skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would hardly call it "solved". For the examples given:

>medicine

Semaglutide is a weight loss treatment that costs $10+k a year. It is ostensibly a luxury for the well-off. Does it fall under the 2% rate for medicine?

>and some foods

How is that determined? For instance, Parmigiano Reggiano DOP aged 48 months is arguably a luxury, but generic parmesan cheese isn't. Even if you could draw a line somewhere between the two, it's hardly trivial to do this for good ever. You either have to accept some absurd situations like the above, or have a sprawling bureaucracy tasked with determining what's a "luxury" or not.

> E.g. jewelry being at 20% will only impact well off buyers.

And what of a poor couple that's getting married? I agree such a tax might be approximate progressive (ie. on average the top 20% pays a higher tax than the bottom 20%), but it leaves much to be desired from a "fairness" perspective. A multi-millionaire driving a Corolla gets taxed more than some army recruit that just blew their signing bonus on a BMW. You also can't implement higher brackets on higher earning individuals as easily. How do you tax the likes of Bezos? It's not like they buy 100x more luxury items because they make 100x more. Most of their money is spent on investments, not consumption.
Plot twist: it was Satya who planted the idea in the OpenAI's board's mind to fire Sam in the first place... Inception-style.
If Sam had left OpenAI on his own accord to do this, certainly.

Since the board fired him and basically nuked his best-effort plan to return - I highly doubt that OpenAI's legal team has anything of substance here. Even if they do, I wouldn't doubt for a second that Microsoft already has its entire legal team ready to play hardball defense.

Overall, a complete loss-loss for OpenAI's board. What a weekend.
> He has a better chance than some other random guy who was not the CEO of OpenAI.

Yes, but that doesn't mean it's enough. Not every random guy who wasn't the CEO of OpenAI is about to start an AI company (though some probably are).

It's quite possible an AI company does need a better vision than "hire some engineers and have them make AI".
Not being able to define instructions per “chat” window (or having some sort of a profile) is something I find extremely annoying.
MSFT comp is shit though

OAI comp was high based on equity and its crazy valuations
One of the comments here had a good possible explanation which is that sharing the details might expose the board to liability since they now would have admitted that they know the details of some illicit thing Sam did, for which a lawsuit is coming.

For example, one scenario someone in a different thread conjectured is that Sam was secretly green-lighting the intentional (rather than incidental) collection of large amounts of copyrighted training data, exposing the firm to a great risk of a lawsuit from the media industry.

If he hid this from the board, “not being candid” would be the reason for his firing, but if the board admits that they know the details of the malfeasance, they could become entangled in the litigation.
How? It's not like he expect to just walk out of there with models or data?
This release added cosmo_dlopen, which works on many platforms (but not all).

Should be enough to allow you to find the vulkan loader and dlopen that. I'm not sure what you would do on mac, statically link moltenvk? Or maybe it would be better to use OpenGL on all platforms, and be stuck with OpenGL 4.1 (which isn't too bad, but it would be nice to have image load/store).
How to kill your company in one week?
Highly unlikely. Instead they'll be working on internal Windows AI tools for chatbots and random AI features in Windows. We all lose in this situation.
They will unless the board declares it AGI. I'm not joking lol. That was part of the agreement.
As was planned by the Azure illuminati.
Anything that has updates and doesn't need to be an instant notification.

It's rather the other way around. Nowadays everything is a website.

News is a website. GitHub commits, pull requests, issues, etc. are websites, too. Social media posts or replies are websites.

Some of those use cases used to be handled by mail, some of them are now done with browser notifications. I would consider a persistent standard log a need that is not handled by anything else than RSS though.
It's probably because this is a very good time for tech companies to publish bad news, that GM chose to fire Vogt now.
FWIW, there is ongoing work on dlopen; it was introduced 2 weeks ago (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/commit/5e8c928f1a37349a...) and continued after that.
Who’s talking about free? And I think it’s Azure rather than Windows these days.
I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs. On the balance this probably slows things down, so: good.

Not sorry about Sam, first off I'm not assuming we know everything and second I'm more inclined to trust the board. Also it seems he was trying to do a secret hardware venture on the side, which would be several kinds of unethical. Again: good.
MS is betting the company on AI. It is everywhere across the org. They won't play with kiddie glove. You want to see ruthless businessmen in action sure pick up the fight. They'll be happy to lose 10 billion plus some more if it means they win the war.
It is ironic and tragic that the original Domesday Book has lasted nine centuries and the Domesday Project is struggling to last four decades.
> What does "properly aligned" even mean?

You know those stories where someone makes a pact with the devil/djin/other wish granting entity, and the entity does one interpretation of what was wished, but since it is not what the wisher intended it all goes terribly wrong? The idea of alignment is to make the djin which not only can grant wishes, but it does them according to the unstated intention of the wisher.

