skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great point. It was rude to drop a bombshell during trading hours. That said, the chunk of value Microsoft dropped today may be made back tomorrow, but maybe not: if OpenAI is going to slow down and concentrate on safe/aligned AI then that is not quite as good for Microsoft.
What Ilya Sutskever really wants
First, I didn't say that Google "wanted to reward abusers". I was simply countering the parent commenter's use of Rubin's payout as an example of what typically happens when an executive is fired for sexual misconduct. It is absolutely not representative, and Google changed its policy as a result of this: "Alphabet said Friday that it will prohibit severance packages for anyone fired for misconduct or is the subject of a sexual misconduct investigation."

But since you brought it up, the fact that Google changed their policies in response to the Rubin (and Drummond) situations and did not caveat their policy with "except in the case where there's a performance bonus, which we'll still totally pay out" implies that it was a choice to begin with.

Also, even if there was a performance bonus that Google felt they might be forced to pay in litigation they could still have fought it to demonstrate a commitment to not rewarding executives preying on subordinates and to preemptively address potential employee backlash, which was entirely predictable. Google has effectively infinitely deep pockets and did not need to preemptively surrender.

And in addition, Drummond and Brin were both involved in the decision and both had affairs with subordinate employees. So, while I wouldn't say that Google had an active goal of "reward abusers", it's quite plausible that the specific, small group of men making this decision on Google's behalf may not have been particularly inclined to punish behavior arguably similar to their own.
I agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38313501
It seems like if it was the Annie Altman accusations, they could have just paid her off. If they wanted him around and he was a creep, there are ways to make this stuff go away. AFAIK a lot of the sister's accusations were accompanied by being excluded from the father's will. Not saying she made it up, but it seems like if those grievances are bundled, there's a easy way to make that problem go away.
> It absolutely follows.

You changed the deduction I described thus moving the goalposts. I'm not going to argue a point I never made. Suffice it to say, the only people assuming anything about LLMs are the ones claiming they're not sentient.

> It would be unbelievably weird if we reverse engineered consciousness without understanding how our bodies generate consciousness

I find it weird that you think this would be weird. Most discoveries are like this. We mastered fire before we understood chemistry, we mastered flight before we understood how birds fly, we have a booming pharmaceutical industry and we still don't really know how most drugs work. Theory and formal understanding often follow discovery and practical applications, not the other way around.

Consciousness and/or sentience will be created before we understand it, and we will only retrospectively recognize that fact. We may have already created it in fact.
This is more likely to be profit-taking as MSFT reached an all-time high yesterday. The stock is still up 40 points from a month ago.
Like in some African languages? I like it.
I didn't actually see the ads (I use uMatrix), but they have boxes outlining where the ads would normally go.
How do I make $150k (or more) having high-level conversations about AWS with senior software engineers? Seriously. I’m sure it’s not an “easy” job, but fuck if I make less actually writing the software (median SWE salary is something like $140k in the US- depends on who you ask but it’s not the $250k+ that Levels.fyi would lead you to believe).
I don’t believe it. I watched OpenAI DevDay live last week (wasn’t it?). I immediately noticed how Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was treating (slighting so subtly in my mind) Satya Nadela, the CEO of Microsoft.

The last this he said was: “I look forward to building AGI with you” or the like…

I’m betting that he insulted Satya at that event or upshowed him, etc. and that’s why he’s kicking rocks…
What adversity and setbacks did Sam personally overcome?
When someone toots their own horn a lot about how good and pure they are, watch out. It’s a big red flag in my experience, both from watching events from afar and from direct run ins I’ve had in my life with sketchy people.
> carefully crafted resignation letter

Are you trolling, the letter is short and all lowercase lol
L3 engineer is a net negative bro.
Why would net metering go away? With distributed production and net metering a power company becomes an electricity broker instead of sole producer.
They have been for a while.

It's become increasingly clear that they're two different concepts so we need two different names.

And nobody involved with currently commercialized projects is going to stop using the term AI, so a new term was needed. AGI seems as good as any other -- do you object?

I see no reason we'll need a third term as you suggest, unless we come to a new gigantic breakthrough that is miles beyond our current conception of AI, but is not yet AGI.
Heritability isn't remotely the same thing as genetic determinism. Things can easily be heritable with virtually no direct biological causative mechanism at all (wearing lipstick, for instance). SES is heritable! Check the first article out. Turkheimer, for what it's worth, is a very big name in this research field.
The only rule that never changes is that all the rules are subject to change. We’re just flying along on our temperate little rock fighting wars and dying on our hills about the rules that were never rules at all.
https://nitter.net/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028
I mean, obviously I realize that some people will take what I write less serious if I don't correctly use apostrophes, so it's worth the effort. I also think the whole "don't split infinitives" thing is utter bollocks, but if you know that a section of your audience will get all triggered over it then it's probably best to avoid (even though it's silly).

