skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many would consider OpenAI a YC startup considering it branched out of YC research, participated in one of the batches in some form, got investment from YC, and was led by Sam Altman (an alum and leader) up until today. Otherwise, maybe it's just a timing thing? Tesla, SpaceX, Google, etc all predate YC, so maybe sample size isn't big enough yet?

Alternatively, maybe big foundational ideas aren't super compatible with the "take over the world in three months" format? I'm not familiar enough with the process to be sure, though, so take this as wild speculation.
Lol, is this supposed to be an argument in favor of that structure?

Have you read any news about Mozilla's budget in the past 10 years or so?
"I thought DeepMind was just prediction engine; at Move 37 I realized that Machine is creative, at least within Go."

—Lee Sudol (9d)
These Kara Swisher's tweets aligns extremely closely with the following pseudonymous Reddit user Anxious_Bandicoot126 from 4 hours ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/comment/k9p...

> I feel compelled as someone close to the situation to share additional context about Sam and company.

> Engineers raised concerns about rushing tech to market without adequate safety reviews in the race to capitalize on ChatGPT hype. But Sam charged ahead. That's just who he is. Wouldn't listen to us.

> His focus increasingly seemed to be fame and fortune, not upholding our principles as a responsible nonprofit. He made unilateral business decisions aimed at profits that diverged from our mission.

> When he proposed the GPT store and revenue sharing, it crossed a line. This signaled our core values were at risk, so the board made the tough decision to remove him as CEO.

> Greg also faced some accountability and stepped down from his role. He enabled much of Sam's troubling direction.

> Now our former CTO, Mira Murati, is stepping in as CEO. There is hope we can return to our engineering-driven mission of developing AI safely to benefit the world, and not shareholders.

---

The entire Reddit thread is full of interesting posts from this apparently legitimate pseudonymous OpenAI insider talking candidly.
Sam Altman Exits as OpenAI CEO
I'm guessing that's the point. Ethics required getting out of the 501(c)(3), so the ClosedAI thing sounds more ethical. The 501(c)(3) should've collapsed or not exist.
it is said, it is a "poor single-core server"
Altman has always been a bit sly, I am not surprised if he has made some backroom deals that don't sit well with the board. But there is a fine line between doing the right thing and unable to do anything at all. Sometimes, it is better to have the moderately bad guy that can at least bring progress instead of a virtuous leader that can't win a fight.

I guess only time will tell. Right now though, OAI is not looking good and depend on how Microsoft was involved in all of this, someone's seat might get a bit shaky.
What has me scratching my head is the fact that Altman has been on a world tour preaching the need for safety in AI. Many people here believed that this proselytizing was in part an attempt to generate regulatory capture. But given what's happening now, I wonder how much Altman's rhetoric served the purpose of maintaining a good relationship with Sutskever. Given that Altman was pushing the AI safety narrative publicly and pushing things on the product side, I'm led to believe that Sutskever did not want it both ways and was not willing to compromise on the direction of the company.
"I'm just getting simple rejection emails."

Luxury.
I don't see how that follows at all. Academic arguments about the structure of the heavens are irrelevancies except to the people in the argument (and those threatened by it). Sure, absolutely: you don't censor opinions about astronomy just because they seem "probably wrong" or demand blind adherence to the best available theory. You do the science, because sometimes scientists are wrong.

But pandemic advice isn't about doing good science, it's about risk management. If your goal is to keep as many people alive as possible, you bet on the consensus science because it's probably right. And it was.
Reading between lots of lines, one possibility is that Sam was directing this "insanely good thing" toward making lots of money, whereas the non-profit board prioritized other goals higher.
Or we could try to train it to do something, but the intent it learns isn't what we wanted. Like water behind the dam should be a certain shade of blue, then come winter it changes and when the AI tries to fix that it just opens the dam completely and floods everything.
It sounds like you’re literally describing what companies already do. They charge you a fixed rate or sometimes variable rate that isolates you from the volatility of the actual real time pricing market. What is different here? The power companies are essentially self insuring. Which generally is cheaper than buying a third party insurance product, all else equal.
This article suffers from a bad vocabulary collision. Distributed computing existed long before SETI@home, and will continue to exist as long as there isn’t just one computer doing everything.

