skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don’t get why people aren’t seeing this. OpenAI said they’d achieve AGI by December. It’s mid November. When they claim to have achieved AGI, Microsoft’s deal with them ends immediately. Sam Altman is a practical man who thinks a lot about server costs, and Ilya is a terrified man who thinks a lot about potential catastrophe. Sam recently bragged about “pushing back the veil of ignorance”, and Ilya is working full-time on alignment techniques.

Why the dominant narrative isn’t “they’re probably disagreeing over the AGI status of a GPT5 ensemble because it affects their relationship w/ Microsoft” I have NO idea, and I’m trying to keep my head down and not let it all drive me crazy with anxiety…

Much love to the fellow hackers out there. If I’m anywhere close to right-ish, then I’m looking forward to exploring the post-SV/VC world with you.
> And the "scares" are often correct. See smoking, leaded gasoline, trans fats, various other food additives, etc.

Leaded gasoline: we knew that was bad and did it anyway because it was easy and cheap.

Trans fats: was this ever a 'scare'?

Various other food additives: which? I know of more that were demonized for no reason than additives that ended up being bad for people.

I applaud your use of non-plastic and think more people should do it. I dislike our reliance on plastics and think the microplastic scare is useful. I just don't see any evidence and only see scare headlines and I think that rousing people's fears over something is generally a bad idea when we could do it rationally.

> Likewise you can look at the evidence of microplastics being bad for human health and say "ingesting random synthetic chemicals that bio-accumulate and are hard to break down are probably bad for you".

I'm not sure why it should be self-evident that inert, tiny things in your body would cause harm. It sounds bad, but there is no real reason why it would be.
THANK YOU! I tried to find that exact clip, but the versions of Change Bank I saw truncated it.
> That seems a lot be better than doubling down on a bad mistake to save face, but we do care quite a bit about about looking strong, don't we.

IMO Its not about looking strong, its about looking competent. Competent people don't fire their CEO of multi-billion dollar unicorn without thinking it through first. Walking back the firing so soon suggest no thinking was involved.
A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders.

No stakeholder would walk away from OpenAI for want of sam Altman. They don’t license OpenAI technology or provide funding for his contribution. They do it to get access to GPT4. There is no comparable competitor available.

If anything they would be miffed about how it was handled, but to be frank, unless GPT4 is sam Altman furiously typing, I don’t know he’s that important. The instability caused by the suddenness, that’s different.
Not really, no. Humans progressed by building societies and rules. No society built on theft ever thrived.
You might want to check your units. BC is a bit bigger than Texas, but not 3x.
SV can afford to pay a lot more journalists writing puff pieces about how great they are.
Or little things like your $10b investment partner having a pissed off CEO and massive legal team ready to strike now. It’s such fucking amateur hour it’s incredible.

It’s unclear what Ilya thinks keeps the lights on when MSFT holds their money hostage now. Which is probably why there is desperation to get Altman back…
Where does one even get the idea that Unix = free (as in beer)? In fact, licenses for the original UNIX distros from Bell Labs retailed for literally thousands of dollars at the time. Various Unix-likes have names like FreeBSD for a reason.
This idea that ChatGPT is going to suddenly turn evil and start killing people is based on a lot of imagination and no observable facts. No one has ever been able to demonstrate an "unsafe" AI of any kind.
Yeah, and go to a shop like that and see their prices compared to the places that only do oil changes. They're usually twice the labor price compared to low cost oil change places in my experience.

Even just putting the car on the lift and jacking it up is already more work, requires more training, and has more risk than having someone in the pit at a fast oil change place.
I would've said the same thing about ChatGPT itself. You could've knocked me over with a feather when they announced that they'd grown to 100 million weekly active users.
Open source is the only path to broad public accountability, which is a prerequisite for safety.
How is SGX different from putting a sticker on the server rack door that says "don't open private data"? Just asking.
The only safety they are worried about is their own safety from a legal and economical point of view. These threats about humanity-wide risks are just fairy tales that grown ups say to scare each other (roko basilisk, etc there is a lineage) or cover their real reasons (which I strongly believe is the case for OpenAI).
Maybe, but I have also heard this opinion independently from a few women in my life.
Yes, a bit like machine learning models.
Kind of, but the Forbes post says more about Microsoft than The Verge post
Which translation were you reading? It makes a huge difference. Wilson's Odyssey is really easy to pick up (and I assume her Iliad will be as well), But there are a lot of translations that try to be too literal and end up not working well in English.

My wife was a Classics major, so we have something like three translations of each, and comparing them is night and day.
Everything is an appeal to authority if you’re not an authority on the subject

And if you’re an authority on the subject, then you don’t need this news article
There are no investors in the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, LLC.
How much would you like to bet that the Murati character is in a love triangle or something like that when the movie comes out? (The character, probably has no bearing on reality).
I recognize the brilliance of SV (the show) but couldn't make it past a few episodes because it was just too painfully close to home.

