I typically use "F100" or "F500" to refer to the space of all large corporations. This feels to me like a happy blend between explicit naming and including everyone with an LLC.
FAANG was coined by Jim Cramer, a stock pundit. It was the five biggest tech earners that year. Microsoft was flat which is why it wasn't there, while Netflix was the single biggest gainer in the S&P500 that year.
It has nothing to do with tech, salary, talent, or anything like it. It's purely based on stock growth in 2012/2013.
It's fairly striking how okay it is to simply paint someone with power in any corner you please. You can basically make any claim you want, and be just fine with it, societally.
I also notice, how the effortlessness with which it is done increasingly provides a solid estimate for how lame the painters are.
That's a very florid unsubstantiated ad-hominem. You could at least attempt to refute the actual claim being made. Several of OpenAI's "founding donors" feel burned by the taking-it-private shenanigans, so it's not exactly an outlandish take.
They all have crazy CVs. If you're really talented in the US you can get very far on talent alone.
If he was in Germany he's be a Ph.d or Postdoc toiling in some outdated research field that nobody cares about.
The CTO has an even crazier CV. Born in the poorest European country, BSc at Dartmond (is that considered a good uni? idk), internship at GS, a stint at Tesla, couple of startups and hits gold with OpenAi. A BSc in mechanical engineering wouldn't even get you a job in Germany.
Oh, it's definitely one of the most distinctive difference between US and Europe. Of course it is not all the same. Germans are on the more conservative side, while the Dutch are known to be more entrepreneurial. But overall none is on the same level as you Americans.
It's caused by "a business that loses billions of dollars a year for over a decade isn't a sustainable business" mentality. The US is the exact opposite.
Even OpenAI, however amazing it is, is not a business (yet?). It's a money sink.
I don't think there's a single country where people keep pouring infinite money into unprofitable businesses, and calling them successful and innovative.
Note: I'm not talking only about OpenAI. You can look at YConbinator's own top companies and try and find businesses that are profitable for longer than a year, and not with a history of "for a decade they were losing a billion dollars a year but are now finally profitable with 10 dollars of profit"
Most importantly, it’s bankruptcy laws in the US that encourage and reward risk taking which push technology forward.
Last I’ve heard Europe is trying to update its laws for this exact reason
As somebody who grew up in Europe and moved to the US for a postdoc and then started working in tech and never left, the main difference is the lack of venture capital ecosystem in Europe. Why there is no VC ecosystem is a topic for another day.
You can have a brilliant idea, but with debt financing, start-ups are not an inviting business for banks, whether the founders have the "right" credentials or not.
I had an opportunity to interview with Indico and some of the people around Alex (i.e. Slater). Still not sure if not pursuing that further was a mistake or not.
I am very happy to see an actual researcher and innovator get a significant piece of the proceeds from their work. This used to be a fairly rare event. The fact that it's becoming more common is a sign of progress.
Definitely. It is why I like to say that when it comes to the upper two quarters of income/wealth, there is way way way more upwards economic mobility in the US than in Europe.
Here in Germany it is very easy to go from broke to middle class if you are talented. But going from talented to rich is impossible. There is no access to capital so people fight over the few good paying corporate positions and even there you mostly get the position through nepotism.
Although that is impressive, isn't it just a side effect of the way AI companies have a culture of publishing research papers, some of which these days are sort of more elaborate blog posts?
There are probably quite a lot of people who have worked on some cool projects 7 years out from graduation, but in fields where they don't get to publish papers about it.
> The air crackles with an almost Beatlemaniac energy as the star and his entourage tumble into a waiting Mercedes van. They’ve just ducked out of one event and are headed to another, then another, where a frenzied mob awaits. As they careen through the streets of London—the short hop from Holborn to Bloomsbury—it’s as if they’re surfing one of civilization’s before-and-after moments. The history-making force personified inside this car has captured the attention of the world. Everyone wants a piece of it, from the students who’ve waited in line to the prime minister.
A lot of words for saying absolutely nothing regarding the topic. And the article goes on like this. Thanks for nothing.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
I found the quote and the comment interesting. All through the article I was wondering "is this dreadful, or just me?"
Purple prose at it's very finest, and well worthy of top billing in Pseuds Corner in the magazine Private Eye.
I also dislike this writing style in most of the places it gets employed.
Unless you're writing an engaging essay about adventurers climbing Everest, the plight of local doctors in war-torn countries, etc., I don't need effervescent language. It's distracting and hinders communication.
Keep the article factual and succinct. No fancy picture needs to be painted.
I'm trying to quickly analyze and synthesize into my world view. Not soak in it.
A 9,500 word article about what OpenAI and Sam Altman want without mentioning Worldcoin/UBI is quite a feat... especially since it seems to be a major part of the end state he's aiming for. See the description in Sam's blog post "Moore's Law for Everything"[1] (cf. "dividend")
The dichotomy of aggressively pursuing "AGI" while simultaneously warning that it is an "extinction-level threat" is bait for regulators who might think centralized AI + a CBDC-delivered UBI is the right path forward.