My point isn't that you or I should stop writing apostrophes, but that you should stop being bothered by other people not always using the correctly (or rather, our perception of what's "correct").
Looking forward to this hopefully final big upgrade on my 20k LOC web service[1]. The upgrade from 0.4 to the first rc of 0.5 was a slog, but I've already upgraded to 0.5-rc.4 so this should hopefully be comparatively painless.

[1]: https://notado.app
3.9 isn’t that bad on my opinion. I work with other Python libraries, popular ones, that won’t work past 3.9. I think PyPDF is one of them? Something with PDF parsing.
Confirmed by a second news source https://www.semafor.com/article/11/17/2023/openai-board-fire...

"Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI, was blindsided by Altman’s firing, Axios reported and Semafor confirmed."
> even with those you can tell within seconds that it's fake, even if you don't know how you noticed it.

Salesmen and scammers have many techniques to get people to act against their better judgement. Urgency is one: imagine a late night voice call seemingly from a loved one saying "I'm stranded, my battery is about to die. Please send the money now -" accompanied by loud environmental noises to mask any artifacts
Fair enough. I just flat-out disagree; nothing I've seen suggests that software "could be" sentient. The burden of proof is yours, if you want to state that software has the potential for sentience.
I’ve had a horrible day with lung issues I can’t tell you how much this made me laugh
Ok, and what happens when the non profit runs out of money and goes bankrupt?
I dunno, if they were behind it, wouldn't they have an interest in claiming they had no idea? And if they weren't and were truly blindsided, would they have an interest in admitting it?
claude sucks
Nice idea, I hope somebody builds it. Signal just showed that they're spending $6 mil/year for verifying phone numbers.
Using national data sets, ANOVA, and, you know "science" (specifically the M part of STEM).

https://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2023/08/17/jech-2023-2205...

Methods: We use data on housing and DNA methylation from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, linked with prior survey responses from the British Household Panel Survey, covering adults in Great Britain. We explore the association between epigenetic ageing and housing circumstances, both contemporary and historical, using hierarchical regression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_variance

Note that one of the three authors is a Professor of Biological and Social Epidemiology, University of Essex

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology

That's literally a science of teasing small factors out of noisy data in a turgid sea of messy correlations.

I suspect the authors are across your concerns and perhaps understand them as well, if not better, than you might.
I've been in companies with this kind of drama, people wait to reach their cliff then leave the next day.
Earlier today, there was a tweet from Sam claiming that large tech companies are saying that young engineers right out of college are now better engineers than the older and more experienced engineers thanks to generative AI. The statement was an obvious nod of approval toward age discrimination. The tweet seems to be deleted now. Whether that statement would be reason enough to fire Sam, I don’t know—it seems unlikely—but it’s an interesting coincidence.
What a strange and yet seemingly juvenile choice.
I understand why your ideals are compatible with open source models, but I think you’re mistaken here.

There is a perfectly sound idealistic argument for not publishing weights, and indeed most in the x-risk community take this position.

The basic idea is that AI is the opposite of software; if you publish a model with scary capabilities you can’t undo that action. Whereas with FOSS software, more eyes mean more bugs found and then everyone upgrades to a more secure version.

If OpenAI publishes GPT-5 weights, and later it turns out that a certain prompt structure unlocks capability gains to mis-aligned AGI, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle.

And indeed if you listen to Sam talk (eg on Lex’s podcast) this is the reasoning he uses.

Sure, plenty of reasons this could be a smokescreen, but wanted to push back on the idea that the position itself is somehow not compatible with idealism.
Gotta finance the past 3 years of living, and employees apparently, minus what she made in that time from other projects which she says was operating a loss (but could be marginally lossy who knows)
It is intentional. The post Musk was responding to was agreeing with the sentiment that "Hitler was right". I don't know how many more of these comments he has to respond positively to over however many more years he's been doing it before people admit it's not a coincidence and it's being done on purpose.

Speaking of that, do you know who frequently claimed that Jews were secretly using "communism" as a guise to promote a conspiracy against white people, and then used that rhetoric to gain power? Now replace that word in the same sentence with "progressivism" and it's dangerously close to Musk's comment.
The board probably sucks and Sam lies to deal with it.
> lenses that minimize distortion and chromatic aberration, that are lightweight and compact

That was Corning, not Meta.

> astounding amounts of work on inside-out tracking to make it work within latency and power budgets with sufficient accuracy

That was Valve, not Meta.

> latency reduction and prediction throughout the stack

That was Carmack, so technically Meta, but it was also 6+ years ago.