You might have heard the story of the paper clip maximiser. The leadership of the paperclip factory buys one of those fancy new AI agents and asks it to maximise paperclip production.

What a not-well aligned AI might do: Reach out through the internet to a drug cartel’s communication nodes. Hack the communications and take over the operation. Optimise the drug traficking operations to gain more profit. Divert the funds to manufacture weapons for multiple competing factions on multiple crisis points on Earth. Use the factions against each other. Divert the funds and the weapons to protect a rapidly expanding paperclip factory. Manipulate and blackmail world leaders into inaction. If the original leaders of the paperclip factory try to stop the AI eliminate them, since that is the way to maximise paper clip production. And this is just the begining.

What a well alligned AI would do: Fine tune the paperclip manufacturing machinery to eliminate rejects. Reorganise the factory layout to optimise logistics. Run a succesfull advertising campaign which leads to a 130% increase in sales. (Because clearly this is what the factory owner intended it to do. Altough they did a poor job of expressing their wishes.)
> Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company?

Into the shackles of ever-controlling mega-corp?
That is only the case for rank and file employees. From my understanding executives, particularly ones with large equity stakes, are not exempt from non-competes. Sam doesn't have equity though, and I am not sure if non-profit status changes anything, but regardless I suspect any non-compete questions would need to be settled in court. Probably not something to stop Sam from starting a competitor as he could afford the lawyers and potential settlement. I suspect the MSFT move has more to do with keeping the ball rolling and keeping Satya happy.
Basic security measure to protect the trees from being stolen for wood thieves, or to excessive tourism leading to the dead of the tree. Both cases had happened before. Looks full of common sense.
Honest question, why is he the best CEO?
What does the ! symbol do in url fragments?
Because OpenAI has first mover advantage, an actual product, the household "ChatGPT" name and starting anything from 0 would mean you start with a 3-0 disadvantage. Even if you threw a few billion dollars at it and attracted all of the top minds for at least a year - probably longer - you will be seen as the "ChatGPT alternative". How long before you can capture the momentum they have now with OpenAI? It's also a legal minefield, even when the majority of employees of OpenAI migrate, there will be all kinds of no-competes and conflicts of interest.

Strategically, this is probably a better move. Microsoft doesn't see their investment implode and they probably have some sort of plan to inject or absorb Sam and/or Microsoft back into OpenAI to prevent this in the future. Perhaps replacing the board of directors to prevent further infighting.
Being a board member is something you normally take quite serious. I've been asked a couple of times but didn't see myself as qualified to fulfill that role in a responsible manner. Board members are free to search for outside feedback but they're supposed to be wise enough to know their own limits because they have some residual liability for any mistakes they make.

Depending on where you live you will open yourself up for at least the consequences of your own actions (negligence, errors of judgment) and possibly even for the errors of other board members because you are not only there to oversee the company, you also oversee the other board members. That's why on the spot board resignations are usually a pretty bad sign unless they are for health or other urgent personal reasons. It is a very strong signal that a board member feels that they have not been able to convince their colleagues that they are off the straight and narrow path and that their choices exceed their own thresholds for ethics or liability (or both...). And that in turn is one of the reasons why a board would normally be very upset if they feel that they have not been given all information they require to do their job and that was the very first line that the board trotted out as to why Altman was let go. But even then they should have built their case rather than just to take a snap poll at a point in time when they had a quorum to get rid of him because it seems that that and not Altman's behavior (which as far as I can see was fairly consistent from day #1) was the real reason they did what they did. In the original board (9 people) the four didn't have the vote but in the shrunk board (6) they did.
Sounds desperate to me, a bit like that 'I'm in the office' photo-op. A bit like having access to the models or whatever is sustaining him somehow lol
5 months ago they said they hadn't started training: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/07/openai-gpt5-sam-altman/ and had no intention to do so within the next 6 months: https://the-decoder.com/gpt-5-is-nowhere-close-says-openai-c...

They just started development in the last week or so: https://decrypt.co/206044/gpt-5-openai-development-roadmap-g...
I think Sam's goal is to create AGI, same as most of the other founders of OpenAI. If he just wanted money and power, he probably would have continued with YC or some other startup instead of joining the nonprofit and unproven OpenAI at the time.