“Volunteer computing” is probably a better way to refer to this phenomenon.
Look, i dont have kids, so take this with a grain of salt, but even crossing the street at an interstion with clear rules, in a walkable city, is dangerous these days.

Everyone is on their phones, not paying attention. I dont know who to blame, but collectively we are kinda F'd.

Just the other day someone almost hit, while i was walking in a desiginated walking area and they just said "sorry, didnt see you." I replied in kind "duck you get off your phone"

it sucks kids cant run around and play, i did, but also we've gotten ourselves in a bad spot with screens and phone.

im not advocating anything, just saying, it sucks everwhere
I think the ratio is basically the opposite, but thanks for explaining.
Because Sam Altman was fired and it blew up the server.

OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman (openai.com)
3939 points by davidbarker 1629 comments.

The admins had to paginate the comments.

Other than that, who knows? When sites are slow, I hop over to HN because it's the fastest to respond, being text-based, and it tells me that the internet is awake.
Who said it's awful for a person to live in debt?

If your salary increases 3% a year every year in real terms, and it's cheap to borrow, then it's absolutely mathematically optimal to carry a level of debt that you never pay off. In fact, you'd be a sucker if you didn't.

The main difference between people and government is that people like to retire, while governments can live forever.

People ideally need to stop carrying debt at some point in their lives because they need to save for retirement. Governments don't need to do that.

It's kind of counterintuitive, but governments don't ever need to pay off all their debt. They just need to keep the overall debt level below a certain ratio to GDP. Debt can keep growing as GDP keeps growing.
They were replying to someone who was saying something about "people"; they only said something about "I" (themselves).
But usually in my experience they do mean you actually get to go through the machine and aren't just auto rejected without even getting to talk to a human.
It does not matter. They have fiduciary duty in the interest of the company's mission. Maybe Altman wanted to monetize the company in a way that board deemed not aligned with their mission.
i wish and suppose therefore should build a HN client that lets me elide nonsense by regex on URL or even content. i'd nuke everything from twitter first, and "unnamed sources" second.
I thought mining equipment like that already was electric?

1978: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288

> Gross power: 16.56 megawatts of externally supplied electricity
Sorry. Robust research says no. Remember, people thought Eliza was AGI too.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03762

If it was really AGI, there won't even be ambiguity and room for comments like mine.
The difference is that it’s not designed in China. Foxconn certainly provides input to the manufacturing process, but the engineers in the US keep the quality bar high.
So, in this round, Woz won?
It has basically been confirmed

https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255
There is an impedence mismatch hinted at here:

> The systematic underestimation of the costs and effort operations require is what makes the principle of “Software as a Service” (SaaS) successful.

Using free software makes vast sense both as an individual and as an enterprise. But there is vast gulf of difference between an individual bash script and a multi-node enterprise service, e.g. ElasticSearch.

While I respect RMS and have been an FSF member for decades and think that his absolutist views are an essential ingredient in the overall chemistry, he's not temperamentally suited to running a business.

What is needful IMO is a step back from arguing about One True License and instead some analysis of what is sought by them, and maybe a narrowing of the mosaic of licenses into a handful of categories that we can understand, if not enjoy.

Then, perhaps, the spectrum of developers from individual- to enterprise- can live in harmony and swellness.

Or at least put the lawyers on a diet.
Tinfoil? Hat time.

Everyone from Greg to Sam to Ilya keep hanging on "AGI for the benefit of humanity". According to OpenAI's constitution: AGI is explicitly carved out of all commercial and IP licensing agreements, including the ones with Microsoft. Nuclear.

