skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well as a kid in the 80s I lived in a village whose link to the outside world was 15Km of wire over the hills hooking a device like this ( https://www.cristoiublog.ro/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/telef... ) to the manual telephone exchange. After picking up the phone from the handle I'd rotate the crank vigurously until the telephone lady looking like this ( https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DMMuSrLXkAAzvXA?format=jpg&name=... ) would pick up and ask where to connect me to.

So radio looked a bit miraculous to me, I tried to understand how it works on a deeper level, engineering level. There were kits to buy and solder but I never felt satisfied with that, it didn't "do it for me". OK, I hooked these things up but still have no idea how or why they work. In a "Lord of the Rings" analogy it's the difference between operating the ring (any idiot can do that) and building the ring (only a true wizard knows how). So this set me on a path where I made efforts to learn applied mathematics which can be used to explain these electronic circuits, eventually went to Techical University and finally fucking figured out the magic. I can now design a radio oscillator and modulator and amplifier and demodulator from the ground up, at differential equations level. Which ... after solving the issue of "understand radio", left me with the realization that I can't make a living out of that. So I pivoted to software development, taking advantage of my higher than usual level of knowledge in mathematics by eventually getting into finance as a quant developer.

So radio kinda got me into stock exchanges.
How is it decided that "AGI" has arrived?
Lol, maybe. Ballmer was a friend of Gates, was 44 years old and had worked at Microsoft for 20 years (2000-1980) already when he became CEO. Nadella was also forty-something and had worked at Microsoft for 22 years (2014-1992) when he got the job.
This was the mainstream killer app for RSS. And it was great. But then some podcasting services (looking at you, Spotify and others...) decided to force us to use our browser or some app instead of giving us the freedom to download files for offline use.
Enough material here for Horowitz to write "The next hard thing about hard things".
I was thinking exactly this. If the original idea was to slow things down, then that kind of turmoil is exactly what was required. OpenAI will slow down under the new CEO and because talent is leaving. Altman will slow down, because he will need to build thing from the ground up.
The people that would rather have him as boss.

I know several people that keep changing company when their favourite leardership changes into another one.
Well many of the top researches in the world seem keen for a slow down so I’m not sure you’re right. You can’t force people to work on things at a pace they’re uncomfortable with.
It really does feel like that. Like it’s mutually beneficial for Sam and MSFT to team up in the short term while Sam figures out his next move and MSFT tries to keep OpenAI afloat for the time being
No, Sam Altman and others have written about this a long time ago. 8 years ago:

"Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence"

https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

It's unfortunate how crank people on HN like you turn when it comes to this grave topic. Multiple people, for years, many without incentive, will tell you what they think and you will just "no they're lying," especially when YC has placed a huge amount of value on earnestness forever. Not too mention they've addressed the regulation conspiracy and how the regulation restricts them and big co's, not GPT4 level models by anyone smaller.
The entirety of the European Union changed their national currencies to a new one, from scratch (no prior partial euroization), essentially overnight, in 2002. It’s definitely doable, if properly planned.
When I was a child I had a pop up book of Skylab complete with movable panels. I played with that thing so much it basically got destroyed.

In the article it mentioned that a Brazilian baby was named Skylab in the hopes that NASA would help raise it. I tried to find more info on the person but a cursory search didn't yield anything on it. I wonder how they're doing today.
>Anders Hejlsberg didn't move to MS until 1996...

The point of the comment wasn't the specific date, it was the impact of hiring a competitor's team AND equipping that team to be even more impactful.
Microsoft also acquired LinkedIn and Github.

Both of which have been run as largely seperate entities.
The scientific method is the only method of enquiry that is valid if you are doing science. In science, skepticism of every theory, new or old, is expected, encouraged and valued, because, according to the scientific method, every theory is potentially falsifiable.

Skepticism and consensus are conflicting concepts. Consensus has no place in science as method of determining truth. You cannot form a scientific conclusion based on socially or politically manufactured consent.

Never has this been more clearly demonstrated than during and after the recent Coronavirus panic. Facts were ignored, or even suppressed, "settled science" and "scientific consensus" were used as weapons to silence dissenters, by trashing their reputations, or threatening their jobs.

