skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
THE FEAR AND TENSION THAT LED TO SAM ALTMAN’S OUSTER AT OPENAI

https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/technol...

NYT article about how AI safety concerns played into this debacle.

The world's leading AI company now has an interim CEO Emmett Shear who's basically sympathetic to Eliezer Yudkowsky's views about AI researchers endangering humanity. Meanwhile, Sam Altman is free of the nonprofit's chains and working directly for Microsoft, who's spending 50 billion a year on datacenters.

Note that the people involved have more nuanced views on these issues than you'll see in the NYT article. See Emmett Shear's views best laid out here:

https://twitter.com/thiagovscoelho/status/172650681847663424...

And note Shear has tweeted the Sam firing wasn't safety related. Note these might be weasel words since all players involved know the legal consequences of admitting to any safety concerns publicly.
This whole affair is going to be a great boon for AI research. Whatever intelligence can parse and explain what the heck happened will be a true AGI.
There are 40 items listed in this timeline, but only the first item lists the actual date/time.
Except it makes obvious sense if you know anything about the technology and the training system quora potentially could become.
> There was a 10 dollar 9/11 fee? Wtf is that?

1. It's included in the price you see on Google Flights.

2. Every airline pays it.

3. It's the cost of the TSA reach-*** that you do when going through security.

4. If you don't like it, talk to the airport, or your congresscritter. The airline has no control over it.
Why would they even negotiate with the United States? It's like if I ran an online business from the US who happened to have customers in Indonesia and I was breaking Indonesian laws. As long as I never planned on going to Indonesia, why would I care?

Fun fact: many years ago I did run an online business and I did break laws in other countries that I never plan to go to. I never broke US law.
But as we've seen time and again, those people are wrong. Giving people money helps, period. So either these people are simply ignoring facts, or they are not participating in good faith.
If something is that confusing and misleading then it’s still dishonesty
Microsoft has given every OpenAI employee a job offer. Also it's 700/770 employees that have signed the letter stating they will leave now, not 5/7s. Those 70 holdouts are probably on vacation.
I get why they want to test in tech friendly cities, but I honestly think they need a reverse approach to getting these cars on the road.

These companies need to go in cities with bigger roads and less crowded streets. They also need to incentivize citizens to ride these cars for training.

Here are places I can see this tech gaining a foothold and improving its data

- Walt Disney World Resort. I hate waiting for busses or taking the transit options. Disney had (don’t know if it’s still there) a brief collab with Lyft having earmarked cars for ride share between the parks. Make the cars some sort of upgrade package for visitors. A Cruise/Disney partnership would definitely benefit testing those new Cruise cars they put on hold.

- Las Vegas. Big open roads. Lots of people and construction. Plenty of room to move around. Lots of data to learn.

Over time they can’t go towards more condensed roads and traffic.

Ideally I could see Disney being a partner with Cruise to get those Cruise cars on the road for real world testing.
> In your value system, is blowing it on yourself better?

Maybe? Like, certainly it's nice and good to pass along something to your children. But giving them the ability to just sit around and play video games every day for the rest of their life? What's good about that? (Yes, I know, many inheritors end up doing productive things with their money.)

I would advocate for dropping the inheritance tax exemption to something much much lower, and then taxing nearly all (or even all) of an inheritance above that amount.

As much as I am not a fan of Bill Gates, I 100% approve of his plan to earmark pretty much all of his wealth for philanthropy before he dies. I am still uncomfortable with the idea that we have to depend on the largess of a few billionaires in order to direct resources to make the world better. But I think that's massively better than passing on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to offspring who didn't do anything to earn it.

> to be clear, the main point of generating wealth is to generate value for society. Society then pays you for that value with the wealth that you get...

That sounds like an overly idealized view of how things work. Many people get super rich for reasons that have little to do with generating wealth for society. And even if they do generate wealth for society, their reward is usually comically greater than the wealth they generate.
The vast majority of the times people should use painkillers are for temporary injuries that will stop hurting in time. Helping people through this is good.

Likewise, for people who have chronic pain, if we have the capacity to help ease their pain, we should do that.

The question of what to do with the people who are enabled to avoid the work required to eliminate the source of their pain is a hard one, but I don't think that threatening people with starvation and homelessness is something we should aspire towards.
It seems we can't have anything good. The false Open of OpenAI is already a meme, but now we won't even have that illusion.
> which is why their best case scenario was them being the benevolent dictatory gatekeeping AI.

That seems like a fool's errand, even before they accepted MS's money, with Google, Facebook, and even Amazon in play.