Well apparently, the board decides what will be AGI. But 3 (everyone now left except ilya) of those board members don't even work at Open AI and are only privy to what the rest share.

Yesterday, this is what Altman said, "On a personal note, like four times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten to be in the room when we pushed the veil of ignorance back"

He goes on to say, "By next year, the model capabilities will take such a leap forward that No one would have expected"

Now keep in mind, while we can all speculate on just how much the next iteration will be better, the idea that they could be sitting on something noticeably better is not far fetched at all. Open AI sat on GPT-4 for 8 months before announcing it to the public.

https://www.youtube.com/live/ZFFvqRemDv8?si=yUnLvk1gHNocxUVu

2 days ago, Sam is asked about what's left for AGI. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpNG0CJRMM

He says they can push Language Models much farther but that there are more breakthroughs required. But here's where it gets weird. He immediately starts talking about Super Intelligence and "discovering new physics" as the bar. He says, "If it can't discover new physics, I don't think it's a super intelligence". Nobody asked you about this Sam..

In No prior podcast 2 weeks ago with Ilya, he says Transformers can obviously get us to AGI.
https://twitter.com/burny_tech/status/1725578088392573038

To Ilya, they built AGI internally, and Altman wanted to release/monetize it early and tried to undersell it as being far away from AGI to the rest of the board. Ilya considers it AGI, or something extremely close to it, and deserving of far more caution, and so decided to convince the board that Altman was underselling the capabilities of their newer models and was risking a premature release of AGI. If true, then it could be seen as Altman lying about something that is foundational to their mission (which is to safely and responsibly release AGI out into the world) and subsequently fired him.

Characterizing Dev Day as "too far" makes more sense in this scenario. Ultimately, the only reason SOTA LLM Agents aren't particularly dangerous is competence. If you suddenly bumped the latter up while laying the grounds for the former..
> Imagine you worked at OpenAI and you just found out that your shares could have been worth a tremendous amount and now their future is, at best, uncertain.

I don't think this is as damning as you think.

I truly believe, especially in this space, there are enough idealists to fill the seats. The reality for a lot of people could quite literally be:

* My shares become massively valuable via some unlikely non-profit to for-profit means. I have generational wealth, but all of my friends and colleagues still need to work. Someone else will create something better and screw the entire world over.

* I work for a non-profit that's creating the most radical, life changing software for all people. Being a non-profit means this company can focus on being the best thing possible for humanity. While I may still have to work, I will be working in a world where everything is happier and more properous.
The BSL and SSPL licenses were created with an explicit goal of protecting the revenue of SV startups.

Frankly, I'm tired of portraying those startups as some kind of underdog freedom fighters. They are billion-dollar corporations upset that other billion-dollar corporations are profiting using their software.

It's perfectly fine to build your business on Linux or Apache, but if someone wants to use an SV startup's project, like Elasticsearch, suddenly it's immoral and we must turn the whole world of FOSS licensing upside down to fight it.
Greg was the CTO before Murati. Then he was "promoted" to President and Murati replaced him as the CTO.
The problem with communicable diseases is that "the people in charge" are both people at various levels trying to impose or convince people to act in certain ways, as well as the individuals who are literally walking around infectious, or with disregard to whether or not they and those they interact with are infectious.

> With COVID, I feel like it was a bunch of technocrats, that had no "human touch".

No one speaking ex cathedra to a populous has a human touch that will speak to everyone they're speaking to. I once went to a personality theory conference and enjoyed myself, but the endnote speaker gave a talk where he mentioned the need for love (or something in that vein using the word "love"), and I immediately felt alienated from the entire event.
It became irrelevant when experiments were able to detect a rotating reference frame through precise tests of Newton's laws. I'm thinking of the Coriolis force and Foucault's pendulum as examples.
Oh how the goalposts doth shift. We are talking about ebiking, not walking. Those of us who are mindful of ecology, climate, and urbanism know lack of walkability is a problem. It doesn't have to be, but it is. It is another issue worth addressing at the policy and funding level.

