skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It matters why you're making the referral. I've seen far too many referrals made just because a stranger or a social acquittance pinged an employee on LinkedIn. And the employee's thinking is "why not". After all, they're helping a person in need and there might be a referral bonus for them down the line.

I'm a recruiting coordinator or a hiring manager, there's nothing that signals to me that this is a good lead. I assume you're just doing this as a courtesy. I might take a cursory glance, but if the resume doesn't look particularly exciting, onto the pile it goes.

The "how" part matters too. If you're referring a person who you know is amazing at their job, say so, and be specific. "I spent five years working with them at Foobar Industries and they are easily in the top 1% of all engineers at that company" is likely to get attention. "I know this person and I think they may be a fit" isn't.
If Ilya unknown-to-anyone thinks people prefer him to Altman, he has another thing coming. I'm not an Altman fanboy, but anyone can see Altman is a rockstar and richt or wrong, that matters HUGELY to OpenAI.

If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen.

Microsoft has put a vast fortune into this operation and if Satya doesn't like this then it will be changed back real fast, Ilya fired and the entire board resign. That's my prediction.
Alternate read: He says that to The Street because it's the board's vision, yet focuses more of the company on commercialization of ChatGPT than he was leading the board to believe. He was talking their message to the press, but playing his own game with their company.

If you truly believed that OpenAI had an ethical duty to pioneer AGI to ensure its safety, and felt like Altman was lying to the board and jeopardizing its mission as he sent it chasing market opportunities and other venture capital games, you might fire him to make sure you got back on track.
I’d bet it won’t. A lot of people and services are paid and billed by man-hours spent and not by output. Even values of tangible objects are traced to man-hours spent. Utility of output is mere modifier.

What I believe will happen is, eventually we’ll be paying and get paid for depressing a do-everything button, and machines will have their own economy that isn’t on USD.
I wonder how much of this was the influence of Hinton on his former student, Sutskever. I'm sure Sutskever respects Hinton above basically anyone out there and took Hinton's strong objections seriously.

I think personally think it's a shame because this is all totally inevitable at this point, and if the US loses its leading position here because of this kind intentional hitting of the brakes, then I certainly don't think it makes the world any safer to have China in control of the best AI technology.
For a good timeline of the development, see the late [1] Michael F. Flynn's "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown"; table of contents:

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

First evidence for Earth's motion:

> 1728. Building on efforts by Flamsteed, Hooke, and others attempting to detect that old bugaboo, parallax, James Bradley detects stellar aberration [2] in γ-Draconis (Phil. Trans. Royal Soc., 1729).

> A similar phenomenon appears when you drive through a snow storm. Even though the snow is falling straight down, it appears to originate at some point forward of your car. This is because as snow falls, your car is moving toward the snow. Similarly, as the starlight falls down the telescope tube, the telescope tube is moving with the earth and the light ray will hit the side of the tube instead of the eyepiece unless the telescope is tilted slightly.

> The effect is small, and detectable only with special instruments, but it counts as a proof that the Earth is moving.

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smack...

Then for rotation:

> Jun-Sep, 1791. In a series of experiments, Giovanni Guglielmini, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna, drops weights from the Torre dei Asinelli in Bologna -- the same tower used earlier by Riccioli and Grimaldi -- and finds an eastward (and southward) deflection. Concerned with windage, he repeats the experiment down the center of the spiral staircase at the Instituto della Scienze and finds a 4 mm Coriolis deflection over a 29 m drop; thus providing direct empirical evidence of the rotation of the Earth. These experiments are later confirmed in Germany (using a mine shaft) and in the United States.

* Ibid

Finally:

> 1806. Giuseppi Calandrelli, director of the observatory at the Roman College publishes "Ozzervatione e riflessione sulla paralasse annua dall’alfa della Lira," reporting parallax in α-Lyrae. This provides a simple direct observation of the revolution of the Earth.

> Keplerian heliocentrism had been accepted because it was computationally easier and because it popped out mathematically from Newton’s theory like Athena from the brow of Zeus. But now, finally, 263 years after Copernicus, the dual motions are established by empirical fact. Hot diggity.

* Ibid

Copernicus had an interesting idea, Galileo picked it up but didn't really add to it (though made improvements on telescope design), Kepler introduced a simplified mathematical model [3] (which just happened to be right) based on Tycho Brahe's observations.

Stellar parallax has know about since at least Aristotle, and as he mentions in his On the Heavens (II.14), since it is not observed then it is reasonable to conclude that there is no motion (it took several thousand years to develop instruments to actually measure it).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37757574

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberration_(astronomy)#Discove...