> foveated rendering

That was a waste of time.

> supporting all of those things in Unity and Unreal

I'm sorry, I haven't seen the Unreal code, but based on what's in the Unity code, this being a "win" is laughable and maybe signals the low expectations you have to also think that Android hasn't had a material impact on day-to-day dev experience.
Yeah, the Quest's boundary setup process astounded me at how polished and user-friendly it is compared to the Vive and Index's room setup process.

Anyone saying that the Quest's software is obviously terrible lives on a different planet than me. The Quest is so simple and works so well, especially compared to other VR headsets+software I've used. I really like the Index too which I use a lot and think does some small things better, but I find it hard to deny the Quest is much more approachable and polished.
it’s a causal writing style that has become popular online in the last decade or so. don’t overthink it
Our Benefactors?
Yup, it is very possible the board members are not used to running a board and have not been on a high profile board before.
I feel like as tech focused as HN is, a lot of people are missing how massive MS’s non financial investment in GPT is.

They just ended Ignite, their huge IT conference - and have revealed baking GPT into EVERYTHING they do. Everything.

The closing keynote was the massive engineering effort put in to running LLMs at scale - for MS themselves and customers.

MS is all in on GPT, including releasing a no code and low code custom GPT builder for orgs this week.
Brave Browser is privacy cope: https://digdeeper.neocities.org/articles/browsers#brave

And even if you don't use BAT, it is still an ad-driven business.
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formul... -> https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bitwarden/cli -> https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/tree/cli-v2023.10.0
At least we are not putting 'X' to everything like older generation.
GPT-3 had "books1" and "books2" among its training material and "books2" never had its actual source disclosed :https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf

Speculations about these source materials can be traced back as far as 2020: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282152689336320

I don't think this issue would've flown under the radar for so long, especially with the implication that Ilya sided with the rest of the board to vote against Sam and Greg.
Because defenders also look for attempts to clear your tracks and catch you. Normal things don't clear their tracks. And by defenders that includes antivirus/malware software.
> Lots of companies are funded every year. Those without solid leadership and clear mission are bound to fail.

IME companies with solid workers (in engineering and elsewhere) but weak leadership and mission have a much better chance than the converse. Even the best companies rarely end up following the mission or the leader.
>. But, as I understand it, it was a “misalignment” of the profit versus nonprofit adherents at the company.

btw these are the people who are convinced they can align artificial super intelligence
That's a completely different thing than merely "it's written in Perl".
There's a 1/7 chance it just happened to be a Friday; probably closer to 1/5, given that these things tend to happen on workdays.

I get that this looks like a strange coincidence, but major shareholders just had minutes of warning and they released the news before market close, sending Microsofts stock crashing down. Had they had the time to wait until Friday, they would have had 30 more minutes. So unless they had some fun with shorts, this doesn't look like a planned out action at all.
That would be happening but Elon won't want to be overshadowed
Plenty of people invest on the side, founders or not. It's not uncommon.
I started with this and gained a lot of insight, though it's definitely very high level: https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:HarvardX+CS50AI+1T...
Could the OC be sarcasm? Perhaps they forgot the /s?
i think i recall reading somewhere that apple designed the mouse in the way they did in order to prevent people just leaving the mouse on charge 24/7 and hence not using its wireless capability while negatively affecting the battery.

i’m not saying i agree with apple’s decision, but i find the perspective interesting.
I don’t buy this narrative that the board is made of “nobodies”. Sure, they might be not be well-known on the SV-board-circuit, but that doesn’t make them unskilled. Nor do I buy that they’re not advised by lawyers; the way I read the board statement is that Altman has lied about _something_ radioactive enough to cause them to dump him basically on the spot, a move that to me, sounds like their legal team went “this is bad, get rid of it”. The speed of it especially makes me think it’s something that had to act quickly on to get ahead of-which would explain the speed with which he was let go, MS was informed, and the public statement was made.
all lower case has a longer hacker culture history.
When the networked masses can't see you using a t-shirt, jeans, and a casual attitude, to signal skills valuable beyond convention, you have to adapt and transgress more blatant conventions.
OpenAI is still riding on a fast wave of success from ChatGPT. Let's see how they're doing in a year.
So I should cancel any plans to build on the GPT platform? Because it doesn't align with the values of Ilya and Helen?

Open AI- we need clarity on your new direction.
I thought he was gay? I don’t know if I’ve heard of gay men sexually molesting little girls before. Not saying it’s never happened, just that it seems kind of rare and unexpected.
This was a huge deal and widely reported. You can easily find copious reporting with a web search if you don't like this link:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/6/17086276/google-ai-militar...
More like four letter agencies. AKA the stock tickers of large companies.
It’s not about altruism. He might have wanted a different thing. If he is well set financially for himself, he may want to build AGI or advance AI further. Others may want to have some sort of an exit for the company or invest more into building SaaS AI platform.
As long as it's some hobby thing where you don't make any promises. If people start expecting stuff, they should start paying for it.