We are living in an age of Cargo Cult Science. Richard Feynman must be rolling in his grave.
The scale of addiction won’t be remotely comparable. The UK has had completely legal, tax free gambling for a very long time and addiction has become a huge issue, with online poker being a tiny part (barely even features in the discourse) of the story. We’re talking about life destroying levels of addiction.
It is the only way they can continue the work they have already contributed at OpenAI. Otherwise, it would mean they spend months or up to a year training their own model which in this arms race isn't feasible with viable competitors like Anthropic closing the gap quickly. This was the only way forward. I'm sure Sam Altman + Greg were offered an incredibly lucrative deal and autonomy.
Even Hollywoodland is just Hollywood now.
They just passed messages through Macs.
Do leading AI researchers at Google/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic/HuggingFace want to work at Microsoft?
OpenAI's ideas of humanities best interests were like a catholic mom's. Less morals are okay by me.
You see it all the time with conglomerates and subsidiaries. Microsoft is unusual in that the company has their largest "subsidiaries" are part of the same corporate legal entity.
The whole point of this is that Microsoft doesn't even need to remove the board anymore. From their standpoint, the whole fear was openAI was about to lose a lot of their best people, including their CEO, who they had the most trusted.

That would've greatly harmed their investment Now they get to have their cake and eat it too: they can keep their existing relationship with open AI and continue to get access to their models, and yet at the same time they potentially get all the best people in-house and benefit from their work directly. This whole turn of events might turn out to be a net win for Microsoft.
Satya just tweeted saying that Sam Altman would be the CEO of this new group.
Just FYI...

Microsoft was already set to spent 27 billion usd on research for 2023. They dedicate huge standout double digit percentages of budget to research every year. Their in house AI research division was already huge.

They didn't become a major AI player overnight... They already were long ago.

OpenAI is small, in raw numbers of AI researchers, compared to the big players in the space. That's a major reason why it's so compelling that they have been able to consistently set the bar for state of the art.

They were a dream team... But small. Msft is adding AAA+ talent to their existing A+ deck. Also they won't have to rewrite the code base. Can hit the ground running.

Lastly, there is no evidence that openai has the greatly quoted and so hard to define 'agi'. That's Twitter hearsay and highly unlikely... If folkes can even agree what that is. By the overwhelming percentage of definitions... Even gpt-5 is unlikely to meet that bar. Highly speculative. Twitter is a cesspool of conspiracy theory... Don't believe everything you read.
Looks like you got your wish earlier than anyone would have expected: https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122
> can capture a bigger slice of THE FUTURE
History says that the future is actually written by the nerds and not the drumbeaters (ah read CXOs).

In all this drama, the deep work interruption of the nerds is the net loss (and effectively slight deceleration) for the future.
Sam is coming on as the CEO of a whole new group. This is like Cruise. Very exciting.
I think your definition of API is very useful, but API is the wrong term. It’s much more general than that and is used in contexts where these constraints don’t even make sense.

Specifically a hypermedia API is something browsers (and the implicit backbone of the internet) understand very well. In fact you have to go out of your way to serve an application that your browser doesn’t inherently understand.

The clarity that seems to be lacking here is not necessarily a fault of the author. We re-purposed some of these terms (REST, API etc.) to serve specific needs. But then kind of lost the understanding of what we had before.

I think that’s not our fault though. Standardization didn’t move fast enough and the quality we needed in the mobile context wasn’t there.
This was expected. Who would possibly think Sam would join MS to be a "senior research" or "VP of engineering"? They get to form a company and run a startup within Microsoft with full Microsoft backing.

OpenAI is so over.
As much as I like the game, the engineering depth isn't that deep compared to "work fast and always know what's behind your cutting surface." (Especially since you are dismantling, rather than constructing.)

I mean, it boils down to stuff like: Systematically depressurize, get fuses before removing generators, shut off fuel before removing thrusters, have an exit path for the generator before you disconnect the coolant, etc.
Satya wins by letting Ilya win. Wow.
Exactly. I'm not so sure that most of OpenAI's employees would be very excited to join Microsoft.
They already defined it - a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.

There's some vagueness here sure but if they can demonstrate something to that effect, fair play to them i guess.
> 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.

Sam is a serial startup (co)founder who has spent additional time at YC -- in the startup world, that kind of talk is so common as to be a stereotype. It's a good way to get people who do care about that kind of stuff to accept equity in a firm that is statistically likely to fail (or, in OpenAI's case, explicitly warns investors that they should not expect profit and treat investments as donations) as compensation when they could earn greater secure compensation from more established firms. It's a great sales pitch, even when there is no truth behind it.
If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Sam's history is full of the worst parts of venture capital and startup mindset. He's only an idealist so far as he's good at selling the ideal outcome and drowning out any criticism.
His daughter is getting discriminated against, and you have word salad justification for that?
The little secret is that the training run (meaning, creating the raw autocompleting multimodal token weights) for 5 ran in parallel with 4.
Non-competes are not legally enforcable in California, or so I hear.
This is so annoying, I don't want to have newsletters in my personal email. I'm happy Substack lets users choose what they want to use, newsletters or RSS feeds.