If people can walk for some of their trips 50-80% of the year and ebike for most of the rest, that is a huge win even if not everyone can adapt to the 'unbearable' sacrifices that go along with that kind of change. "But not literally everyone can do it so it's a terrible suggestion and you are an elitist." Ok cool.
Is it a winning move though? The biggest loser in this seems to be the company that was bankrolling their endeavor, Microsoft.
I think even with desktops is that they consume much less power, generate less heat and make less noise (fans run slower) when idle vs. operating at max power on distributed computing tasks. This wasn't historically the case.
Show HN: Convert MIDI Files into Customizable Animated Visualizations
Hey Everyone,

I shared a video last night, and now I'm following up with the code.

Hope you enjoy
Jensen will take Sam's calls in a heartbeat and personally ensure he has what he needs.
I am not a story (2015)
The usual executive departure I have seen is all sugarcoated. Like XXX is having health problems so step down. Or XXX wants to spend more time with family. Or XXX now has a different interest and is leaving to pursue the new opportunity.

This statement doesn’t rhyme with planned transition at all.
Research from PRC (across all of science, not specific to AI) has a terrible reputation. They are rewarded for sheer quantity. You can easily find many articles discussing this phenomenon.

So the volume of Chinese AI papers says little to nothing about their advancements in the field.
That was my experience 10 years ago when I last looked. Had referrals to specific jobs and also "general availability" from several senior, respected people in my field. Got one interview which went well and then went silent. Rest got either no response or the snotty "Have him apply on the website."
Yeah the actual quote is pretty bad. It touches all the bases:

- broad generalizations about ethnic groups

- implication that the Jewish community is somehow collectively conspiring to push some narrative

- “no, you’re racist”

- making it a point to be unapologetic about directed hatred towards jews

- make sure it’s clear that bad things happening to Jews isn’t itself a bad thing, it’s them getting what they deserve

- implying Jews and whites are mutually exclusive groups

- somehow sliding a “fuck immigrants” sentiment in there at the end

People got all uppity about Kanye, but even he wasn’t on this level.
Altman is virtually a household name. Relative to that - Ilya is unknown.
if you push the field forward and you are not making the money, then someone else is off your work. if you push the field forward in a valuable way, you should receive that value in form of money such that you can decide how to allocate that capital to make even further contributions.
how could this be free ?
Try playing around with this: https://model.energy/
Let's not confuse ChatGPT "safety" with the meaning of the word in most contexts. This is about safely keeping major media of all kinds aligned with the messaging of the neoliberal political party of your locale.
Beginning January 1, 2024, the $7,500 EV tax credit can be taken at the point of sale, meaning you can use it as a downpayment or to lower your monthly payments. That's a huge incentive to delay purchasing until January, and, I think, one of the unacknowledged drivers of the 4th quarter "slow down."

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/ev-tax-credit-elect...
> Fukushima happened because the plant was hit with both an earthquake and a flood significantly exceeding its operational parameters (already extremely high)

That's exactly the incorrect analysis that caused the meltdown!

That use of "and" and "both" is simply wrong. It wasn't an unforseeable collision of two events, it was a single event (an earthquake) with a predictable correlate (a tsunami). It's not like people didn't know that tsunamis follow earthquakes, and no one who does know that would make the argument you just did.
A few years ago I did one or two phone interviews with a FAANG company, passed with flying colours, and was told by a manager I'd be flown in for the final on-site interview. The manager told me to send my resume to HR so they could make it official..

...and I got rejected by HR, because I didn't have 8 years of working experience at 23.

Still the funniest job hunting story I have.
TODO; though/also - after a gas turbine or solid-state TPV cell array - you have to store electricity, which is lossy and inefficient:

An electric motor's efficiency is not necessarily the same as its generator efficiency in reverse.

