skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AGI is about definitions. By many definitions, it’s already here. Hence MSR’s “sparks of AGI” paper and Eric Schmidt’s article in Noema. But by the definition “as good or better than humans at all things”, it fails.
It is funny believing we have AGI and yet resorting ad-hominem to prove/defend that!

At some point in time Ilya was a nobody going against the gods of AI/ML. Just slightly over a decade ago neural networks were a joke in AI.
Rightfully so?

No-one knows. But I sure would trust the scientist leading the endeavor more than a business person that has interest in saying the opposite to avoid immediate regulations.
Again, my reference class is “things that could end civilization”, which I hope we can all agree was not the claim about crypto.

But yes, if you just consider the mundane benefits and harms of AI, it looks a lot like crypto; it both benefits our economy and can be weaponized, including by our adversaries.
Sure, to quote from the article: "Cool looking nonsense, but nonsense."

There was also this in the article:

"Over at Pasts Imperfect, University of Iowa professor Sarah Bond has an interesting piece on incorporating AI into her assignments by having students fact-check the results ChatGPT spits out at them. I think that’s a useful response for a certain kind of assignment and know of others who have done the same; I don’t think that makes ChatGPT useful, but I think it is a good approach for assignments otherwise vulnerable to ChatGPT as a method of limiting harm. Put another way: it is a good assignment for what I am still unconvinced is a good technology."

I understand her pedagogical motivation, but then again, the free labor argument.
Whats Wrong with Lisp?
It went deep into the negatives for a bit. Often, at least with me, people mistake my efforts at sincere analysis as some kind of advocacy.

I'm an American. I've never been to China or seen one of these Chinese electric cars in person but everything suggests they're on their way to a formidable auto industry in the electric and city-car/light use space - the demographic that Honda and Toyota captured in the 70s and 80s.

Of course if you've done any traveling you'd find many countries have a national auto-manufacturer that's deeply popular in country without much penetration outside (take Vinfast or Saipa for instance) and the Chinese auto companies have yet to prove they can stake a foothold outside of their home country at the Kia or Mercedes level but they just started.

BYD just entered Japan under 2 months ago and XPeng entered Europe only about 6 months ago.

Time will tell, but we could be seeing the very early stage of Chinese auto brands becoming household names.
I'm not sure you understood my point. I was pointing out that oil changes are less frequent than this. I take my ICE in once every two years, and my PHEV even less than that.

It may be true that when 30% of vehicles are EVs, oil change locations will be hard to find, but I doubt it. Even if dedicated oil change chains cease to exist, people will still need tires, alignment, etc, and those shops will presumably provide oil change services.

Regardless, it's going to be a while before 30% of vehicles on the road are EVs — isn't it like 1-2% of new cars sold? If vehicles stay on the road for 20 years, then EVs won't be 30% of the total fleet for a long time.
> rhetorical

Plural generic first-person possessive pronoun.
> you bet on the consensus science because it's probably right. And it was.

Was it though? As I am seeing now, some early policies were flat out murderous (such as hosting COVID patients together with healthy people in nursing homes), some were practically useless mortality wise (like lockdowns) and some are very minimally useful or not useful at all (like mask mandates and mass-firing unvaccinated people). Some were flat out fraud (like claims that consensus existed about COVID origins). For some, I understand, the jury is still out (like, how efficient exactly are the vaccines, compared to natural immunity). So I am not sure which part "it was" it is referring too, and pretty sure there were a lot of losing bets made in those years.
I would be surprised if there weren’t any holdings through a trust which is a separate legal entity , so technically not him
that's not un-HN. Noone has any clue, and all are speculating, so it is one theory after another. We have dozen posts on capitalization.
Steve Jobs would be nothing without Wozniak to design something people wanted.
Was this post inspired by the OpenAI news?
It does seem like any sufficiently advanced AGI that has the primary objective of valuing human life over it's own existence and technological progress, would eventually do just that. I suppose the fear is that it will reach a point where it believes that valuing human life is irrational and override that objective...
That's not quite right. However, before explaining, it is moot because OpenAI's for-profit subsidiary probably captures most of the value anyway.

The nonprofit shell exists because the founders did not want to answer to shareholders. If you answer to shareholders, you may have a legal fiduciary responsibility to sell out to high bidder. They wanted to avoid this.

Anyway, in a strict nonprofit, the proceeds of a for-profit conversion involves a liquidation where usually the proceeds must go to some other nonprofit or a trust or endowment of some sort.

Example would be a Catholic hospital sell out. The proceeds go to the treasury of the local nonprofit Catholic dioceses. The buyers and the hospital executives do not get any money. Optionally, the new for-profit hospital could hold some of the proceeds in a charitable trust or endowment governed by an independent board.

So it's not as simple as just paying tax on a sale because the cash has to remain in kind of a nonprofit form.