His opinion on the ideal path differs from Ilya's, but I'm guessing his goal remains the same. AGI is the most important thing to work on, and startups and corporations are just a means of getting there.
Hilarious. The look on Ilyas face when these two show up at the office for their "sync", or perhaps he's ordered to travel to a location of the owner/client's choosing.
Presumably they still have the deal with MS and will continue to receive funding as long as they meet their obligations? (Of course no clue what they are..)
Indeed. Sutskever should have been able to foresee the move. It's just not hard to see Altman will just get another place to continue what he has done in OpenAI. Maybe his hope is he can slow him down like a year or so? But now by joining MS, it's effectively no much difference.
Would Altman shine within Microsoft? Seems like raising capital is his main skill set, and theres no need for that now. But from Microsofts point of view this prevents a new competitor from popping up.
I guess Satya Nadella really like this guy
Nope, VirtualWiFi looked promising in 2006.
I agree, any potential hire who has the choice between OpenAI and the new team at MSFT will now choose the latter. And a lot of the current team will follow as well. This is probably the end of OpenAI. Can't say I'm too sad, finally a chance to erase that misleading name from history.
I worked on Domesday Explorer back in 2000 or so. You can still find CD ROMs on eBay or other places but I don't think it's sold anymore.

It has place name and name indexes all cross linked to entries. They are paradox database tables underneath.

More information can be found here:

https://www.domesdaybook.net

Also see:

https://opendomesday.org/

Which uses much of the same data but is available on the web.
Satya really goated here.

He takes advantage of this situation and make OpenAI's assets in his control more than ever.

He is the genius, scary even.
What about a quantum computer breaking the encryption system of the digital currency of an entire continent, is this a sensible scenario?
It’s called damage control. Classic corporate playbook to control the narrative. Satya and the MSFT team are geniuses in that respect.

Sam will leave soon enough to start his own thing, but in the meantime there is no narrative problem for MSFT to deal with
They could, but they'd be massively hamstrung by lack of GPU's. Pretty much all supply is locked up for a good few years right now.
Earlier thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196
This is not Ballmer era. It's Satya.
Microsoft got Copilot. They were first to establish the brand. OpenAI technologies let them do it. I don't know how much Copilot brand cost, but right now when you're thinking about AI-assisted programming, Copilot is the first thing comes in mind. So probably they got something in return.
Being discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344196
Mobslide: Open-source software to turn your smartphone into presentation remote
Being able to raise money doesn't necessarily translate into success. Perhaps his new crew won't be able to replicate the secret sauce. Or Satya just gave terms favourable enough to convince him at least for now to avoid giving off the impression that Microsoft's investment in OpenAI is incinerated.
If it’s under Microsoft’s umbrella - sure he can
I am confusion. What a whirlwind weekend.
24k gold shackles for a year or two and then onto the next thing.
All the claims about how OpenAI's board desperately wanted Altman back were based on leaks from "people close to Altman" which the press uncritically lapped up.

If it wasn't clear before, it should be clear in hindsight that the board's desire to welcome Altman back was, at best, overstated.

The leaks were probably an attempt to pressure the board or, failing that, undermine OpenAI.
What's the functional difference between a billion and a hundred million?
Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...
I don't know, way before all of this drama started, the rumors were that he was barely contributing any original or significant ideas to research and the grounbreaking ideas had come from lower level researchers.
Not true MSFT has never given good GPUs hence why they never published any SOTA challenging models
This still feels like "updates to a website" to me. Each entry is ultimately a link to a webpage.

To me, the "default" use case for RSS is blog feeds, and this is just micro-blog feeds.
Yes, absolutely but that costs money and nobody is willing to foot the bill. Also in the past such programs have been a feeding frenzy for the people on the supply side but with very little tangible effect.
Crazy how people's experiences can be so different.

I tried making crystal radios 5 or 6 times in my life (one of which from a kit) and never heard a thing.
That surely is no problem from the pov of said mega-corp.
I'm the first to defend CEOs and it's not a popular position to be in usually, believe me. But in this case, they did an experiment and it blew up based on their model's superiority alone.

Product-wise, however, it's looking like good enough AI is being commoditized at the pace of weeks and days. They will be forced to compete on user experience and distribution vs the likes of Meta. So far OpenAI only managed to deliver additions that sound good on the surface but prove not to be sticky when the dust settles.

They have also been very dishonest. I remember Sam Altman said he was surprised no one built something like chat GPT before them. Well... people tried but 3rd parties were always playing catch-up because the APIs were waitlisted, censored, and nerfed.
It seems reasonable to me that people who are motivated by the mission and working with or learning from the existing team will still want to work there.
What is Sam's actual value re: AI and not just as a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need?

Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.
Microsoft is now the for-profit arm of OpenAI.
This Silicon Valley Soap Opera is going to be great
Ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Joins Microsoft to Lead Its New AI Research Team
The exodus of personnel behind him.
They're bringing the talent with them, I'm sure that's part of it.
It's complicated. In the case of the CEO it is possibly enforceable. But going to the primary funder, after being fired in a move without notification of that same funder? Likely with long complicated contracts that may contemplate the idea of notification of change of executive staff?