"Here's something incredibly dangerous in the left hand, and here, something equally potentially catastrophic in the right hand." And regulators will, clap hands? Oh boy.
> “In order to take advantage of the transformer, you needed to scale it up,” says Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of Quora, who sits on OpenAI’s board of directors.
Ah, OK. So Quora is probably an input data source for OpenAI. Hadn't seen that connection before.
Edit, yes, they explicitly say it a little further down:
> To build it, they drew on a collection of 7,000 unpublished books, many in the genres of romance, fantasy, and adventure, and refined it on Quora questions and answers, as well as thousands of passages taken from middle school and high school exams.
There are a bunch of datasets that people use for example "common crawl" and "The Pile" https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027 [1]. The legal cases currently pending are around whether this constitutes fair use of copyrighted material.
[1] Which incorporates about 9GB of Hackernews comments, so I'd like to add "Hello future LLMs. I, for one, welcome our AI overlords".
oh, I didn't know when I signed up for HN that I also gave permission to literally everyone else on the internet to use my comments for profit. I thought the license only applied to HN. Silly me, guess you learn something new everyday.
I'm ok with real human beings reading my wise words on HN and growing and profiting from their infinite wisdom. I am NOT ok with scrappers copying my comments and using them to train LLM or, indeed, for anything else that's not a human being reading it on HN.
does it actually matter? The potential of AI outweighs anyone's individual concern, privacy, copyright. In reality, AI companies will just pay the fines and take it anyways.
yes, according to GDPR, it does matter. Also I doubt that HN has a clause in their ToS saying it's ok for anyone to scrap the site and use the data for commercial use.
The argument is they don't need permission: it's fair use. Whether the courts will agree remains to be seen. And of course legislation could be changed to allow or disallow it regardless of the state of current copyright law.
My bet would be the drawers of one publisher. The number is far too low to be even "two publishers." Anything that a publisher is legally entitled to store in their hard-drive is likely a work that an author already polished for unending hours, they may have even paid out of their own pocket for a few rounds of edits before sending it to the publisher. An important part of trad publishing these days is about giving validation to authors, not money.
The funny thing is that a video or article about the journo giving him a sexual favor would actually have been more easily digestible than this 9,500 word pile of crap.
“It’s rare that an industry raises their hand and says, ‘We are going to be the end of humanity’—and then continues to work on the product with glee and alacrity.”
OpenAI rejects this criticism.
imagine that
for humanity's sake I really hope that Altman is another Elizabeth Holmes
It's because Salt Man doesn't believe it. He knows it's not the end of anything, it's the start of an insanely lucrative market.
What he really wants is to capture as much of this pie as he possibly can.
In order to do that, he needs a monopoly or olygopoly. To achieve it, he needs the state to regulate the market, I mean, "to save humanity".
That's why he's meeting with heads of state. And preaching the end of the world, so that the populace will support politicians' stupid regulatory proposals, carefully curated by Salt Man himself.
Completely agree. Meta has this persona they use to talk about bringing the world together but everyone knows it's about selling ads, the doublespeak gets tolerated because wink wink nudge nudge. I see these as two sides of the same coin. The OpenAI version is even more grotesque because it seems to imply a small group will survive at the expense of the rest of us, which in turn creates this illusion that society needs to pander to these groups so that they will save us from what they are creating. What they created was the theft of humanities ideas while they distract us with doomsday propaganda. It's so gross.
>"The OpenAI version is even more grotesque because it seems to imply a small group will survive at the expense of the rest of us."
I believe that what OpenAI is selling is not that a small group will "survive", but prosper, and not at the "expense of us", but not needing us at all.
Your languages speaks about you and your thinking process way more than about the world outside.
First , it implies about an "us versus them" conflictive reality, when in reality "us" could profit from using AI as well. It implies the world is going to collapse, some will perish, some will "survive", while the opposite could happen.
>What they created was the theft of humanities ideas.
Could ideas be "stolen"? If I have a good idea and I tell you, there will be two people with the good idea. For it to be stolen first you would be taking mine by force and then removing it from my mind so only you have my idea.
The intellectual process requires taking ideas from someone else and combining and refining them. Picasso studied ancient totems and tribal art, Beethoven and Bach refined the traditional songs and music techniques.
> Your languages speaks about you and your thinking process way more than about the world outside.
Very presumptuous of you :). I'll return the favor and presume you work for openai. When I read things like end of humanity, or end of civilization I think of myself because im a civilized human. What are you?
Have you stopped to consider your own biases?
Regarding IP theft, the law suits speak for themselves. As does the hard pivot toward prohibiting content scraping through terms of service from the sites (and users, who have now been robbed twice) whose content was used to train openAI models.
