skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"And there is how you do something"

Sorry I don't see the 'how' as necessarily appalling.

The less appalling alternative could have been weeks of discussions and the board asking for Sam's resignation to preserve the decorum of the company. How would that have helped the company ? The internal rife would have spread, employees would have gotten restless, leading to reduced productivity and shipping.

Instead, isn't this a better outcome ? There is immense short term pain, but there is no ambiguity and the company has set a clear course of action.

To affirm that the board has caused a split in the company is quite preposterous, unless you have first hand information that such a split has actually happened. As far as public information is concerned 3 researchers have quit so far, and you have this from one of the EMs.

"For those wondering what’ll happen next, the answer is we’ll keep shipping. @sama & @gdb weren’t micro-managers. The comes from the many geniuses here in research product eng & design. There’s clear internal uniformity among these leaders that we’re here for the bigger mission."

This snippet in fact shows the genius of Sam and gdb, how they enabled the teams to run even in their absence. Is it unfortunate that the board fired Sam, from the engineer's and builder's perspective yes, from the long term AGI research perspective, I don't know.
From their other comments, it seems like it's actually tax-evasion-haven rich.
> The etymological sense of occlude is that of closing off/blocking

That's quite the sense development for include, which I see derives from a word meaning "shut in, imprison".
ZIRP was a crazy time. Interest rates rise and things get even crazier.
> think Microsoft is behind all of this

Wasn’t Ilya brought in by Musk?
> You're going to quit and go wherever Altman goes next.

I won’t be surprised if it’s the open arms of Microsoft. Microsoft embraced and extended OpenAI with their investment. Now comes the inevitable.
They are based in California, where non-compete agreements are not allowed.
https://archive.ph/WMAm6
And probably a shit ton of copyrighted works that were stolen and misused as training data
This is absolute nonsense. The game of Go is a grid and two colors of pieces. "The world" here is literally everything.
>information-theoretic approach to the process

Can you elaborate on this? I've studied some information theory and I don't see it.
"...accept that their situation was untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/18/openai-in...
Technically it’s a specialized text model, not a search engine. I’m the requisite AGI doomer that you’re talking about, but doubt I’ll convince you there - instead just want you to evaluate these techniques in that view. Because IMO it makes them much more impressive. “A robot that knows everything that humanity knows” is a) not chatgpt, b) not AGI, and c) not anywhere close to a reality.
5 years ago large parts of this same community would sneer at you and call you a luddite for suggesting that fully-self-driving claims were overly optimistic.

People were saying things like trucking was a dead profession within a handful of years, etc.

They were wrong as hell, clearly.

Point being: Moore's law is for transistors, not just any tech, and not everything in tech gets on an exponential growth/improvement path.
If your “for all you know” supposition that he’s a criminal were correct, then it would be criminal to try to bring him back. In that unlikely case, I can assure you my opinion of the board is unlikely to improve. It may be a black box to us, but it does have outputs we can see and reason about.
No it is not a dupe, this is hidden in a different discussion
> A not insignificant portion of HN commenters believe AGI is close.

Did any of them mention how to build it?
Been reading up on the insight offered up on this site.

Seems like a lot of these board members have deep ties around various organizations, governmental bodies, etc. and that seems entirely normal and probable. However, prior to chatgpt and dalle we, the public , had only been allowed brief glimpses into the current state of AI (eg Look this robot can sound like a human and book a reservation for you at the restaurant -Google ; look this robot can help you consume media better -many). As a member of the public it went from “oh cool Star Trek idea, maybe we’ll see it one day with flying cars” to “holy crap, I just felt a spark of human connection with a chat program.”

So here’s my question, what are the chances that openAI is controlled opposition and Sam never really was supposed to be releasing all this stuff to the public? I remember he was on his Lex podcast appearance and said paraphrasing “so what do you think, should I do it? Should I open source and release it? Tell me to do it and I will.”