Now that I work for a non-tech, non-SV company (agricultural equip manufacturer in fact), and have some distance from the real world SV, maybe I could watch it without my skin crawling.
Same! Cannot wait. I think I learned it from cursive and carried it over to sans.

Thanks Neil for a great product.
This is unfathomably depressing for me; I am solidly in the non-profit, open etc. camp, and the way the board has handled the situation seems to be putting a tombstone to any opponents to Altman's way of doing things: profits uber alles, moats galore, non-profit-wink-wink-nudge-nudge; an unmitigated disaster.
Conversely, I was very skeptical of its ability to help coding something non-trivial. Then I found out that the more readable your code is - in a very human way, like descriptive identifiers, comments etc - the better this "smart autocomplete" is. It's certainly good enough to save me a lot of typing, so it is a net benefit.
Tried it tonigth with a friend. It's really nice but 200chars would be better and more time is needed.
I worked at a startup that was more absurd than anything on "Silicon Valley".
Indeed. If the government got out of the way and allowed them to work, things would be better.
Luckily the AI field has been very open source-friendly, which is great for competition and free access, etc. The open source models seem to be less than a year behind the cutting edge, which is waaaay better than e.g. when OpenOffice was trying to copy MS Office.
Jill Stein is a former presidential candidate and outspoken critic of Israel's ongoing war/genocide in Gaza. She is far from the only one having her account banned ostensibly for speaking out against the war. See https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/24/shadowbanning-... and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/26/pro-pales.... Regular, less high-profile users, report having their accounts meddled with for posting about Palestine. See https://twitter.com/qa_zafar/status/1725780416647299082, https://twitter.com/lowenxverity/status/1722966578411577565, and https://twitter.com/IShowSpeed_Live/status/17235893796782124....
> Incredible.

Incredibly worrying, as a member of a nation state with conflicting interests with the USA.
"Would want significant governance changes" ah, so maybe he baited it
24 hrs isn't enough time to get signals on whether this was a mistake
The Curb-Cut Effect
Or a weapons test.
> What exactly do YOU mean by safety? That they go at the pace YOU decide?

Usually what it means is that they think that AI has a significant chance of literally ending the world with like diamond nanobots or something.

All opinions and recommendations follow from this doomsday cult belief.
RISC-V Ox64 BL808 SBC: Sv39 Memory Management Unit
Another good example he had brought up was with Arm China. Would love to see what he has to write about it on Monday's newsletter.
Maybe also somehow divide by the size of monthly occurring topics like "Who is hiring"?
In the first (I think) episode of halt and catch fire, Joe tells IBM that they have their source code. IBM being IBM sends a legion of lawyers to their smallish company trying to scare the shit out of them.

I feel like it be like that, but instead of a legion, legions.

And OpenAI is scared.
I'll bite.

> This contains the misunderstanding that merely by existing calibre "uses up" something like oxygen. This is true in a commercial product when there are a finite number of buyers whose money in turn funds a finite number of merchants efforts to bring a product to market[...]

You don't say it explicitly, but there's an implied "this is not true with open source software". I don't agree. I wrote about this a few years ago:

<https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...>

If people think of a problem as solved or in the process of being worked on by competent minds, they're less likely to pledge their own minds to solving the problem.

> > The UI feels very dated to me

> Perhaps the worst reason to make a different piece of software.

Okay, I'll say it differently. Calibre's UI is bad. Forget "dated"—I don't think it even qualifies for the use of that word. Firefox 3's UI is dated. Calibre's UI is just bad. It has a bad UI, irrespective of trends.

When I first downloaded Calibre years ago after having heard people rave about it for a while, I thought there must be some sort of mistake, or a joke even. Calibre has a hilariously bad UI, minus the hilarity. And it wouldn't be quite so crazy if it weren't the case that there's clearly been a lot of effort that has gone into trying to make it do things that are bad. The animation effect that makes thumbnails "pop" is but one obvious example.

If Calibre were "Zotero, but specifically for ebooks", it wouldn't be on the receiving end of this kind of criticism.
I know, personally, a dozen or so non-tech people who know of Sam, mostly because they listen to podcasts or consume other news sources that tell them.
Musk is mad he got caught.
Because it will take 6 precious months at the least to get back to where OpenAI is today in terms of compute and people.
For one thing, this would imply that clinical psychopaths aren't conscious, which would be a very weird takeaway.

But also, how do you know that LMs aren't empathic? By your own admission they do "mimic empathetic behaviors", but you reject this as the real thing because you claim that with enough testing you would encounter a failure. This raises all kinds of "no true Scotsman" flags, not to mention that empathy failure is not exactly uncommon among humans. So how exactly do you actually test your hypothesis?
If you close your eyes, how long can you navigate in the environment without hitting something? Not long, because you didn't model it.