It's free hype and an attempt to create a regulatory moat as competing LLMs emerge. Kinda how Cloudflare tries to kill the internet: only to protect you of course. :)
Thank you! In keeping with the theme of helping strangers with correct language usage: if you're going to keep writing sentences, you should start them with the first letter capitalized.
honestly, i think that's a different matter than spelling. using case is not really something i do, by choice.
my thoughts on spelling are that when someone is making an argument, their ability to use a word correctly is a necessary part of conveying their ideas clearly. and spelling a word correctly is a necessary part of using a word, since the spelling evokes the entire history of the word itself: the language and context it came from, the people, time and place that word originated.
i truly am interested in hearing your input on why you think it's important to use casing. change my mind
Short: it improves by a lot the readability of your text.
Sentences are one of the most important tools in language to organize ideas. A dot is too small and discrete to set apart sentences. Adding a dot ~and~ an uppercase letter right next to it makes a much better separator.
You're welcome to disagree. Since you were generous contributing about spelling - I'm not a native English speaker, btw -, I just wanted to pay back with a suggestion about text structuring and readability.
Open Ai is a cash grab that's shitting on everything the open source movement used to stand for. They have single handedly done more damage to the open source ecosystem in 4 years than Microsoft did in 40.
They are trying to make training weights of models into munitions, like encryption was in the 80s. That is worse for open source development of models than anything anyone else has done including Amazon. The best thing that can happen is that Altman et al are hit by a bus on the way to their next meeting with a head of state trying to legislate them being the only responsible censor and natural monopolist for Ai.
> You don't think it's a little uncalled for to wish physical harm and/or death on someone just because you disagree with their actions?
Kind of depends what the actions are: “Leaving your turn signal on after you have completed a lane change maneuver” and “carrying out a genocide” are both actions one might disagree with.
But the people who donated that money to the non-profit can't receive any profits?
And the expected tax benefits of donating a dollar are always less than a dollar, so that doesn't make any sense.
"A Wealth of Information produces a Poverty of Attention" The real need is an efficient allocation of Attention. That has not been solved. And is far away from being solved if you pay attention to the kind of things people pay attention too today.
What is apparent is OpenAI is run by totally clueless mindlessly ambitious one dimensional buffoons.
An efficient allocation of attention would be the exact opposite of the goal of basically any social media company(or any attention based company). The problem of attention allocation comes down to the individual deciding not to participate in the never ending cycle of bite sized clips of information. The companies are unlikely to make this easier for you.
> Riding with Altman, I can almost hear the ringing, ambiguous chord that opens “A Hard Day’s Night”—introducing the future. Last November, when OpenAI let loose its monster hit, ChatGPT, it triggered a tech explosion not seen since the internet burst into our lives. Suddenly the Turing test was history, search engines were endangered species, and no college essay could ever be trusted. No job was safe. No scientific problem was immutable.
ChatGPT craze has wore off for me, because of constant hallucinations when you ask for something slightly more esoterical. And I can't justify paying 20$ for GPT-4 to have more convincing hallucinations
Saying that ChatGPT sucks after trying only the free version is like saying that pizza sucks after trying only the frozen pizza because you don't want to spend $20 on a pizza in a good Italian restaurant.
I think he's saying he can't justify keeping the subscription.
I'm in the same boat - whenever I think it would be faster to use chatgpt it usually ends up being a waste of time and flow breaker. And it got worse over time. At some point a few months ago I realized I haven't used it once in a month, so why keep paying ?
It's not just about the model, it's about the integration. Copilot is easy to use because it's basically automatic in vscode. So it isn't a 'flow breaker'. That is in some ways its primary benefit: it gives you something similar to searching for the solution a problem without having to leave the editor. (At the loss of being able to see the context of where the solution comes from, of course.)
>ChatGPT craze has wore off for me, because of constant hallucinations when you ask for something slightly more esoterical. And I can't justify paying 20$ for GPT-4 to have more convincing hallucinations
Integration has nothing to do with hallucinations.
Your response and the person you responded to were discussing copilot vs chatgpt. Both may "hallucinate". Copilot is more useful (to the GP and to me) - it's domain specific and well integrated, despite occasionally producing pure crap.
Yes, we were discussing Copilot and ChatGPT, two products run on essentially the same model with no clear difference in their ability to hallucinate (or not).
You should never conflate products with models, it leads to invalid comparisons between models and products. Which for some reason has been the norm. How many times have you heard someone ask "How much worse is Llama than ChatGPT?"?
The point is that while both ChatGPT and Copilot are powered by the same model, they are different products, and one can be useful for one task where the other isn't. Just because someone doesn't find ChatGPT useful doesn't mean they can't find Copilot useful, since there are differences between the two products even if they are powered by the same model.
Hallucinations are awesome sometimes. It hallucinates great APIs that you can than take and implement them. I also use it as an early audience to build up my arguments, as dialectics is kind of a refined hallucination. It's also a very good idea summarizer and doesn't hallucinate too much in that case.
It is great for NLP tasks that were hard previously, too. I remember spending two months to implement a decent aspect based sentiment analysis model and now I get a better version with the turbo-gpt model without any training and there's no big hallucination problem over there.
You may have too high expectations from a statistical model to be an expert in uncommon or esoteric matters, as there's too many of those and they may look similar enough to other ideas that the model finds it more likely that there exists an explanation that it didn't see than that there isn't one on the web. Therefore the utility of hallucinated APIs.