Ultimately, this is what “the board is focused on trust and safety” mean right? As in safety is SV techno HR PR dribble for go slow, wear a helmet and seatbelt and elbow protectors , never go above 55, give everyone else the right of way because we are in the for the good humanity and we know what’s best. (vs the Altman style of: go fast, double dog dare smart podcast dude to make unprecedented historical decision to open source, be “wild” and let people / fate figure some of it out along the way.”)

The question of openai’s true purpose being a form of controlled opposition is of course based on my speculation but an honest question for the crowd here.
Study qi gong with an energy arts teacher. There are plenty in the Bay Area especially
Of course it isn’t. Without executive sponsorship there is no staff or resources.
Various newswire-type things on Twitter reporting Satya will do what it takes to make sure Sam’s at work on Monday.
The leaked memo today (which was probably reviewed by legal, unlike yesterday’s press release) says there was no malfeasance.
The key word is "bright". It's clearer in the other article: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/asteroid-will-cov...

> An occultation of a 1st-magnitude star is rare — such an event is visible from Earth only every few decades

and

> That changed on September 13, 2023: In advance of the December event, Leona occulted another object, this time of a 12th-magnitude star.

It makes sense: there are only a few bright (1st-magnitude) stars so occultation of them is rare, while there are a lot of stars in the sky so occultation of some (dim) star is not very rare.

————

Edit: We can come up with a more explicit expression. If each individual star has an occultation once every k days, then "at least one of N stars" has an occultation roughly once every 1/(1-(1-1/k)^N) ≈ k/N days. So if with N=22 (the number of 1st-magnitude stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=First-magnitude_s... ) this is once in 40 years (say), then with N = 10000 stars you'd see about once a month.
Lots of things in computing are perpetually 10 years away, until one day they aren't. Remember when image classification was the canonical "easy problem computers can't do"?
Sam creating his own company for what purpose? Meta, Google, Elon's company, Anthropic, OpenAI... why would anyone believe that Sam and crew could stand up a new company tomorrow and have any kind of chance to compete in next six months with above?Even if Microsoft threw a ton of money at such a startup, good luck finding GPU time. Good luck sourcing the data. Good luck doing the RLHF. Could Sam and Greg do this? Sure! But what would that give them above and beyond the racers that are currently in pole position?
People are speculating without knowing the details.
Typical engineer hot take. Altman wields immense influence in SV. Technical brilliance is nothing without the capital (social + monetary) necessary to convert it to useful products.
I’m really curious about how the venture investors feel about that
Exactly, quantum fields are basically ether by another name.
The ether/aether word is just very out of fashion, having been allegedly 'disproved' (not actually) by Einstein and the Michelson–Morley experiment.

To be fair, some early conceptions of the ether included it flowing, like a liquid, which we don't think it does currently, and which quantum fields don't do.

If you have drunk the special relativity kool-aid, you might also be confused about how the ether/quantum field can be 'real' or something physical, if everything is relative. The Lorentz ether theory viewpoint helps with that confusion though, I think.
Ah yes, no other company would step in and get this deal from OpenAI if Microsoft pulls out. It's not like Amazon and Google pump billions into the OpenAI competitor.
Sure, but Microsoft could also walk away today and leave OpenAI high and dry. They hold ALL the power here.
They fire the CEO suddenly, and not at all nicely, either… and then the next day they’re in talks to bring him back? I don’t think so. This doesn’t make any sense at all.
how many steps away from Evil Giants do you want? If there is a great little company that offers what you want, run by mom and pop but they host THEIR stuff at google...
Not a chance. Not a chance at all.
Ask HN: Is my local hacker space unusually dysfunctional?
I am fortunate to have a hacker space in my neighborhood, and I have been visiting it during the day, attending events, and even hosting a few community meetups now and again. I'm concerned that I have entered a socially unhealthy environment and surrounded myself with people who erode my excitement for technology and drain my energy.