Many feed readers also let users subscribe to newsletters. I'm also working on one, https://looking-glass.app/

It has a bunch of extra bells and whistles as well, like automatic summarization.
You're not beating Nvidia if you aim for GPUs.

The more plausible approach is developing more specialized chips, which are only good at Tensor Ops. Heck, that's what Nvidia's top of the line chips are. The A100 and H100 don't support OpenGL or any other Graphics Api.
I believe his total comp since becoming CEO passed 1B this summer, 9 years or so.
you always build on top of something else and I'm not saying otherwise

fact still remains that Google came up with an impressive and transformative piece of technology
Even HP fanfiction lovers HATED HPMOR. It had a clowny reputation

It is wild to see how closely connected the web is though. Yudkowsky, Shear, and Sutskever. The EA movement today controls a staggering amount of power.
Leadership

People believe his vision of AI

That is it
You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to Microsoft's profits, so maybe their interests are not as misaligned as you think.

I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain who wants to destroy the entire world just because.
People usually screen scrape because of limitations in the Hacker News API, not because it's nonexistent.
https://imgur.com/a/ZjehzHY
The point about technology is that there is no choice. It's not like if we did nothing, everything would just live happily ever after. Every species on this planet is living on borrowed time. Literally the only choice for the persistence is advancement and expansion, which of course will also cause numerous negative effects along its course.

Also, the first [1] (and one of the most extreme) extinction events ever was indeed caused by a single species, cyanobacteria. Prior to the evolutionary development of photosynthesis, there was plentiful simple life on the planet. The evolutionary emergence of photosynthesis resulted in a dramatic and rapid introduction of oxygen into Earth's atmosphere which was exceptionally toxic to the existing abiotic species. We only think of oxygen as a good thing, because we evolved in its presence. If there was an advanced species that managed to evolve in abiotic circumstance, we'd probably look as weird to them as a creature that breathes gaseous arsenic would look to us!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
Also on their site...

"it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world"

This company is very different.
A lot of experienced OpenAI engineers/scientists apparently want to come with him. Those people clearly have a lot of value to Microsoft since they've invested heavily in OpenAI. Imagine having poured billions in to that firm to discover half the reason you invested is walking out the door...
It's really telling of US tech culture, how AI hype quickly turned from "Open" and "we're doing it for humanity" into a mega-corp cash grab *show.

I understand what money does to principles, but this is comical.
As far as I know, he actually came from an engineering background, making his career even more impressive. Despite my views on Microsoft and shareholder-oriented capitalism, he certainly seems like a brilliant and genuinely interesting guy.
> So which humans in the Americas killed off the roaming elephants or mammoths?

native Americans
Come on! Of all C/Posix thread-safety issues in circulation this can plausibly be considered the most moot one.

Environment variables are not meant to be an inter-thread communication channel and the documentation that points out setenv() is not thread-safe is very much a fair shot.

You rarely, if ever, need to setenv() anything maybe unless you're a shell. For spawning children execve() already takes an envp parameter. For debugging I think I've mostly set in-process environment variables manually from gdb.

Further, because environment variables are an interface between the process and its environment you typically read environment variables at start and cache the parsed values in some internal location. If you need to change that global state on the go you should do it using your own internal variables instead of recycling it through the environment and having the program threads repeatedly getenv() the updated values.
Microsoft's board made the right call when they promoted Satya to CEO. Their share price on the day he became CEO was $36.35 and is now $369.84 (and likely to increase again on this news).

Putting together a deal like this whilst maintaining the relationship with OpenAI is impressive enough, but to do it as a cricket tragic when India was losing to Australia is even better.
I suspect for people like Sam who are compulsively ambitious and competitive, it's not about the dollars. It's about winning.

Further, based on anecdotes from friends and Twitter who know Sam personally, I'm inclined to believe he's genuinely motivated by building something that "alters the timeline", so to speak.
Sure. But Sam Altman is an ambitious man. Why would he accept this instead of fundraising and creating another company? I think there would be more details of this arrangement surfacing these coming days. It is unlikely a traditional team within a large corporation.
Sam is not a billionaire. By all industry accepted accounts (easily googlable), his net worth is in the range of 500 to 700 million.

Do you have a source for your assertion?
Microsoft has become the commercial arm of OpenAI
Have you ever exported anything in a shell script? Sure you can keep the necessary changes in local state and pass those to execve(2)/execvpe(3)/posix_spawn(3), and that would be safe AFAIK, but setenv(3) is there and more convenient if you're unaware of the hidden dangers. Also that doesn't work for PATH in execvp/execvpe, which is read from the current process; how do you change search paths for execvp without setenv (short of doing the search yourself)?