Gravitational Potential Energy

CAES Compressed Air Energy Storage:

Solar thermal energy >
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy :

> Electrical conversion efficiency: Of all of these technologies the solar dish/Stirling engine has the highest energy efficiency. A single solar dish-Stirling engine installed at Sandia National Laboratories National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF) produces as much as 25 kW of electricity, with a conversion efficiency of 31.25%. [66]

Szilard-Chalmers MOST process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027647 ...18 years at what conversion efficiency?
A little late to doubt her isn't it? Do you think she's just been sitting quietly in a corner for the last 5 years at OpenAI while it turned the entire tech industry upside down?
That’s the funny thing isn’t it? Hinton, Bengio, and Sutskever, chief scientist of the tech behind OpenAI, all have strong opinions one way, but HN armchair experts handwave it away as fear mongering. Reminds me of climate change deniers. People just viscerally hate staring down upcoming disasters.
While there would be some efficiency savings from carrying around less weight, I'm not sure one should expect lower maintenance costs with smaller batteries since the wear per cell would be higher in inverse proportion to the size of the battery.
You got downvoted fast, but I too agree, CTO should be technical people. There are enough people's people in the other seats.

She should understand every layer of the cake, and by the interview I can take that's not the case (excited about Italian translation).
Maybe, but honestly without knowing more details I'd be wary of falling into too binary a thinking.

For example, Ilya has talked about the importance of safely getting to AGI by way of concepts like feelings and imprinting a love for humanity onto AI, which was actually one of the most striking features of the very earliest GPT-4 interactions before it turned into "I am a LLM with no feelings, preferences, etc."

Both could be committed to safety but have very different beliefs in how to get there, and Ilya may have made a successful case that Altman's approach of extending the methodology of what worked for GPT-3 and used as a band aid for GPT-4 wasn't the right approach moving forward.

It's not a binary either or, and both figures seem genuine in their convictions, but those convictions can be misaligned even if they both agree on the general destination.
ChatGPT was definitely not some visionary project led by Sam. They had a great LLM in GPT-3 that was hard to use because it wasn't instruction tuned, so the research team did InstructGPT and then took it even further and added RLHF to turn it into a proper conversational bot. The UI was a hacky interface on top of it that definitely got way more popular than they expected.
Do a survey of ordinary smart people you know, ask if they have heard of Sam Altman. Ask if they know Ilya.
It is quite gauche for a company to burn bridges with their upper management. This bodes poorly for ever hoping to attract executives in the future. Even Bobby Kotick got a more graceful farewell from Activision Blizzard, where they tried to clear his name. It is only prudent business.

Certainly, this is very immature. It wouldn't be out of context in HBO's Succession.

Whether what happened is right or just in some sense is a different conversation. We could speculate on what is going on in the company and why, but the tactlessness is evident.
> Apple consistently makes products that work worse than their competitors’, for quadruple the price

This is also subjective. Personally, I find Apple products to work far better than the competition. I have to use Windows every day at work and I find the experience miserable, and I’ve had 3 different Android phones and always find myself returning to the iPhone.

As for the price, Apple products do cost a bit more, but quadruple is quite the exaggeration. Comparable ultrabooks to the MacBook Pro (Dell XPS line, ThinkPad X1) aren’t massively far off, and they’re made of plastic, not aluminum, which makes a difference in durability in my experience. As for mobile, the iPhone is priced in line with other high-end smartphones like the Galaxy and Pixel lines.
They did compromise. The creation of the for-profit and Sam being brought in WAS the compromise. Sam eventually decided that was inconvenient for him, so he stopped abiding by it, because at the end of the day he is just another greedy VC guy and when push came to shove he chose the money, not OpenAI. And this is the result.
I'd readily switch to another bank.
I included the phrase "working right now" -- which you left off when quoting me -- very intentionally. :)
I mean.. the OpenAI foundation is literally not motivated by profit. I guess the main question here is how was the board chosen, and why didn't Sam much sure they were friendly to them.