- We have a tradition of weekly "nerd nights" with lightning talks, but the majority of presenters talk about vague business scams, motivational self-help programs, paranormal beliefs, and fringe science.

- We have a Sam Altman eyeball-scanning orb on site and it gets more use than our 3D printers and other maker tools. Some of our events hand out NFTs for attending them.

- Nowhere else in my life have I ever been approached more often about brazen swindles, from fee-based "insider" Discord servers, to "exclusive" pre-pre-YC prep programs, to "opportunities" to work for free for "well-connected solopreneurs."

- A number of our regulars are practically homeless and use the space to cook meals in the toaster oven, wash up in the bathroom, sleep on the lounge sofa, and live out of trucks and trailers in the parking lot.

Is my local hacker space unusually dysfunctional, or is this pretty much par for the course?
This example seems to be survivorship bias. Personally, if someone approached me to suggest backstabbing someone else, I wouldn't trust that they wouldn't eventually backstab me as well. @bear141 said "People should oppose openly or leave." [1] and I agree completely. That said, don't take vacations! (when Elon Musk was ousted from PayPal in the parent example, etc.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38326443
>> I do think it's still worthwhile to consider the minimum wage since it applies direct upward pressure on other hourly wages

> That's all true

You're conceding a lot; that claim would not generally be viewed as true.
A company named openai choosing safety is bad because safety means as closed as possible, is a very questionable linguistic contortion. Most unsafe things happen behind closed doors.
Virtually all non-compete agreements are illegal and void in California. Limited exceptions exist for LPs, etc, but they do not apply here.
I think I’m on sutskever’s side in all this- AI safety, to the extent that such a thing is possible, is certainly more important than making a bunch of money in the short term. Potentially, this is the future of the whole human race you’re talking about- not the time to go on some ego driven macho crusade to make a name for yourself. It’s just terrifying that these are the kind of people fucking around with technology they don’t even fully understand. Have they never read cat’s cradle?

This technology is more dangerous than the hydrogen bomb, more dangerous than smallpox, and they’re just throwing it out there for everyone to play with. Calling this irresponsible is like calling the ocean a puddle.
I read Nadella has threatened to turn off OpenAIs computers and would litigate the hell out of them to prevent the computers from being turned back on. Which is why the board is suddenly open to negotiation with Altman.

Yeah, that's the Microsoft of old. Don't trust 'em.

Bad news for OpenAI, and any hope that this stuff won't be used for evil.
From the article,

>As frustrating as coding can be, I am still in love with it. I love to see my code work, I love it when people can use it, play with it. I love building things, solving problems. I love making progress through difficult challenges.

The "idea guy" part of the story was from the writer's past.
iPhone: Why Apple is working hard to break into its own phones
Doesn't matter, the original statement being refuted was "I very much doubt a single engineer or scientist would side with him"
Those are basically unenforceable in California.
No. You shouldn’t.

He’s smart, but smart is like having a big engine in the car. Says nothing about the driving. Big engine plus bad driver just means a worse accident.
It's the topcomment of the discussion of the same article which is itself updated with that same information. That submission is on the FP.
They have external investment!
Gotcha. The short answer is I'd stay, but not for something I believe twitter does uniquely well. A tool like that would make it easier to move away from Twitter for sure, so the motivation threshold for doing so gets lower. But the core reason is that I'm just not motivated to move away from it. It still does what I want more or less like it did before and it doesn't seem that any other platforms are doing it obviously better (at least right now).
FYI I'd skip the Tao of Pooh if you're trying to learn more about Taoism; it's more of a pop-culture, western philosophy inspired by eastern take then actual Daoism.

Otherwise, my recs are:

First find good translations of the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi. For the former I recommend Victor Mair or Thomas Cleary. For the latter, Brook Ziporyn.

There's also the Lieh-tzu, which is often considered to be "authored" by Laozi as well, though isn't talked about as much. I've only read AC Graham's translation but liked it well enough.