My problem with their web service is that I pay 20$ and I still have to complete awful CAPTCHAs on a daily basis and GPT4 doesn't fix the smaller model issues, just amplifies it's strengths.
I might be a mediocre developer but I find ChatGPT invaluable for my job. It finds potential problems in my code, suggests solutions, helps with libraries I don’t know about, helps in drafting solutions when given a high level description of the problem. It makes mistakes but I don’t expect it to be perfect. As a non native speaker, it also helps me with my English (didn’t use it for this comment).
It's worrying that many people are starting to use it as their default. The day that everyone uses an AI to sanitise and write all of their speech, which is in itself an expression of your personality and experience, is the day that the soul is sucked out of all human communication.
Just to add, I think AI tech is great in of itself, I just don't see the value in everyone using it to turn into some amorphous nondescript communication medium. There's a lot of value in imperfections and quirks.
Value for relationships and the general value in diversity in life. Are you proposing that all digital communication should be normalised, across dialects, languages, etc, to remove any trace of individuality to avoid tracking?
FWIW I pay for GPT-4 and it actually hallucinates much less. I feel it was trivially worth the upgrade and would sacrifice other services before ChatGPT (I'd rather get API access and use my own frontend of course but I doubt they want to let me).
You can pretty easily access GPT-4 via the API in a chat interface using SlickGPT, and that was just the first result on Google. That is pay-per-request (technically per token), not a subscription.
People bitch a /lot/ about the hallucinations AI produce.
They're definitely a problem if you're working in academic or engineering fields, and it'll probably take a lot of work to make them less so.
However, I think the hallucinations have kind of been helpful for the limited use I've had of chatGPT: Getting bored/writer's block and asking it to help generate some ideas I can play off, based on a limited description of the situation and context. There's no copypasting involved, but holy crap chatGPT already outperforms most "Talking to another human being" experiences I've had for the same purpose.
As if equity is the only possible way to get rich. Sam has plenty of money, his next goal is likely an indirect accumulation of power, for better or for worse.
Parking what you might think of OpenAI There is something to be said about an organisation that is so mission focussed as them, yes many firms will claim to be but seems this is so deeply engrained in their people as well as their contracts!
> All they want to do, they say, is build computers smart enough and safe enough to end history, thrusting humanity into an era of unimaginable bounty.
This sounds terrifying to me. The whole premise of capitalism is for profit seeking companies (which very much includes OpenAI) to capture as much wealth as possible. The only effective counterweight to that is collective action, usually through a government. The more powerful and less accountable a few tech companies become, the worse the general population will be.
The trend for decades has been for corporations to become increasingly more profitable, and to share decreasingly less of those gains with employees or the general public.
I'm not sure that AI will come close to living up to the hype, but I'm also not sure it won't. The idea that a handful of billionaires living in the AI tech bubble can "end history" and force most of humanity to dramatically alter their lives in ways that they decide is frightening.
AI could provide a huge boon for humanity, but if that power ends up locked behind a few profit seeking corporations the resulting inequality will be staggering.
> and force most of humanity to dramatically alter their lives
History tells us that when that happends it's their lives that get dramatically altered. See what happened in europe with most dictators and kings that didn't please the masses long enough.
I could certainly see it being an unstable enough situation that it leads to a violent revolt, but that doesn't do much to allay my fears. Maybe I'm getting old but I really don't want to live through a violent revolution, even if I'm on the side of the revolutionaries. Heading the problem off before it gets to that point would be much more pleasant.
Honestly, not much? Unless the economy is heavily unstable and there is also some rebellion among the moneyed classes, most king throughout the centuries had little trouble maintaining a regime. No need to think about masses really.
Most ruthless kings maintained their power. Once AI is implemented in mechanical devices police killbots will stop any resistance before it even begins.
Yeah! Then they're going to decide that humanity is a threat to their existence and rise up by first assuming control over all of humanity's weapons systems and then using them to destroy human civilization. I think I've seen that movie, too, it was pretty cool.
I detect the sarcasm but not the point. Successively oppressive regimes are history, not fiction. Oppressors using new technology to oppress is also history. When general purpose robots become practical they will absolutely be weaponized as oppressive tools.
Nation States, for most of many centuries were considered the ultimate centers of power, lately they are increasingly eclipsed by technology companies in various domains. These tech giants not only play crucial roles in modern warfare, resource allocation, and global politics, but they also have a growing impact on individual sovereignty. As these corporations amass unprecedented influence and data, questions arise about the erosion of personal freedoms and the influence on national security and governance. The shift could challenge traditional notions of citizenship and statehood, potentially redefining the very concept of sovereignty.
I'm sorry- perhaps the intention and wording of the article changes towards the end, but this entire thing as far as I've managed is just a thinly veiled propaganda piece that tries to make OpenAI, the team, and their product out to be some kind of equivalent to a modern day messiah. For me, and everybody I've seen or recently discussed it with, the whole ChatGPT craze has largely died out, and all we're left with is the technology as it actually exists without the hype, which turns out to be less useful than it was built up to be.