If you're taking out the recycling, do you take the time to identify (model) each piece of it first? No, because that's not necessary.
When a bright light is extra annoying to light sensitive eyes it's because the lamp is actually blinking at a high frequency.
I do not believe AGI poses an exponential threat. I honestly don't believe we're particularly close to anything resembling AGI, and I certainly don't think transformers are going to get us there.

But this is a bad argument. No one is saying ChatGPT is going to turn evil and start killing people. The argument is that an AGI is so far beyond anything we have experience with and that there are arguments to be made that such an entity would be dangerous. And of course no one has been able to demonstrate this unsafe AGI - we don't have AGI to begin with.
>> That is subjective, i do not want the input latency induced by synchronizing to the monitor's refresh rate in my desktop as it makes it feel sluggish.

Only if the DE or application can't keep up. Oh, it overran the frame time, so let's just dump half of it to screen...

I'm still baffled that this is a problem. I tried ray tracing a hierarchy of rectangles decades ago and it was pretty fast. Should be better than real time today, and that's doing it the expensive way. I suppose the challenge is composting stuff from different processes every frame.
> To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness.

The weakness was the first decision; it’s already past the point of deciding if the board is a good steward of OpenAI or not. Sometimes backtracking can be a point of strength, yes, but in this case waffling just makes them look even dumber.
HN is not a monolithic entity with a single opinion. I don't know what specific comments you're referring to, but I don't see any hagiographies myself. I've seen a lot of people hopeful that OpenAI will go in a different direction with him gone!
Well, you have to specify a jurisdiction. Let’s go with California since that’s where a lot of OpenAI’s employees are. Here’s what you need:

1. an economic relationship existed between the plaintiff and a third party which contained a reasonably probable future economic benefit or advantage to plaintiff;

2. the defendant knew of the existence of the relationship and was aware or should have been aware that if it did not act with due care its actions would interfere with this relationship and cause plaintiff to lose in whole or in part the probable future economic benefit or advantage of the relationship;

3. the defendant was negligent;

4. and such negligence caused damage to plaintiff in that the relationship was actually interfered with or disrupted and plaintiff lost in whole or in part the economic benefits or advantage reasonably expected from the relationship

It’s pretty open and shut, no?
If Sam does come back Ilya’s maneuver will have been a spectacular miscalculation. Sam would be back much stronger than before and the people who cared about OpenAI’s original mission will have a massively damaged their reputation and credibility. They threw all the influence they had out the window.
Im assuming they mean Silicon Valley the TV show [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
This is how the true UNIXen of yore were sold.
Or real life is just messy but most people don’t know it because they willfully ignore it and just keep their head down living their boring middle class life.

Judge is no profit he just communicated what the rest of us already knew.
You may be right that there's no danger, but you're mischaracterizing Ilya's beliefs. He knows more than you about what OpenAI has built, and he didn't do this for legal or economical reasons. He did them in spite of those two things.
Adam has competing interests. It's hard to see why he is even allowed in non profit board. And for other two members, their profile seem pretty weak for being in a board of one of most important companies in the world.
If they were looking out for investors "blindsided key investor and minority owner Microsoft, reportedly making CEO Satya Nadella furious" doesn't make it sound like they did a terribly good job.
In retrospect, anyone who is familiar with the game mechanics of agar.io should have seen this coming.
Intel One Mono. Not extremely different from Berkeley Mono it looks like but lower x-height, higher line height, more space around letters, and a number of smallish differences (mostly in the lower case letters and numbers and round dots instead of square). Intel has the extra visible {} and non-continuous % while Berkeley Mono has the funky @.

https://github.com/intel/intel-one-mono
It happened when I did load the game files, I had to patch out this line to remove the second set of args:

Module.arguments = [...args, ...params.args];

Then, it did work! :D
And yet an enormous amount of innovation and wealth is created in Silicon Valley.
By the playground rule:

"I'm rubber, you're glue. What bounces off me, sticks to you"

The fact they had to make a release saying there was no malfeasance means there was malfeasance on their part.
> OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.

At least two of these people are not like the others and deserve to be fired and disgraced for this shitshow regardless of how it pans out.
You are saying that all top ai scientists are saying fairy tales to scare themselves if I understood correctly?
What does Satellite IR data tell us about the evolving war in Ukraine?
They just put themselves in a terrible negotiating position.

Probably so bad that the damage has already been done to themselves (the board) regardless what happens next.

How can Sam possibly agree on the board remaining intact when they don't trust him in his leadership?
I totally agree that if an employee adds $10M or $1M to the bottom line and you're paying him $100k, that's under compensation.

But there's a categorical difference between that situation and when an employee or dozens of employees who may be a break even or negative impact on profits have knowledge of a trade secret researched by a team of their predecessors that makes the company $100M.