[3] There were actually seven models in contention at one point: https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
This is hand-wringing moral panic by nontechnical people who fear the unknown and don't understand AI/DL/ML/LLMs. It's shriekingly obvious no one sane will intentionally build "SkyNet", nor can they for decades.
Not the app builder but the app store and revenue sharing, if rumors are to be believed.
Yes, absolutely, but what would you like to do for the next 100 years while we make that happen? Keep on burning dug up fossils?
Kara Swisher gets in big public fights with CEOs and wears dark sunglasses in order to be cool.

In other words, she's definitely not immune to bias and might easily want to shape the story to her own ends or to favor her own friends.

We're not really talking about facts here.. it's really just speculation and hearsay, so who can say if she's just talking?
Buy Worldcoin, obviously /s

They're probably firing up the eyeball scanning machines on this news.
> For example, for stripe , you need the customer ID. For grafana, an instance url. For aws, a site url.

Uh, no? For stripe, you just need the key (customer ID is the ID of a resource in the account). For AWS, you need the key id and secret, but these are nearly always colocated if you're actually dealing with keys.
It's also quite silly that society often credits one guy at the top who supposedly has "incredible vision" and yet would likely fail at explaining even the most basic technical details. And if such a person must be credited, why not the CTO, chief engineers, or principal scientists, who are at least closer to what actually drive the technical innovations than the CEO?

In reality, it's actually the 1000s of actual engineers that deserve most of the credit, and yet are never mentioned. Society never learns about the one engineer (or team) that solves a problem that others have been stuck on for some time. The aggregate contributions of such innovators are a far more significant driving force behind progress.

Why do we never hear of the many? It's probably because it's just easier to focus on a single personality who can be marketed as an "unconventional genius" or some such nonsense.
"Wacky" is an interesting way to describe "non-profit" or, in this case, "not purely profit motivated."

It's not "wacky" to have goals other than the accumulation of capital. In fact, given the purpose of OpenAI, I think it's meritorious.

I'd personally prefer we just not work on AGI at all, but I'd rather a non-profit dedicated to safe AI do it than a for-profit company dedicated to returns for shareholders.

> Let this be a lesson, don’t have a wacky ownership structure and wacky board when you have the (perhaps) the most valuable product in the world.

I think the lesson is just the opposite: If you want to work according to your ideals, and not simply for money, you should absolutely do whatever 'wacky' thing protects that.
If this is true, which it very well could be, it's clearly not ok/right. However, this was known for some time. She was tweeting about this in 2021, and this was discussed again in October of this year.

None of that makes sense as to why the board would randomly fire him. I don't think it's this.
Said in the George Senior voice: And thats why you don’t use a non-profit to do world critical work: politics will always beat true value at a non-profit.
I heard MacOS screen time can't control Java apps like Minecraft.
>what was strange about it?

There's 8 billion people on the planet nowadays, of those, about 7.9 billion would not lift a finger if there's no material benefit to them. Hence why it's strange.
Because he and Habasis became rivals when they parted at Google, and despite Dennis being the golden boy because of AlphaGo, Sutskever ate GOOGLES whole fucking lunch with ChatGPT.
Open AI's board will decide when we have attained AGI
I love the idea, but the nature of running on untrusted user PCs brings some security concerns. If a game is multiplayer/requires a login, it would be trivial for a host to extract those credentials.
he was one of Geoff Hintons students, involved in alexnet, worked on early days of google brain. Ilya is one of the most "distinguished" ml researchers in the world today and i feel like he has a lot more to contribute.
Who knows? The job market is really crazy at times. I got contacted by an ex-company asking if I'd consider coming back, and then they never really even followed up after I showed potential interest, and they eventually said "they don't see a fit" when I followed up. Like, huh? They contacted me.

In my view, the best a referral can do for you is to get eyes on your application and potentially bump it up in the stack. Unless you really know the specific hiring manager well, that seems like the best that's going to happen.
Sounds like a really interesting system but the devil's in the details. I really don't see how you solve this without some combination of layer 3 filtering and individual kernel level apps for all supported devices.
Technically the boomer marketing people did that trying to cater to generation X.
"Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, works 60 to 100 hours per week, and spends around 80% of the time coding. Former colleagues have described him as the hardest-working person at OpenAI."

https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...
Can we just accept it for what it is, a career journalist using anonymous sources a few hours after a major event? She's staking her reputation on this, and that means something.

It doesn't mean it's absolute truth. It doesn't mean it's a lie. Can we just appreciate her work, accept that maybe it's only 70% vetted right now, more likely true than not, but still subject to additional vetting and reporting later on?

It's still more information than we had earlier today. Sure, take it with a grain of salt and wait for more validation, but it's still work that she's doing. Not that different from a tech postmortem or scientific research or a political investigation... there's always uncertainty, but she's trying to get us closer to the truth, one baby step at a time, on a Friday night. I respect her for that, even as I await more information.
I sometimes like to indulge my particular outlook on life and harp on the "MBA types", self-promoters, and flimflam men of the world blah blah blah, and think how everything would be better if the techno-philosophers were in charge. Frankly after I've sobered up from my self-indulgent flights of fancy, I know "those people" serve a very important role that I can't.