Edit: I just realized macOS/FreeBSD has execvP() that allows passing a custom search path, so PATH is now safe, but without a -e variant, everything else is again unsafe.
Microsoft is not a pyramid organization, but distributed into teams - like Google, for better or for worse.
I imagine Sam's vision, both before and after this company change, is that he'll keep improving GPTs, while also setting up a thriving ecosystem through APIs, and AI will become a trillion dollar industry with him at the center.

From there, maybe someone will come up with the revolutionary advance necessary to reach AGI. It may not necessarily be under his company, but he'll be the super successful AI guy and in a pretty strong position to influence things anyway.
Yup back pats from the board to Satya. Only 10 billion to get their foot in the door at OpenAI and now they can ransack all their talent. How many billions would it cost to develop that independently? What a saving.
> Cloudflare doesn't obey the Accept header

That's not true. They do, but you have to add it to the Vary header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Va...

This way user-agents know that the Accept header is involved in the final form of the response. (As another example, Firefox also doesn't take Accept into consideration when caching locally by default, and it does with Varry: Accept)
So from scratch but with a TON of insight and miles of read code from OpenAI?

Haha. This will be so awful for Microsoft's lawyers.
Yes, and that’s great for plants! It’s terrible for human beings though, which personally I’m more concerned with being as though I’m not a plant.
This sounds like a step down for both openai and sama. Microsoft probably wins here as they still have access to openai tech and now the only entity with access to the same talent pool as was there before last Friday.
A) Does brockman own equity in openAI ?

B) Can you please please please name the new company Clippy?

C) What is it so unique about openAI employees that people think it makes them irreplaceable?
The new lint in Dart 3.2
The OpenAI nonprofit board does, AIUI. That means OpenAI can, in theory, cut off everything from this day forward (by declaring GPT-5 or whatever as "AGI"), but they can't cut off access to GPT-4.
Don't you still need to look up times when you schedule with people?
RSS never really died, most CMS packages still spit out RSS feed that web site owners either don't know exist or don't care to advertise. So you can often find unadvertised feeds all over the internet, but for everything else there are plenty of poling services (hosted or selfhosted) that can generate an RSS feed well enough.

If enough people start using RSS again the icons will show back up on websites again, mainly because it wouldn't be much work to add.
> a nonprofit with a mission oriented around safety

so much wrong in so few words.
Well that turned out to be 100% wrong. I am, as predicted, very surprised.
Ha! Tell that to the species of primates that will happily squeeze even the last ounce of resources from the only habitable planet they have, to enrich said shareholders. Humans are really bad in assessing situations larger than their immediate family, and this is no exception.
At a very basic level, isn't it just confusing to have the same URL and method return two different completely different formats?

I feel like a good API is limited in what it accepts, and this alone is enough to say one should not do content negotiation unless forced to.
Yep. LinkedIn has a completely different pay scale and perks than regular Microsoft employees.
From a users POV, GPT-4 with search might be, but not alone. There's still a need for live results and citing specific documents. Search doesn't have to mean Google, but it can mean Google.

From an indexing/crawling POV, the content generated by LLMs might (and IMO will) permanently defeat spam filters, which would in turn cause Google (and everyone else) to permanently lose the war against spam SEO. That might be an existential threat to the value of the web in general, even as an input (for training and for web search) for LLMs.

LLMs might already be good enough to degrade the benefit of freedom of speech via signal-to-noise ratio (even if you think LLMs are "just convincing BS generators"), so I'm glad the propaganda potential is one of the things the red team were working on before the initial release.
Based on Satya’s reply to Sam’s quote tweet, seems like Sam is going to run a subsidiary-style organization like LinkedIn, GitHub, and Minecraft. Can’t wait to see what he’s going to do.
I was expecting MSFT to get a board seat and bring them back tbh
You might be thinking of sodium vapor lights
I'm still talking about how hard it is... just for the 7000 known species of lizards.

"We show that as of June 2021, 3,278 unique animals have had their nuclear genome sequenced and the assembly made publicly available in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank database (10). This translates to 0.2% of all animal species."

It's a huge project! Just lizards are double the number of complete screens we have.

We should definitely try and get the tech going. It will have uses to recover even endangered species in the near future, but it's not a smart use of our resources for saving us "after" something happens.
The climate crisis has proven pretty thoroughly that companies will choose short term profit over humanity’s long term success every time. Public companies are literally forced to do so.
There is a Lego Mindstorms Rubik's Cube solver robot as well:
https://mindcuber.com/

It is a bit slow, but it seems to work. Here are some videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/IAssemble/videos
This is a tweet directly from Satya Nadella. Do you think he's publicly lying in a way that would be disastrous to the company he runs?