I'm all about fair compensation and worker's rights, but a business shouldn't have to pay all those people $100M salaries.
I think they’ll end up spinning off the non profit. The board members can keep their titles as board members of a now irrelevant org.

Maybe they’ll give the non profit some advisory (fake) role over the new company.
This article itself is likely part of the power struggle.
Your test fails because the scaffolding around the LM in ChatGPT specifically does not implement this kind of thing. But you absolutely can run the LM in a continuous loop and e.g. feed it strings like "1 minute passed" or even just the current time in an internal monologue (that the user doesn't see). And then it would be able to do exactly what you describe. Or you could use all those API integrations that it has to let it schedule a timer to activate itself.
Who is Tasha McCauley? She’s listed there as from “unremarkable startups”, so how did she get on to the board?
Sorry for not replying.

10^241: I can't find the paper from years ago I thought I would be able to re-find (if it even exists). But, Seth Lloyd has written about there being a hard limit of 10^120 operations on 10^120 quantum bits as a max computational capacity of the entire universe up to today. Whether one just multiplies the two to get 10^240 or there was another paper I can no longer find where this is explicitly done, I'm not sure. The number stuck though. Since it uses plank areas and times, it is a maximum "quantity" for a human to say physically exists according to their best scientific theories. No other physical quantity in this modest metaphysics is larger than this. So we can and must get a little more creative in how we think math relates to the world since I can talk of 10^241. It represents the universe at max capacity since inception to today, what could be greater. (If you want to get really pedantic, we could say well a person thinking of 10^241 is physical too, and science is probably somewhat wrong, ergo 10^241 is physical as is any mathematical object we can think of. What about infinity? Does it take infinity of something to think of infinity? It couldn't as there aren't infinite physical anything at our disposal up to now according to science. So if it doesn't take infinite resources to think of infinity, where is infinity in the physical. We can't just say in our thoughts. This seems hard to argue).

Regarding Aristotle, is 10^241 in the physical world? How? I personally don't want to have to argue that side. Plato's division between physical and abstract (math) say, allows me to better understand math as its own thing, and leave the mystery to how it relates to the physical world as less of a scientific question a la Aristotle.

For something like Aristotle's potential infinities existing, I'm not very knowledgeable on how he envisioned they actually do exist. Maybe it can explain how to find vast quantities in the physical. Maybe. But then is 10^241 only potential?

Funnily enough I am not a platonist about math, nor however do I believe in psychologism which I would attach to Aristotle. I'm more of a fictionalist by default but always trying to challenge this. Plato I see as setting math free from physical conceptions, which is why I gravitate toward him vs. Aristotle.
Ability to attract valuable employees, connections to important people, proven ability to successfully run an AI company.
Authorities like major conferences and journals are pretty good at detecting word salad. It's not orthogonal. It's extremely highly correlated.

Don't try too hard to find fallacies.

And you'd better not respond by bringing up that one infamous time word salad was accepted; it's infamous for a reason.
This is not just a "non-profit"... it's a non-profit that owns a $90B for-profit company developing revolutionary, once-in-a-century technology. There is a LOT of money at play here.

Others have commented on how Microsoft actually has access to the IP, so the odds that they could pack their toys and rebuild OpenAI 2.0 somewhere else with what they've learned, their near infinite capital and not have to deal with the non-profit shenanigans are meaningful.

I'm not saying Sam is needed to make OpenAI what it is, but he's definitely "the investors' guy" in the organization, based on what has surfaced over the last 24 hours. Those investors would rather have him there over someone else, hence the pressure to put him back. It doesn't matter whether you and I think he's the man for the job -- what matters is whether investors think they are.

TL;DR the board thinks they have leverage, but as it turns out, they don't
Almost all top AI scientists including the top 3 Bengio, Hinton and Ilya and Sam actually think there is a good probability of that. Let me think: listen to the guy that actually built GPT 4 or some redditor that knows best?
They officially call the shot.

But right now they get a lot of shitstorm for this inexperience handling.

And it doesn't look good from the board that looks inexperienced.

Gordon-Levitt's wife?? Helen who? D'Angelo with a failing quora and a history of a coup.

Doesn't look good.

I'd bet it starts impacting their personal lives. This is equivalent to them coming out to support Donald Trump. It is that bad.
It’s all about edge cases. Sometimes, people are discussing some random proper noun, and with modern lax internet/SMS etiquette all sorts of unusual constructions pop up occasionally. Hard to know when it’s intentional, and any amount of over-zealousness is immediately noticeable.

At least that’s a layman’s guess
Nothing matters if you don’t have the money to enforce the system. Come on get real. Whatever the board says MS can turn off the money in a second and invalidate anything.
How would the trust be repaired then?

I guess if Sam is back, Ilya is planning his way out.

Regardless due to this stupid stunt, OpenAI is hardly the same.