One way to describe the situation at OpenAI over the past few days is:
A hot AI company was valued a few weeks ago at $86 billion.
The CEO got fired, and his cofounder and company president resigned in protest of the firing.
Because of #2, 743 out of the company’s 770 employees threatened to also resign in protest.
Unless #3 gets fixed, the company is now worth $0 billion.
Now, there are a lot of frameworks for figuring out how much value the CEO of an $86 billion company adds to the company. But none of them will give you the answer, “All of it. In an $86 billion company, the CEO is worth $86 billion and all the rest of the company’s people and assets are worth zero.” So it’s counterintuitive that that is in fact what has happened in OpenAI’s case. (If you want to read more about OpenAI’s situation, see Matt Levine’s writeup.)
Great man theory is the idea that history is shaped mainly by the actions of very rare, uniquely effective individuals. Sidney Hook put it like this: “How many battalions are the equivalent of a Napoleon? How many minor poets will give us a Shakespeare? How many run of the mine scientists will do the work of an Einstein?”
The alternative is a more “efficient market hypothesis“ approach to history, where generally events happen because of system structure or forces (societal, technological, climatological, whatever) that aren’t in anybody’s control. The leaders might edit around the edges, but generally it’s the environment that sets the leader rather than the leader setting the environment.
This isn’t the sort of question that will ever have a definitive answer, but after the OpenAI kerfuffle, score one for the first theory.
Guns are an area where the same effect is noticeable. How many minor gunsmiths will give us a Samuel Colt? How many ordinary garage workshops will do the work of a John Moses Browning? We know the names of the specific people who’ve caused the major changes in the industry.
As we’ve written before, guns are a cottage industry. If a couple people can change the path of AI or smartphones, they could certainly alter the course of the gun industry.
Who are the people shaping the industry in modern times? You could make a pretty good case for Jamin McCallum, the founder of Palmetto State Armory. And a thing that’s unique to modern times is that influencers have as much pull here as the people starting hard-goods companies. How many fewer gun owners would there be if the top few guntubers didn’t exist?
This isn’t to say that progress is all down to individuals. The overall environment matters a lot. But the key point is that even when an individual can’t fully control a situation, they usually can control it much more than most people would think.
This week’s links
OSD’s Chuck Rossi on coming out of the safe
Interview with the Liberal Gun Owners Lens podcast.
T.Rex Arms podcast on the ATF’s and California’s recent court losses
Good breakdown.
Larry Correia enumerates some common fallacies
A. Gun owners are never trained enough so are dangerous and shouldn't be armed at all.
B. Gun owners who do train are crazy psychos living out their wannabe fantasies itching to shoot someone.
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Merch
Gun apparel you’ll want to wear out of the house.
Love them or mock them, Palmetto State has done a lot for the gun community, both in terms of advocacy and making guns for reasons beyond just making a buck, as well as in innovation. For the past several years, PSA has dominated the news out of Shot Show. While others tweak existing guns, they are doing new stuff. Not perfectly of course but at least they are pushing the boundaries.