end. Isn't that what matters the most in these stories?

Maybe, maybe not.

Anyway, this is all a story, and up until this point in the story, Goliath lies six feet underground and Sam is barely holding on.

There is a however a new David in town, and her name is Claudia.

A Little Bit of Further Reading:

1. Larry Page calling Elon Musk a "speciesist" - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/14/elon-musk-drifted-from-larry-page-but-spacex-google-closer-than-ever.html
2. Elon Musk building OpenAI with Sam Altman - https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-history-of-elon-musk-sam-altman-and-openai
3. A Smoking on Joe - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/elon-musk-smokes-weed-on-joe-rogan-podcast.html
4. Google's ChatGPT before ChatGPT - https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/artificial-intelligence/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-explains-ai-chatbot-delay/130129233
5. Google Bites the Kill Search Bullet - https://thecompetenetwork.com/newsletter/google-rolls-out-ai-mode-cannibalizing-search
6. Sam the Sociopath - https://qz.com/openai-sam-altman-chatgpt-board-culture-1851506700
7. Sam the Sociopath II - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham/
8. Sam the Sociopath III - https://futurism.com/sam-altman-silencing-former-employees
9. Sam the Sociopath IV - https://futurism.com/the-byte/former-openai-employee-altman
10. Sam the Sociopath V - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/when-sam-altman-used-china-to-con-the-us-government-to-fund-openai/articleshow/130082283.cms
11. Human in the Loop - https://dig.watch/updates/openai-raised-controversies-for-outsourcing-data-labelling-to-underpaid-kenyan-labourers
12. Data Centers Are Bad for the Environment - https://unu.edu/inweh/collection/environmental-cost-of-AIs-Enrgy-Use-Carbon-water-and-land-footprints
13. Data Centers Are Bad for the Environment II -