I suppose projects can get so big that developers literally don't have enough free time to fulfill people's expectations even if they wanted to do it. At that point they should get sponsored so that it become possible for them to devote more time to their projects. Sponsorships seem like a perfectly ethical way to make money to me. With enough sponsors people can afford to quit their jobs and work on their own thing full time. I've seen news of developers who did just that when they got enough support. I hope they're doing well.
just having a little chat on irc here

nothing too crazy
Not sure if that's why they're doing it, but all lower case writing has strong hacker culture roots.
Unlikely since Greg has announced he's quitting OpenAI. If these allegations were the cause of Sam's firing, I don't see why Greg would pick such an ethically indefensible hill to die on.
I don't think so. HL2 is an old game by now, way older than HL1 was when HL2 came out (6 years from HL1 to Hl2, 19 years from HL2 to now) and I just don't see it appealing to players unless they're going back to view older games.
It's also happening with gas. Especially because switching to entirely electric is an alternative (and being pushed). So gas prices have to raise to make up for infrastructure cost, incentivizing individuals to move off gas to save money, repeat.
Goals, Guidelines, and Process (a gpugoo.com design doc)
Lied to the board and they _rushed_ to oust him.

No clear transition plan. In what situations world a board fire the ceo from the worlds greatest tech sensation since who knows when, in a matter of hours ?
The next logical step after ad tracking -- you will use their website and willingly give them your info for better surveillance.
> It's become increasingly clear that they're two different concepts so we need two different names.

Here's a suggestion; stop calling LLMs "AI". Yes, I know; the shareholders will hate it. But then, you're not building towards any expectation of intelligent behavior. The fact that we have to qualify the existence of intelligence with a different acronym says it all; people are disappointed with what we have. AI simply isn't enough, we need it to be generalized before we get reliable results!

So... yeah, I do object. Users won't object because they're hungry for a better experience, and developers won't because they need every excuse they can get to charge recurring service revenue. Suspicious onlookers like me and the parent are the only ones who end up questioning the whole thing.
What AGI comment are you talking about? Nothing happened around 18:46?
It only dropped 2% and it’s already half back in after hours. I don’t think the market thinks it’s Altman who’s the golden boy here.
a symptom of spending too much time on IRC IMHO
Asking ChatGPT (until someone else answers) says that to remove a board member usually takes a super majority, which makes much more sense... but still seems to imply they need at least 4/6.
The blue one is still around, but it costs $8/month. The gold one costs $1000/month
That seems like an incredibly bad strategy on his part though.

Like, doing that is just actively making your own life difficult.

Edit: thinking about it more: lying to the board, even if they suck, seems like the fast-track to completely blowing away your own reputation.
i turned it off on a whim, but this is the reason why i keep it off.
I am an insecure renter and this scares me. What should I do??
As a hobby project: cool. But as a solution to a problem, how about not supporting companies that make ridiculously overpriced products with hugely deficient functional designs? Apple consistently makes products that work worse than their competitors', for quadruple the price, but, hey, I guess they "look nice".

...which is subjective, personally I think Apple products look absolutely atrocious, with half of screen real estate of their software attributed to padding, and all their product's surfaces the blandest possible solid colors imaginable. So when a product not only functions worse, is several times the price, but also looks bad, what's left?
I don't doubt your conviction. It's easy enough to stand up a website, but naming things and yet another public license change ain't nothing.

I've guided companies to decisions on all these licensing choices. Decisions differed, and reasons did, too. Every choice to delayed-relicense open meant more open software and made the ecosystem better, insofar as more code means better. Everyone thought their choices were right---for them. There's definitely value in painting the shed red and calling that a standard, but there's no one in any position to enforce adherence.

The thought I'd leave you with is that if you're worried about adoption under your restricted terms, and not just the eventual open ones, I think you could get a lot more projects reusing a "don't compete with us" license uncoupled from permissive relicensing on an aggressively short interval. "Licensed under Foundation Source v2, releases become MIT after 2 years" isn't any harder to mimic, for companies you suspect will just follow your lead. And then anyone adopting just FSLv2, or "FSLv2, releases become MPLv2 after 4 years" (Hashi?), or some other combination, could also be bouncing around through the industry, bumping into coders and legal departments, informing them one at a time that FSL exists and might be worth green-lighting.

I wish you and yours the best. I'd never say this is bad, and I haven't. But I've been at this a while, and I do suspect it could be better.