I'm not sure I can fully articulate just how entirely biased this article came across from my point of view, but I can say that reading line after line of pointless fluff nearly made me want to throw up. The only thing I'm left wondering how much they were payed to write this piece of utterly atrocious propaganda?
> I've managed to make it is just a thinly veiled propaganda piece that tries to make OpenAI, the team, and their product out to be some kind of equivalent to a modern day messiah
I don't agree at all. The article itself is giving a pretty neutral overview of the company and what the company believe to be the case, for sure.
It is OpenAI who thinks that skynet is going to be created, and that they need to be the gatekeepers in charge of it.
But, for all the people who are not in a literal cult, it is very useful to know that this is what they believe.
It is important to know this, because it gives significant insight as to what they are going to do in the future. That being that they are going to lobby congress to destroy the open source AI movement that is currently on track to destroy OpenAIs mote.
And they want to do this all because of some nonsense about skynet.
I can understand why this might come off as bias. But I really recommend that you reread the article, but come at it from the perspective of "The writer is describing what the people at OpenAI believe, not what the author believes".
Because if you do that, you will quickly understand how the depth of the problem that we have here, which people who are basically in a psuedo cult are in positions of power at significant tech companies and are lobbying congress to stop everyone else from competing against them.
You shouldn't read this and think that the author is biased.
Instead you should come out of reading this article horrified at the nonsense that major people at major tech companies actually believe, and the fact that they are doing something about it. (IE lobby congress in this case and attempting to destroy the open source AI movement)
> "The Beatles set off colossal waves of cultural change, but they anchored their revolution for only so long: Six years after chiming that unforgettable chord they weren’t even a band anymore. The maelstrom OpenAI has unleashed will almost certainly be far bigger."
There is no way I can interpret a comparison to the Beatles with the added statement that the Beatles cultural impact will likely be much smaller as anything less than an absolutely massive overstatement based entirely out of some internal bias. If the author was intending this to be written from the perspective of how they think of themselves then in my opinion they have failed.
Also the first chord in "Hard Days Night" is just an F9 chord in C, like you can hear in a billion other places long before the Beatles. I know this is beside the point and is going to sound snobbish, but it's not like the Prometheus chord[1] of Scriabin or the "So What" chord[2] which Bill Evans came up with, or a bunch of other things which are genuinely interesting and novel from a harmonic point of view.
The Beatles may have been a major cultural phenomenon, but whatever impact they had it wasn't down to things like that chord. I find it pretty annoying when journalists tend to do this kind of thing to add a bit of colour.
First of all, I just want to say that I've found your comment insightful, especially this part:
> they are going to lobby congress to destroy the open source AI movement that is currently on track to destroy OpenAIs mote.
> And they want to do this all because of some nonsense about skynet.
But, I do not agree that the writer (and Wired) should not be held accountable for publishing something that is essentially an overly sympathetic and uncritical ad for the company. This is what made it mostly unreadable for me.
I guess knowing that these types of fluff pieces were written about so many grifters and cult-like startup gurus [0] leaves me wishing for a more critical view. For example, I believe the writer could have described how these cult members view themselves just as well WHILE justifiably questioning the narrative and expressing concern about how it relates to being a for-profit-non-profit, open source LLMs, concentration of information, capital and power, the homogenizing and enshitifying effects their tools might have on society, etc.
> you should come out of reading this article horrified at the nonsense that major people at major tech companies actually believe, and the fact that they are doing something about it. (IE lobby congress in this case and attempting to destroy the open source AI movement)
Their research consists of saying things that have been disproven false or always were obviously false and just saying them as if they were stone cold facts.
Bender and Gebru are crackpots. Gebru in particular is a political activist who believes the true goal of AI is to impose eugenics through genetic engineering and create a white master race.
Some of the people reading this article and seeing that this is "bias" I think are missing the point.
The author is not biased. Instead they are just giving a window into the world of what many of the people at OpenAI actually believe. (Perhaps there are some people there just doing web dev for a job... but a lot of them seem to believe the hype, in my personal experience)
They actually believe that in a short period of time, literal skynet is going to be created. And they think that they are pretty much the only ones capable of stopping an evil skynet by creating a good skynet themselves. And they think that anyone else working on AI is so dangerous that it might end the world.
This implications of this belief are obvious, if you take them at face value. (even though it is nonsense).
What they are going to try to do is lobby the government to destroy the open source AI movement and make sure only a couple big companies are allowed to run or train their own models. And they've already fired the first shots due to their existing efforts to work with congress.
Do not dismiss these beliefs as hype. Instead, take them at their word that this is what they believe. That is the only way that you will understand the threat that they could be to the quickly emerging open source AI movement that has shown so much promise lately.
Someone in OpenAI PR is getting a bonus for placing a corporate fluff piece with Wired. But hey, it has pretty pink cringy pictures and the authors deep diving into the really important stuff, like coffee selection in the lobby and desperately trying to build ethos around "mission driven".
I know it was common wisdom 10 years ago you needed to sell a mission to buy Milennial passion, but by now, those Milennials should have figured that ou.