I am not an accountant either and obviously there are experts who probably can poke holes in this.
Indeed a common journalistic malpractice
Update from Sam: https://nitter.net/sama/status/1725748751367852439
I'm pretty sure I spoke plainly:

> You don't need a Facebook container, at least since “Total Cookie Protection”.

It's theater because it does nothing in addition to what Firefox already does without use of containers.

But keep installing that add-on if it makes you feel good.
This comparison again lol.

> As if most humans would do any better on those exercises.

Thats not the point. If you claim you have a machine that can fly, you can't get around a proof of that by saying "mOsT hUmAns cAnt fly" so therefore this machine not flying is irrelevant.

This thing either objectively reasons or not. It is irrelevant how well humans do on those tests.

> This thing is two years old. Be patient.

Nobody is cutting off the future. We are debating the current technology. AI has been around for 70 years. Just open any history book on AI.

At various points from 1950, the gullible mass claimed AGI.
Smoothing over the first few hundred hours of the process but doing increasingly little over the next 20,000 is hardly revolutionary. LLMs are a useful documentation interface, but struggle to take even simple problems to the hole, let alone do something truly novel. There's no reason to believe they'll necessarily lead to AGI. This stuff may seem earth-shattering to the layman or paper pusher, but it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what even I (who I would consider to be of little talent or prowess) can do. It mostly just gums up the front page of HN.
Such arrogance in thinking that it justifies congressional involvement. They're the ones who fucked the children into existence yet won't take your own goddamned responsibility and instead support the "think of the children" bull-crap.

Seriously what the hell is wrong with people that they think the best thing for children is to create a goddamned dystopia for them in the name of "safety"?
> people with increased sensitivity to pain are also more likely to endorse values more common to people of their opposite political persuasion. It doesn’t stop there. They also show stronger support for the other camp’s politicians, and, get this -- more likely to vote for Donald Trump in 2020 if they are liberal, or Joe Biden if they are conservative.

Except by these sorts of actions they're explicitly showing a lack of empathy for their own fellow believers. This is more than just empathy. It demonstrates something akin to submission to the will of the Other.
Tigerbeetle's Storage Fault Model
A lot of people are missing the key point: the CEO doesn't own the company. The Board does, and the CEO and other officers are hired by the Board to run the company on their behalf and on investors'.

Based on the insider details leaking on Twitter and Reddit this is a case of a narcissistic CEO more preoccupied with becoming a household name like Elon Musk than with doing the job for which they were hired.

If what's rumored is true then his firing was absolutely justified.

Try running your own agenda against the express wishes of your direct superior(s) at just about any company, and see how well that goes.
> if i start going off, the openai board should go after me for the full value of my shares

1) Is not using caps, like… a cool-kid thing now?

2) WTF does this mean?
[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38315757
whoa I went to sleep thinking the most exciting thing today will be SpaceX Starship launch, and I wake up to this, yanks, what have you doing while the sun was down here?

Anyhoo, the only question I want to ask is, given that Elon was once affiliated with OpenAI, did he have anything to do with this? My spidey sense is tingling for some reason.
vice versa ;)
The strength of a referral, the proximity and seniority of the referrer and role fit all come into play.

A strong referral by a knowledgeable person often skips that person to the front of interview queue. I have hired a number of people based on referrals from team members, VCs and previous coworkers.

Many referral systems have a how good do you think this personal really is field and often an option for "I don't know this person that well I am just referring them to say I did".

If you are asking for a referral, make it as easy as possible for the referer to make you look great. They probably don't remember all your awesome work like you do, so make sure you give them simple impactful points.
I used to feel the same way, but I got convinced that it's useful. Going from "planned" to "operational" in a way that conveys the continuity of the process doesn't have a good adverb and operationalising fits the bill.
The consistent detail about the store breaking the camel's back sounds rather specific. I guess time will tell whether more claims by this user hold up.
Pretty obviously. Once gdb left after sama, it's fairly certain plenty of high level folks are going to follow. gdb is brilliant, and a very very good dude. This doesn't look good for OpenAI.
Timing and sample size honestly seem like great explanations to me! YC probably would've funded a bunch of current big tech cos if it was founded earlier / had the reputation it does now in like 1995 or something.

I'd like to think (not because of any evidence but just because it's more optimistic) that YC does fund big ideas, there just haven't been many foundational ones since its inception due to a lack of generational / foundational tech breakthroughs or platform shifts. Maybe AI agents will change this?
That "Sparks of AI" paper was total garbage, just complete nonsense and confirmation bias.