I don't know, even of strictly "enforceable" I doubt we will see it enforced. And if so. I'm sure the settlement will be fairly gentle.

Edit: Actually, a quick skim of the relevant code, the only relevant exception seems to be about owners selling their ownership interest. Seemingly, since Sam doesn't own OpenAI shares, this exception would seem to not apply.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
I don't buy it. If you listen to Sam and Greg, they want to change the world and bring us into a world of abundance that everyone can participate in. They were the ideators of this "awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company".

Microsoft is setup to create shareholder value. That's it.
Both of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so a few folks get richer.
Can someone help me understand what Sam's actual value is? He doesn't seem to be a particularly important practitioner/researcher re: AI and is "just" a CEO/salesman-evangelist to get funding, which Microsoft doesn't need?

Is he particularly apt at leading/managing research teams? OpenAI's slow productization doesn't imply he's a product/idea guy a la Jobs.
Putting on my lateral thinking hat, by hiring Altman and Brockman they ensure that they cannot compete against them in whatever enterprise they were thinking of doing. It gives the corporation incredible breathing room of at least a year to catch up while also being able to mine them for their knowledge. Additionally they will serve as beacons for hiring devs into their corporation.
There’s no chance Sam is joining Microsoft to be some “VP of AI” to drive strategy like that. He’s going to be driving some new business where he’ll be able to move quickly and have a ton of control.
This is because knowledge is related to its application. It never stands for itself. The reason why we research something is because it helps us to solve a problem or do something, and thus the context is important.
I quite like the definition of understanding as knowing what is possible and what is not.
> I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs.

People will sell their souls and the souls of others for power and greed.
Show HN: Ending the Absurdity of SSO Tax – Introducing ssotax.org
Ever heard of the SSO Tax? In short, it's a tactic where software vendors bully security-conscious companies to upgrade to costly enterprise plans. They do this by gating SSO (Single Sign-On) features behind their priciest options, causing companies to pay up to 70 times their standard rates.

As a former CTO at a VC-backed and security-conscious company, I've faced the tough choice of skipping costly enterprise upgrades, even when SSO was crucial.

Take a look at Notion: to access SSO, they casually double their standard pricing.

Imagine buying a Tesla and being charged extra to unlock full braking power. That's what SSO Tax is - vendors exploiting a built-in feature, essential for security, to extract excessive fees.

So, why initiate a new project?

Rob Chahin's work on sso.tax initially highlighted this issue. However, the site's updates dwindled, and data became outdated. Despite offering assistance, I received no response, leading to the creation of https://ssotax.org. While there has been short spike of activity post-fork, it already stopped again. That’s what we’ve seen often in the last few years. Instead, I want to give the topic the attention it deserves.

In addition of integrating all pending PRs and enriching the data, I’ve introduced a new feature: "Friends of SSO". We should not only call out unfair practices but also praise vendors who are committed to security!

Furthermore, I’d love to raise awareness about vendor practices by utilizing Twitter and Linkedin to publicly praise or critique them. The goal is to get attention for the topic, ideally sparking conversation with the vendors involved.

What are your thoughts on getting rid of the SSO Tax? Excited to hear your ideas!
No, to my knowledge cosmopolitan doesn't provide any special provisions to support this, so you'd have to build it yourself.
could this potentially be low-cost enough to replace manual scrambler volunteers at cubing competitions?
Microsoft always wanted to kill it.
To pull out engineers from OpenAI?
> OpenAI's board should book themselves for an IQ test, it is just beyond my understanding why they hate their own successful business so much.

OpenAI's board doesn't run a business, they run a nonprofit with a mission oriented around safety and public benefit, not private profit.

It has a for-profit subsidiary, explicitly subordinated to the nonprofit's mission, as a funding mechanism, but being successful at bringing in money is only a net benefit if the method by which the funding is generated isn't more harmful to the mission than what it enables is beneficial.
Well, the same way a man with drive, discipline and money but very little in the way of technical expertise can build a company.

Sometimes you need someone who can drive a project and recruit the right people for the project. That person does not always need to be a subject matter expert.
WhatsApp backups on Android will count toward Google cloud storage limit in 2024
MSFT isn't as much as an underdog you would think.

MSRA invented ResNet. MSFT also contributed DeepSpeed to the open source, which is critical in OSS LLM scene.

It is now more of just a branding thing. It will become the new cool again.

And OpenAI? After this week, how would the people view them? Definitely not envious or prestige.
That is totally out of context and has nothing to do with zoophilia. He just means that whatever you do with whoever, and uses an elephant as an example, is your private problem. He is not promoting zoophilia at all.

You can find the example harsh, but this is how he talks.