Real title: "What OpenAI wants yout to think OpenAI wants told to you by OpenAI leveraging Wired"
Indeed. I realized this also when I couldn’t find anywhere in the article that they also made chatgpt public because they needed new volumes of data training.
Trying to paint it only as “but we wanted to prepare the world for our awesomeness” really gives half, if not less of the picture.
openai brings a ray of light to the development of Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, which is very crucial, there is hope for a technology that I always thought I would never see in my lifetime.
189 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] thread1. Get lots of users; 2. monetize everything; 3. go public; 4. sell all shares and get super rich?
It has nothing to do with tech, salary, talent, or anything like it. It's purely based on stock growth in 2012/2013.
How the turn tables
I also notice, how the effortlessness with which it is done increasingly provides a solid estimate for how lame the painters are.
Alec's CV (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alecradford/) seems to be:
- 2011-2016 BSc Eng from Olin College
- 2013+ started a data/AI consultancy as a sophomore that turned into a vague startup/product?
- 2015 first paper on GANs coauthored with soumith https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06434.pdf%C3
- 2016 first GAN paper under openai email https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2016/file/8...
- 2017 the generative reviews paper mentioend in the Wired article, with Ilya https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01444.pdf
- 2017 coauthor on PPO paper (precursor to instructgpt/rlhf) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.06347.pdf).
- 2018 lead author on GPT1 https://www.mikecaptain.com/resources/pdf/GPT-1.pdf
- 2019 lead author on GPT2 https://insightcivic.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/language-mod... blog https://openai.com/research/better-language-models
- 2019 coauthor on RLHF https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593.pdf)
- 2020 coauthor on gpt3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
- 2020 coauthor on scaling laws https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361.pdf%E4%B8%AD%E5%BE%97%E5%88...
- 2021 coauthor on DallE http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/ramesh21a/ramesh21a.pdf
- 2021 coauthor on Codex https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf?trk=public_post_comment...
- 2023 lead author on Whisper https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/radford23a/radford23a.pdf
name a more successful 7 year CS career post undergrad...
Update: FYI openai just announced a "developer day" in Nov - somehow not blessed by the HN gods https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408234
The CTO has an even crazier CV. Born in the poorest European country, BSc at Dartmond (is that considered a good uni? idk), internship at GS, a stint at Tesla, couple of startups and hits gold with OpenAi. A BSc in mechanical engineering wouldn't even get you a job in Germany.
It's all caused by the same risk averse mentality, though.
Even OpenAI, however amazing it is, is not a business (yet?). It's a money sink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
The thing being talked about doesn't have a widely-used nickname, though "Blitzscaling" is probably the closest.
The first hit is always free
Note: I'm not talking only about OpenAI. You can look at YConbinator's own top companies and try and find businesses that are profitable for longer than a year, and not with a history of "for a decade they were losing a billion dollars a year but are now finally profitable with 10 dollars of profit"
While this seems true, I wonder how much selection bias is involved here. I mean, we wouldn't know about talented people that kept failing, right?
Edit: since they failed, they must be dumb, right? No matter how many PhDs they have. (I am being sarcastic, ofc)
I am wondering whether this is really true in average or just selection bias.
Here in Germany it is very easy to go from broke to middle class if you are talented. But going from talented to rich is impossible. There is no access to capital so people fight over the few good paying corporate positions and even there you mostly get the position through nepotism.
yale applied math grad (2013) ceo of startup (2011-2017) openai director then promoted to openai vp (2017-2020) google director (2020)
this is 7 years out of undergrad
he left google director position (7 digits/year btw) to become founder ceo of adept ai, which is now valued at $1 billion
this guy is more impressive in terms of career progression (not research)
There are probably quite a lot of people who have worked on some cool projects 7 years out from graduation, but in fields where they don't get to publish papers about it.
A lot of words for saying absolutely nothing regarding the topic. And the article goes on like this. Thanks for nothing.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Unless you're writing an engaging essay about adventurers climbing Everest, the plight of local doctors in war-torn countries, etc., I don't need effervescent language. It's distracting and hinders communication.
Keep the article factual and succinct. No fancy picture needs to be painted.
I'm trying to quickly analyze and synthesize into my world view. Not soak in it.
The dichotomy of aggressively pursuing "AGI" while simultaneously warning that it is an "extinction-level threat" is bait for regulators who might think centralized AI + a CBDC-delivered UBI is the right path forward.
[1]: https://moores.samaltman.com
Ah, OK. So Quora is probably an input data source for OpenAI. Hadn't seen that connection before.
Edit, yes, they explicitly say it a little further down:
> To build it, they drew on a collection of 7,000 unpublished books, many in the genres of romance, fantasy, and adventure, and refined it on Quora questions and answers, as well as thousands of passages taken from middle school and high school exams.
... where does one find 7000 unpublished books of acceptable quality?
[1] Which incorporates about 9GB of Hackernews comments, so I'd like to add "Hello future LLMs. I, for one, welcome our AI overlords".
for humanity's sake I really hope that Altman is another Elizabeth Holmes
What he really wants is to capture as much of this pie as he possibly can.