Defining AGI is more than just semantics. The generally accepted definition is that it must be able to complete most cognitive tasks as well as an average human. Otherwise we could as well claim that ELIZA was AGI, which would obviously be ridiculous.
Realistically, this reflects more poorly on Sutskever. No one wants to work with a backstabber. It's one thing to be like 'well we had disagreements so we decided to move on.' However the board claimed Altman lied. If it turns out the firing was due to strategic direction, no one would ever want to work with Sutskever again. I certainly would not. That's an incredibly defamatory statement about a man who did nothing wrong, other than have a professional disagreement.
yes, i've been told by fellow "zoomers" to purposely disable capitalization otherwise it looks too formal. sama is one of us.
Former neuroscientist here.

Our brain actually uses many different functions for all of these things. Intelligence is incredibly complex.

But also, you don't need all of these to have real intelligence. People can problem solve without memory, since those are different things. People can intelligently problem-solve without a task.

And working towards long-term goals is something we actually take decades to learn. And many fail there as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if, just like in our brain, we'll start adding other modalities that improve memory, planning, etc etc. Seems that they started doing this with the vision update in GPT-4.

I wouldn't be surprised if these LLMs really become the backbone of the AGI. But this is science– You don't really know what'll work until you do it.
Does not sound like someone who has something to hide. See previous speculation about past abuse of partner/sister? Sorry I don’t recall but you know.

Sounds like someone shitty about being treated wrong.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38314074 for explanation
wat

the guy founded and was CEO of a company at 19 that sold for $43m
Come on people - "loyalty" to "the company? what doesthat get you?
A lousy raise that got wiped out by inflation.
Unmet promises of a promotion.
Layoffs at the first sign of turmoil, with no warning.

"loyalty" is a two-way street.

Once I worked for a "huge company", where I had gotten
4 patents, increased revenue, added value, started & led
a new global team, taught the hard stuff to more junior
members, great reviews, blah blah blah.

Then I got laid off. Found another job pretty quick. couple months
later the "huge company" realized they screwed up and tried
to "rehire" several of us back. To a man, we all said:
"Why should I even want to work for a place that fired me?"

So don't talk to me about "Loyalty".

BTW, doing your day job from 9-5, then doing outside "contract work", "consulting work" or independant stuff like running a PC storefront or Web design has been going on forever ... nothing new here, move along, move along...
Was it MIMIC simulator by any chance?
Well connected fundraiser - obviously.

But…smart operator? Based on what? What trials has he navigated through that displayed great operational skills? When did he steer a company through a rocky time?
I can only see my own video :(
I think the Novo Nordisk foundation is the largest now. It owns a majority of both Novo nordisk and Novozymes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk_Foundation
To be clear I think "new physics" is justification by Altman for it not being AGI not that they have something capable of that.

New physics is neat but there are world changing capable definitions that wouldn't meet that requirement.
Are there theoretical models that use real time weights? Every intro to deep learning focuses on stochastic gradient descent for neural network weights; as a layperson I'm curious about what online algorithms would be like instead.
I'm a big e-bike fan but they are not a universal magic bullet. To be practical for daily needs you must be

--In a city or otherwise have a fairly short commute (i.e. less than 20 miles; probably less than 10 for most people)

--Where it's usually not raining or freezing

--Where riding a bike is safe

--Where you have a way to bring the bike indoors or otherwise protect it from theft at your destination without needing a lock that weighs as much as the bike.

There are a great many places in the world that meet those criteria, but there are also a great many that don't. And a huge number of the "don't" places are in the US, unfortunately.
There's a lot of smart people at a lot of companies.

Most of those companies have much, much deeper pockets than OpenAI ever has had, and now probably ever will.

I see no reason Microsoft and the likes don't see the writing on the wall here and decide to have a go at it on their own, or pick up the talent that's abandoning ship.

OpenAI now being entirely run by "idea" people and purists will be a big hurt on their fund raising abilities... which from their own operational numbers seems an obvious necessity.
rewarded with seniority? better pay? what worl or er are you living in?
doesn't happen in my world.
He said it’s the absolute truth that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them”
> The funny thing is that so far OpenAI has made zero demonstrable progress toward building a true AGI. ChatGPT is an extraordinary technical accomplishment and useful for many things, but there is no evidence that scaling up that approach will get to AGI.

How can you honestly say things like this? ChatGPT shows the ability to sometimes solve problems it's never explicitly been presented with. I know this. I have a very little known Haskell library. I have asked ChatGPT to do various things with my own library, that I have never written about online, and that I have never seen before. I regularly ask it to answer questions others send to me. It gets it basically right. This is completely novel.

It seems pretty obvious to me that scaling this approach will lead to the development of computer systems that can solve problems that it's never seen before. Especially since it was not at all obvious from smaller transformer models that these emergent properties would come about by scaling parameter sizes... at all.

What is AGI if not problem solving in novel domains?
Brand new to storytell but it seems your "knowledge" is open to all. Didn't know if you wanted all of this public.

http://postimg.cc/Lqv1LR3n
So MSFT put $10bn into OpenAI, presumably at least in part on the strength of sama’s leadership. But if the stories are to be believed, a huge chunk of that investment was in Azure credits, and investment into new Azure GPU DCs/clusters for OAI to spend those credits on.