Taoist Body by Kristofer Schipper is a fascinating look into Taiwanese Taoism. Kristofer was even ordained as a Taoist priest, one of the few Westerners to do so.

Early Daoist Scriptures by Stephen R. Bokenkamp is borderline a textbook but I found it gave a great historical understanding of how Taoism has developed through the ages.

Original Tao by Harold Roth is actually a translation and commentary of a text that pre-dates the TTC and was very interesting to me.

Taoist Meditation by Thomas Cleary is another neat collection of translations that cover a broad range of Taoist thought with decent of annotations to help you understand.

And finally, I'd recommend grabbing a copy of the I-Ching (I like David Hinton's translation) and some Taoist T'ang dynasty poets (Li Bo or Li Bai is a good one to start with) to round it all out. I've found that reading relevant poetry helps me put the philosophical stuff into a real-world context without falling into the trap of re-contextualizing it into Western culture.
> And regardless of what happens here

Regardless of whether or not sam is coming back to OpenAI, the board is 100% getting fired.
He’s not the only one. But at least 4 top people have already left because of him leaving. He can clearly take people with him. That’s the comment you’re responding to. His power isn’t him alone. It’s everyone he brings with him.
> And yet it's a productive language with significant adoption, go figure.

Perl was also a successful language with significant adoption. At least back then, we didn’t know any better.

In twenty years the industry will look back on golang as an avoidable mistake that hampered software development from maturing into an actual engineering discipline, for the false economy of making novice programmers quickly productive. I’m willing to put money on that belief, given sufficiently agreed upon definitions.
See also Ryan C. Gordon’s (icculus) Multizork / Mojozork project:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/54997062?utm_campaign=postshar...

https://github.com/icculus/mojozork
Not really. This is new development that deserves a separate discussion.
The AGI is already in control, and it's been reading Machiavelli.
It's still tough. They won't have the data used to train the model, which is an incredibly important part. There's a lot of existing competitors in this space with headstarts. There's no guarantee that the entire research organization will follow Sam even if they leave OpenAI - they're going to have a lot of offers and opportunities at other companies that have an advantage.

It's also not clear that this is a realistic scenario - Ilya is the real deal, and there's likely plenty of people that believe in him over Altman.

Of course, the company has also expanded massively under Altman in a more commercial environment, so there are probably quite a few people that believe in Altman over him.

I doubt either side ends up with the entire research organization. I think a very real possibility is both sides end up with less than half of what OpenAI had Friday morning.
I think this article represents a tactical press release from Sam’s camp. Company in “free fall” without Sam? It’s not even Monday yet.
Eh. There is so much good content around, why waste my time reading and encouraging user hostile content? Pushing myself through inconveniences like this carries a tang of self abandonment.

Visually filtering this stuff out is really exhausting for me. I have the mental energy to read one article with buzzy BS, or maybe 3 other articles which might be just as good or better and respect my attention. I must admit - I didn’t think of reader mode. But by the time I started holding my thumb over the bottom of the screen, overwhelm had already started to set in a little. I was frustrated and the seeds of hatred had sprouted in my heart for the author. “Mildly inconvenienced” my arse.

It’s Sunday and I choose to enjoy my life. Somehow I think I’ll survive not reading this one particular article. At least not today, Satan.
I mean the desire to get Sam back and probably also fanning the flames of mass resignation to use as pressure.
How could he possibly oust them?
Silicon Valley has a way of diminishing humans. So of course deep learning is about to eclipse human intelligence - the vast majority of humans are just stochastic parrots and NPCs, after all.
Out of genuine curiosity , and I mean no disrespect , have you worked in film production? Because directors sit in many meetings directing the people on the project.

It kind of feels to me like you’re describing the way the industry works from an outsiders view since it doesn’t match the actual workings of any of the productions I’ve worked on.

the shoots are only a portion of production. You have significant pre production and post production time.