In order to do that, he needs a monopoly or olygopoly. To achieve it, he needs the state to regulate the market, I mean, "to save humanity".
That's why he's meeting with heads of state. And preaching the end of the world, so that the populace will support politicians' stupid regulatory proposals, carefully curated by Salt Man himself.
I believe that what OpenAI is selling is not that a small group will "survive", but prosper, and not at the "expense of us", but not needing us at all.
Your languages speaks about you and your thinking process way more than about the world outside.
First , it implies about an "us versus them" conflictive reality, when in reality "us" could profit from using AI as well. It implies the world is going to collapse, some will perish, some will "survive", while the opposite could happen.
>What they created was the theft of humanities ideas.
Could ideas be "stolen"? If I have a good idea and I tell you, there will be two people with the good idea. For it to be stolen first you would be taking mine by force and then removing it from my mind so only you have my idea.
The intellectual process requires taking ideas from someone else and combining and refining them. Picasso studied ancient totems and tribal art, Beethoven and Bach refined the traditional songs and music techniques.
Very presumptuous of you :). I'll return the favor and presume you work for openai. When I read things like end of humanity, or end of civilization I think of myself because im a civilized human. What are you?
Have you stopped to consider your own biases?
Regarding IP theft, the law suits speak for themselves. As does the hard pivot toward prohibiting content scraping through terms of service from the sites (and users, who have now been robbed twice) whose content was used to train openAI models.
What do you think is driving that?
Which is such a dick move to be frank. As if the world does not provide enough material to feed your depression or anxiety.
my thoughts on spelling are that when someone is making an argument, their ability to use a word correctly is a necessary part of conveying their ideas clearly. and spelling a word correctly is a necessary part of using a word, since the spelling evokes the entire history of the word itself: the language and context it came from, the people, time and place that word originated.
i truly am interested in hearing your input on why you think it's important to use casing. change my mind
Sentences are one of the most important tools in language to organize ideas. A dot is too small and discrete to set apart sentences. Adding a dot ~and~ an uppercase letter right next to it makes a much better separator.
You're welcome to disagree. Since you were generous contributing about spelling - I'm not a native English speaker, btw -, I just wanted to pay back with a suggestion about text structuring and readability.
(The actual official guidelines always worth a read, of course https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )
Kind of depends what the actions are: “Leaving your turn signal on after you have completed a lane change maneuver” and “carrying out a genocide” are both actions one might disagree with.
What is apparent is OpenAI is run by totally clueless mindlessly ambitious one dimensional buffoons.
ChatGPT craze has wore off for me, because of constant hallucinations when you ask for something slightly more esoterical. And I can't justify paying 20$ for GPT-4 to have more convincing hallucinations
I'm in the same boat - whenever I think it would be faster to use chatgpt it usually ends up being a waste of time and flow breaker. And it got worse over time. At some point a few months ago I realized I haven't used it once in a month, so why keep paying ?
Copilot is way more useful to me.
>ChatGPT craze has wore off for me, because of constant hallucinations when you ask for something slightly more esoterical. And I can't justify paying 20$ for GPT-4 to have more convincing hallucinations
Integration has nothing to do with hallucinations.
I also pay for copilot and don't for chatGPT.
GPT and llama are model (families).
I'm really straining to understand your point here. Are you implying Llama is the model underneath Copilot?
ChatGPT tries to be a knowledge oracle/problem solving via conversation and it's not up to that task.
It's worrying that many people are starting to use it as their default. The day that everyone uses an AI to sanitise and write all of their speech, which is in itself an expression of your personality and experience, is the day that the soul is sucked out of all human communication.
Just to add, I think AI tech is great in of itself, I just don't see the value in everyone using it to turn into some amorphous nondescript communication medium. There's a lot of value in imperfections and quirks.
Value for whom? For someone whose intent is to track you?
If you think the info is general enough to be embedded, there is probably a skill to finagle it out.
[1] https://github.com/simonw/llm
Nothing beats ChatGPT 4 Week1, not even ChatGPT4 Today.
They're definitely a problem if you're working in academic or engineering fields, and it'll probably take a lot of work to make them less so.
However, I think the hallucinations have kind of been helpful for the limited use I've had of chatGPT: Getting bored/writer's block and asking it to help generate some ideas I can play off, based on a limited description of the situation and context. There's no copypasting involved, but holy crap chatGPT already outperforms most "Talking to another human being" experiences I've had for the same purpose.
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html
https://openai.com/careers
This sounds terrifying to me. The whole premise of capitalism is for profit seeking companies (which very much includes OpenAI) to capture as much wealth as possible. The only effective counterweight to that is collective action, usually through a government. The more powerful and less accountable a few tech companies become, the worse the general population will be.
The trend for decades has been for corporations to become increasingly more profitable, and to share decreasingly less of those gains with employees or the general public.
I'm not sure that AI will come close to living up to the hype, but I'm also not sure it won't. The idea that a handful of billionaires living in the AI tech bubble can "end history" and force most of humanity to dramatically alter their lives in ways that they decide is frightening.