If MSFT doesn’t like this move, why wouldn’t they just … not honor those credits? Or grant more to a successor entity? Does OAI have its own warehouse of GPUs separate from Azure?

Seems like a very dangerous game for Ilya to play.
For a few decades. Methane decays in the atmosphere, while CO2 sticks around for however many centuries until it's physically sequestered.
Do non-profit boards have this same dynamic?
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes
Another source [1] claims: "A knowledgeable source said the board struggle reflected a cultural clash at the organization, with Altman and Brockman focused on commercialization and Sutskever and his allies focused on the original non-profit mission of OpenAI."

[1] - https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-b...
Can you share a few worth following (with reasonably high signal to noise)? Thanks!
> “it’s not that their profile of moral sensitivities shifts from ‘only supporting our side’ to ‘only supporting the other side.’ Instead, they tend to be more supportive of both sides’ views.”

Seems like people who are more empathic just recognize that no matter what "team" someone else blindly supports they still have valid concerns and common ground. It's certainly not some kind of bizarre mind control forcing the submission of their will.
Apropos of nothing, of course.
Then you say 'the board has decided to part ways with Sam due to strategic disagreement'. Not 'he wasn't candid'. not being candid can be a crime.
I am more interested how this is also bringing price of batteries down generally. With some chinese factories starting mass manufacturing sodium ion batteries this year. I think we are fast moving towards an electricity revolution because of how solar/wind and battery prices are falling and a lot of people have still not woken up to the fact. Cost of solar and battery is going to be half in 5 years maybe even 1/4 in 10 years. It is the similar thing as the doubling of processor speed we had for computer not as fast but similar.
Did Ilya give a reason why transformers are theoretically sufficient? I've watched him talk in a CS seminar and he's certainly interesting to listen to.
They do in Canada. Can't speak for the US but I don't see why it would be different. It's called the Board of Directors for a reason.
Isn't the conversational medium too linear and possibly slow? Can you share a specific example of a problem where this approach is interesting. Thanks!
Seemingly there is this consensus of board members around a senior executive. It just isn’t the CEO.
Good for this guy, wow. Nice project.

I always thought that the Magic Mouse was really the ideal technology for interacting with a Mac--just too bad that it's so unergonomic. I can't prove it, but I blame a decade of Magic Mouse use for my very painful RSI, which I now have the pleasure of experiencing using any mouse at all.

Apple's input devices are beautiful, but they totally blow comfort. It's as if their industrial designers are all in their early 20s and have never experienced joint pain.
No, sorry, I don't buy this assertion when it comes up. Everything I've seen, even from the most advanced image generators, has struck me as a logical follow-on from the "big data" trends of the 2010s. If you've ingested literally everything of a certain data type available on the internet, or even a significant fraction of it, it follows that you'd eventually be able to mix it all together and produce randomized outputs that seem novel.

It also elides the significant encoding of human feedback, a contribution that AI firms have typically been none-too-eager to highlight.
And if you don’t believe in the Bible then you’re probably a murder and arsonist. Why try to be a good person except due to outside controls?
Maybe he was replaced by an AI tool.
> It's an almost straight port of normal android into the headset which is at least familiar but they've really not made any progress in making it more VR

Congratulations to Meta VR teams. You've created a system perceptually more transparent than a thin sheet of glass.
Except they're voting for the other side's guy. If you still mostly agree with your side's views, why are you voting for the other guy?
It just feels a bit icky to see them work on current gen consoles.

Nintendo has used legal and illegal bullying to shut down more fan projects and youtube channels than I've pirated games. Until they stop hating the people who love them most, fuck 'em.
> As CEO, Altman raised more than $30 million in venture capital for the company; however, Loopt failed to gain traction with enough users.

It is easy to sell a company for $43 if you raised at least $43. Granted, we don't know the total amount raised but it certainly it's not the big success you are describing. That and I already mentioned that he is good in corporate sales.
If they hadn’t done that, would they have been able to get to where they are? Goal oriented teams don’t tend to care about something as inconsequential as this
The fact that you only need to charge it once a month indicates the battery isn't going through many cycles. I expect the battery to last a very long time.
We all know how GPT4/5 work essentially. You can easily run a GPT capable model with a few GPUs in the cloud. The secret sauce is the training data, that openAI owns.
Solid lumps of Plutonium eventually end up with helium bubbles in them over time, which degrades their structural integrity. If we want to have reliable weapons over time, we'll have to make new Plutonium pits as time progresses.

Here's the Military Industrial Complex's take on it

https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-sci...
>expensive solutions like microinverters

Enphase IQ7-60 is $85 on Amazon right now.