If this report is true, we're going to see a big rubber meets road event along these lines. I don't think this will end well for OpenAI.
> Even in Chinese, which supposedly has no count nouns, there a few places when you do just count things directly.

Are those things nouns? Days, for example, must be counted directly, except that the grammar is very clear that 天 is not a noun at all.

月 can be used with or without a measure word, but the obvious analysis would be that it is a noun if used with a measure word and not if counted directly, much like 人.

(Preemptive counterargument: is "right" a noun or an adjective?)
The Mighty Mouse size was nice, but not sure it was worth the constant hassle of cleaning the tiny track ball of whatever microscopic dust mote blocked it from working again and again - every single Mighty Mouse I ever owned would regularly jam up and be a pain to unjam. No other mouse I've ever owned or abused has had a button or wheel stop working, ever.

I do miss the distinctive "click" Apple mice of this era made a lot though.
Swiping away (to the right) from the Home Screen, will take you to the widget area from which you can immediately remove the news widget with two or so taps, and that setting will get preserved. So not really the same as pressing start to search for an app to launch. I think in your example the equivalent would be going to the iOS App Library list and then seeing ads and widgets there, which does not happen.
It sounds like someone neutral from MSFT leadership needs/ed to moderate and bring people together before the wheels fell off.
None of these people seem to be typical corporate board members, except maybe Altman.
I've always seen it as a way of peacocking. A way for people to make themselves stand out from others. But I think it also stems from a mindset of "I'm aware that professional communication involves proper capitalization, but I'm not going to bother because I don't feel the need to communicate professionally to the person I'm typing to"

I'm fine with it as long as everyone is typing in lowercase. But if the culture of a company or community is to type a certain way, there's some level of disrespect (or rebellion) by doing the opposite.
I didn’t have much sense of who Ilya Sutskever is or what he thinks, so I searched for a recent interview. Here’s one from the No Priors podcast two weeks ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0gTO2K85A

No clear clues about today’s drama, at least as far as I could tell, but still an interesting listen.
Take another look at the cast of FF6 and you’ll realize a lot of them aren’t really good people… Locke is a thief, Shadow is a straight up killer for hire, Setzer a degenerate gambler and rapist, Edgar a creepy womanizer, and Celes was gleefully killing people for the empire before changing sides (imagine a Nazi general just deciding she’ll join the Allies instead).
Completely agree. Sam is on the phone with Satya as we speak.

Alternative is Sam goes in house to MS who already have all the weights of GPT-4 and build again, but constrained by any existing charter.
So you think AI will force a push out of economic growth? I'm really not sure how this makes sense. As you've said a lot of labor these day is mostly useless, but the reason it's still here is not ideological but because our economy can't survive without growth (useless can still have some market value, of course).
If you think that somehow AI displacing actual useful labor will create a big economic shift (as would be needed) I'd be curious to know what you think that shift would be.
>as Sama has no equity

Yeah and he got sacked.
In the interview with Jay Leno they said you can do Grapevine "without ever touching the brake" which I interpreted as 100% regenerative
Not too great on steeper hills due to having a hub motor, but the trade-off is hub motors are really cheap.
when did a board or CEO ever introduce an authoritative 3rd party to mediate between them? the board is the authoritative 3rd party.
Context for those inclined to ignore this as something that couldn't possibly have been researched in the time aloted:

“This interview was conducted in July 2023 for WIRED’s cover story on OpenAI. It is being published today after Sam Altman’s sudden departure to provide a glimpse at the thinking of the powerful AI company’s new boss.”
Have you ever tried foveated rendering? I find it to be significantly more uncomfortable than low framerates.
The analogy would be publishing designs for nuclear weapons, or a bioweapon; hard-to-obtain capabilities that are effectively impossible for adversaries to obtain are treated very differently than vulns that a motivated teenager can find. To be clear we are talking about (hypothetical) civilization-ending risks, which I don’t think software has ever credibly risked.

I take a less cynical view on the name; they were committed to open source in the beginning, and did open up their models IIUC. Then they realized the above, and changed path. At the same time, realizing they needed huge GPU clusters, and being purely non-profit would not enable that. Again I see why it rubs folks the wrong way, more so on this point.
- mech engineering bachelors 2012

- 6 years of experience including stints as a PM at Tesla and some experience at Goldman and LeapMotion

- joined OpenAI in 2018, shortly became CTO and now CEO

While credentialism and gatekeeping is all too prominent in society today, for Mira I have serious doubts about her capacity as a leader. A serious lack of experience in all aspects
I trust the hell of a lot more in Ilya than Altman. Ilya is a scientist through and through, not a grifter.
I think I don't get your point entirely:

"We can still push on large language models quite a lot, and we will do that": this sounds like continuing working on scaling LLMs.