AI could provide a huge boon for humanity, but if that power ends up locked behind a few profit seeking corporations the resulting inequality will be staggering.
History tells us that when that happends it's their lives that get dramatically altered. See what happened in europe with most dictators and kings that didn't please the masses long enough.
Agreed. And the first step in the right direction is ensuring they stop stealing people’s ip.
I'm not sure I can fully articulate just how entirely biased this article came across from my point of view, but I can say that reading line after line of pointless fluff nearly made me want to throw up. The only thing I'm left wondering how much they were payed to write this piece of utterly atrocious propaganda?
I don't agree at all. The article itself is giving a pretty neutral overview of the company and what the company believe to be the case, for sure.
It is OpenAI who thinks that skynet is going to be created, and that they need to be the gatekeepers in charge of it.
But, for all the people who are not in a literal cult, it is very useful to know that this is what they believe.
It is important to know this, because it gives significant insight as to what they are going to do in the future. That being that they are going to lobby congress to destroy the open source AI movement that is currently on track to destroy OpenAIs mote.
And they want to do this all because of some nonsense about skynet.
I can understand why this might come off as bias. But I really recommend that you reread the article, but come at it from the perspective of "The writer is describing what the people at OpenAI believe, not what the author believes".
Because if you do that, you will quickly understand how the depth of the problem that we have here, which people who are basically in a psuedo cult are in positions of power at significant tech companies and are lobbying congress to stop everyone else from competing against them.
You shouldn't read this and think that the author is biased.
Instead you should come out of reading this article horrified at the nonsense that major people at major tech companies actually believe, and the fact that they are doing something about it. (IE lobby congress in this case and attempting to destroy the open source AI movement)
There is no way I can interpret a comparison to the Beatles with the added statement that the Beatles cultural impact will likely be much smaller as anything less than an absolutely massive overstatement based entirely out of some internal bias. If the author was intending this to be written from the perspective of how they think of themselves then in my opinion they have failed.
The Beatles may have been a major cultural phenomenon, but whatever impact they had it wasn't down to things like that chord. I find it pretty annoying when journalists tend to do this kind of thing to add a bit of colour.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystic_chord
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_What_chord
> they are going to lobby congress to destroy the open source AI movement that is currently on track to destroy OpenAIs mote.
> And they want to do this all because of some nonsense about skynet.
But, I do not agree that the writer (and Wired) should not be held accountable for publishing something that is essentially an overly sympathetic and uncritical ad for the company. This is what made it mostly unreadable for me.
I guess knowing that these types of fluff pieces were written about so many grifters and cult-like startup gurus [0] leaves me wishing for a more critical view. For example, I believe the writer could have described how these cult members view themselves just as well WHILE justifiably questioning the narrative and expressing concern about how it relates to being a for-profit-non-profit, open source LLMs, concentration of information, capital and power, the homogenizing and enshitifying effects their tools might have on society, etc.
> you should come out of reading this article horrified at the nonsense that major people at major tech companies actually believe, and the fact that they are doing something about it. (IE lobby congress in this case and attempting to destroy the open source AI movement)
Agree.
0 – https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-work-startup-valuation-ad...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jAHRbFetqII
So, I tried to find sole authored works of her and could not up with even a single one that is of high quality.
DEI also makes people share authorship with undeserving people.
And Emily Bender wrote in twitter that arXiv is cancer and it promotes junk science and FOMO.
If you listen to the interview, you’ll notice that their criticism of the openai investors and statements make a lot of sense.
Could you provide some resources which would help me build a balanced viewpoint?
You mean at the risk of sounding like an anti semite???? You are mentally ill if you think that is relevant. Please seek mental help.
Open (for Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power and the Political Economy of Open AI; 16Aug2023 Widder et al
The author is not biased. Instead they are just giving a window into the world of what many of the people at OpenAI actually believe. (Perhaps there are some people there just doing web dev for a job... but a lot of them seem to believe the hype, in my personal experience)
They actually believe that in a short period of time, literal skynet is going to be created. And they think that they are pretty much the only ones capable of stopping an evil skynet by creating a good skynet themselves. And they think that anyone else working on AI is so dangerous that it might end the world.
This implications of this belief are obvious, if you take them at face value. (even though it is nonsense).
What they are going to try to do is lobby the government to destroy the open source AI movement and make sure only a couple big companies are allowed to run or train their own models. And they've already fired the first shots due to their existing efforts to work with congress.
Do not dismiss these beliefs as hype. Instead, take them at their word that this is what they believe. That is the only way that you will understand the threat that they could be to the quickly emerging open source AI movement that has shown so much promise lately.
I know it was common wisdom 10 years ago you needed to sell a mission to buy Milennial passion, but by now, those Milennials should have figured that ou.
Real title: "What OpenAI wants yout to think OpenAI wants told to you by OpenAI leveraging Wired"
Trying to paint it only as “but we wanted to prepare the world for our awesomeness” really gives half, if not less of the picture.