A producer is closer in role to a CFO or investor , depending on the production since it’s a relatively vague term.
I agree. The pretense that OpenAI is still an open or a nonprofit has been a farce for a while now, it is an aggressively for-profit, trying to be the next Google company, and everybody knows it.
As you're watching this whole episode where no one can figure out what an organization worth tens of billions of dollars is going to be on Monday morning, remember: Silicon Valley businesspeople are the smartest, most competent, and most innovative people in America - if not the world - and deserve their personal net worth because none of us could have handled this better.
They could just patch Chrome to make "updating video element props trigger DOM updates".
You're replying to a six day old comment about the entire US prison system which is flawed on many many levels.

For future reference a good line of exploration is:

Denmark's recidivism rate is about 27 percent, roughly half the rate of the U.S., which ranges from 49 percent to 80 percent depending on the crime.

which raises many questions; how does this vary by country and what are the reasons?

The US prison system has a big issue with not being a simple punishment for a crime, it's very much a destruction of a persons life for the accusation of crime, once marked as a "former convict" a person in the US has difficulty regaining employment which leads to few options otherthan more crime.
Well I read Nadella threatened to turn off OpenAI's servers, so yeah, Microsoft does in fact control it.

Not your premises not your compute?
"Wrong as hell" seems like a severe overstatement. Even after the Cruise fiasco, self-driving cars with no human in the driver's seat are commercially available in three major US cities. There were quite a lot of overly optimistic claims about the speed of market penetration, but the technology is real.
It’s still common for people are people and triggered often by a list of common things like power, money, and fame.
This poses an interesting question: how to get rid of that energy? Once the battery is full, you'd need a pretty substantial resistor bank to dissipate all of that excess energy. I wonder if they intentionally start the day at a low state of charge and end fully charged? The idea of a "reverse charger" to discharge the battery into the grid every night would be hilarious and not entirely unfeasible.
And the commercials are coming within a decade.
The Security Council will convene a crisis committee to debate sending in peacekeepers.
5% ups and downs happen all the time.

It was definitely a shitty move on MS, and Satya being the CEO is right to express they're upset.
It has been used already, in (I know for certain 1) a AAA game. Including voice overs and dynamic choicing.

(It was used to generate x number of possibilities, each were human vetted and ran by the LQA and FQA teams.)

Cannot mention the product name though sorry :s

Edit: not in a live environment, just as a 'generator' though
You say that, but one day one of them is going realise that they can give ChatGPT a fresh cup of really hot tea and ask it for an implementation of AGI.
Or the same process...
You can safely assume he still had sufficient power to be well protected.
This is what happens when you have people trying to change the world. Opinions make people weird. If you want to avoid weirdness, just have a boring business that tries to make money by any means necessary.
Pointing out the points raised is hardly "conceding" when the points are of very little relevance to the claim of "Americans are broke", nor does it rebut the claim of "inflation adjusted wages have been creeping up in the last decade". It's not contradictory to admit that minimum wages have effects on economy wide wages, but also claim that wages have been creeping up.
> justify

i don't need to justify my actions. I know adblocking is denying revenue to the platform. i don't care.

The "just buy premium" crowd is assuming that people are rich enough to afford premium. May be they should consider how priviledged they are for having the spare money to dump on premium.
Was Einstein Right? by Clifford Will (disclaimer: know the guy a little bit), while it could use an update, is a fantastic review of the various experiments which showed that the results were within predictions of special and general relativities.

Many people don't want Einstein to have been right, and their motivations vary. Some really really really want FTL to be a thing. Some desire an absolute frame of reference. Some have philosophical issues with the concepts. A few seem to be under the impression that Michelson-Morley was done just the one time and that was the end of any attempts to falsify.
I think you are right that this paper isn't practically useful. But that is much like saying that making one chip off of a block of granite isn't art. It isn't, but the first chip enables further research until it is practical.
Ah, parliamentary democracy.