"We need another breakthrough. [...] pushing hard with language models won't result in AGI.": this sounds like Sam Altman wants to do additional research into different directions, which in my opinion does make sense.

So, altogether, your quotes suggest that Sam Altman wants to continue working on scaling LLMs for the short and middle term and parallely do research into different approaches that might lead to another step towards AGI. I cannot see how this planning could infuriate Ilya Sutskever.
“My background is in engineering, and I worked in aerospace, automotive, VR, and AR. Both in my time at Tesla [where she shepherded the Model X], and at a VR company [Leap Motion] I was doing applications of AI in the real world.”
Funny, because I feel the exact opposite.

And the answer is every English teacher I had growing up.
It was actually a great move. Unusual, but it goes with the mission and nonprofit idea. I think it was designed to draw attention and stir controversy on purpose.
This is genuinely frustrating.

IF the stories are to be believed so far, the board of OpenAI, perhaps one of the most important tech companies in the world right now, was full of people who are openly hostile to the existence of the company.

I don't want AI safety. The people talking about this stuff like it's a terminator movie are nuts.

Strongly believe that this will be a lot like facebook/oculus ousting Palmer Lucky due to his "dangerous" completely mainstream political views shared by half of the country. Palmer, of course, went on to start a company (anduril), which has a much more powerful and direct ability to enact his political will.

SamA isn't going to leave oAI and like...retire. He's the golden boy of golden boys right now. Every company with an interest in AI is I'm sure currently scrambling to figure out how to load a dump truck full of cash and H200s to bribe him to work with them.
No one in this company is "consistently candid" about anything.
Sounds good but it will require long stretches of infrastructure to be electrified or am I wrong?
>every English teacher I had growing up.

I doubt that.
> If it's not useful to you then I'm guessing you're either using it wrong or you're never trying anything new / challenging.

That’s a bold statement coming from someone with (respectfully) not very much experience with programming. I’ve tried using GPT-4 for my work that involves firmware engineering, as well as some design questions regarding backend web services in Go, and it was pretty unhelpful in both cases (and at times dangerous in memory constrained environments). That being said, I’m not willing to write it off completely. I’m sure it’s useful for some like yourself and not useful for others like me. But ultimately the world of programming extends way beyond JavaScript apps. Especially when it comes to things that are new and challenging.
I'm assuming this change will allow plugins to be written that expose a web UI. That would be huge for Emacs.
As far as I can tell, it eventually boils down to this: Ilya is jealous. After all Sam took all the spot lights away from him who actually made the model behind OpenAI.

It's human nature. OpenAI can continue without Sam, but not without Ilya for the moment. On the other hand, Sam could have been a little more "humble".
If you know anything about Ilya, it's definitely not out of character.
What about those who deny "HIV causing AIDS", and don't take their medications?
I guess it's really about people. And if the people in charge have your best interests at heart.

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

As for "heliocentric / geocentric" - didn't that all become irrelevant once we've learned there's no "ether"?
All models are equally valid/invalid.
Or perhaps I'm missing something.
My biggest question is: If Sam Altman starts a new company by next month, and him and Greg Brockman know all details of how GPT4/5 works, then what what will this mean for OpenAI's dominance and lead?
Don’t you think it’s more likely you don’t know the whole story yet?
The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951) [pdf]
>If it's not useful to you then I'm guessing you're either using it wrong or you're never trying anything new / challenging.

Please quote me where I say it wasn't useful, and respond directly.

Please quote me where I say I had problems using it, or give any indications I was using it wrong, and respond directly.

Please quote me where I state a conservative attitude towards anything new or challenging, and respond directly.

Except I never did or said any of those things. Are you "hallucinating"?
Agree with this. Internal power structure between academic types and tech-forward commercialization types.

It might be this is good at the end of the day. OpenAI is just not structured to win.
>it's a pretty civilized way to handle downsizing if you ask me.

It is. Some companies will also offer the old timers early retirement packages. There are companies like this out there still, they just don't make headlines by being civil.
There’s no indication that any sort of discussion took place. Major stakeholders like Microsoft appear uninformed.
Altman’s job was to be a go between for the business and engineering sides of the house. If the chief engineer who was driving the company wasn’t going to communicate with him anymore, then he wouldn’t serve much of a purpose.
Tesla Investors Call for Elon Musk to Be Suspended
disclose bad news on Friday after market closes, not 1 hour before that.
The most likely outcome at this stage IMO is Sam will start a new thing with a huge equity stake and just do it again.
Imagine you sold your soul and you see someone else succeeding (wildly) without also selling theirs. Like crabs in a bucket, some people get mad and don't want to face the possibility they've been lying to themselves.
This. Referrals don't mean much at a company with a heavy, rigid bureaucracy. You still have to go through the machine.