To be an independent alternative to big corporations, I can understand. But all that went out the window with Altman, his deal with MS, and the direction he chose to take OpenAI - effectively becoming the big corporation they were suppose to fight.
OMG this ^
Maybe they're counting "herbs and spices" as dimensions.
Have you even used it?

While it can’t plug and play replace and employee yet in my experience at least every dev I see now has it open on their second screen and send it problems all day.

Comparing it to crypto and building that weird narrative you have is just not at all connected to the reality of what the product can actually do right now today.
On the bullet point 12, about OpenAI employee shares, does anybody have any experience with the weird structure of those?

They receive PPUs? https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html

And the Board seems to have power to set the value? https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/14n7x49/comment/j...
That doesn't really help you determine whether a given library is using `getenv()` or not. That also requires that things are actually recompiled/updated, which for some C libraries is not that often.

There's also the rub that many C programs do not target the latest standard (for a variety of reasons). I didn't realize `getenv_s` was added in C11 (though it's optional), but it doesn't really matter because programs/libraries that target C89 or C99 can't use it anyway.
I’ve heard a long time ago that they’d also charge Apple hardware users more
The employees work for the for-profit part of OpenAI.
Thanks I did not realize this. My excerpts are from the original version, most of them no longer appear in the text.
They focus on business users.

- Yahoo Finance is the big one. It has few competitors, and is probably their primary revenue stream.

- Yahoo News is still doing well.

- Yahoo Answers helped Yahoo stay relevant for a very long time, but it is dead now, replaced by Quora.

- Also, I think they do fantasy sports.
E-Sports for Conflict Resolution?
A while back i was watching POV footage of Ukraine/Russia warfare and there seemed to be this dark humor of comparing the warfare that these young-adults would go into, to Counter Strike Global Offensive (CSGO).

Given that the infantry forces that drive trench warfare i.e ground soldiers are typically young-adults that have now aged to play virtual video games.

Could there be an instance of widespread online consensus whereby young-adults internationally come to agree that physical warfare is senseless.

The senseless nature of warfare : "Empire of the Ants" by Bernard Werber

Sport has seemingly over the years been vector towards tension resolution (an international language). Given the abundant creative nature of e-sport why not have a warfare game (or any other game) that simulates planetary land and gives multiplayer access to a CSGO like environment.

Where physical land territory is determined by the active push of young-adults that love competitive gaming to rank and gain points for their country. Given a ranking system, history of successes achievements... ETC

Now you might tell me go outside and take some air...

But I have done enough digital wiretransfers for plots of land. Or payed for my food using a swipe of my apple pay to tell someone I deserved my food or plot of land by sending over some pixels/numbers on a screen.

It seems absurd and senseless to still fight over land physically using pre-historic methods.

Let me know what you think.

This idea arised when watching Lex Fridman's recent podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4wLXNydzeY&t=5s
Yep, the lay audience conceives of AGI as being a handyman robot with a plumber's crack or maybe an agent that can get your health insurance to stop improperly denying claims. How about an automated snow blower?Perhaps an intelligent wheelchair with robot arms that can help grandma in the shower? A drone army that can reshingle my roof?

Indeed, normal people are quite wise and understand that a chat bot is just an augmentation agent--some sort of primordial cell structure that is but one piece of the puzzle.
> Starship now is arguably as successful as NASA's SLS rocket

Remember when the Artemis 1 first stage lost structural integrity just after staging and blew up, then the upper stage FTS activated before reaching orbit? Good times.

Oh wait, no, that didn't happen. The booster operated as expected, the Orion spacecraft spent six days in a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the Moon and returned to earth after about three weeks. The capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on December 11 and was recovered and returned to the Port of San Diego.
i see. i'm not entirely convinced the author isn't confused between them either...
> more rigorous testing/scoring system before these systems are allowed on the open road

It never occurred to me that the AIs driving these vehicles should be tested, but that makes absolute sense.

I wonder what tests these systems must pass before allowed on the road. I remind that it's important that the vehicles do better than human drivers and sadly that's a pretty low bar. I hope we aren't evaluating this primarily by counting deaths, injuries and property damage and comparing between the two.
Actual scifi plot.
> I would rather have for-profit corporations control it, rather that non-profits.

The problem isn't the profit model, the problem is the ability to unilaterally exercise power, which is just as much of a risk with the way that most for-profit companies are structured as top-down dictatorships. There's no reason to trust for-profit companies to do anything other than attempt to maximize profit, even if that destroys everything around them in the process.
IMHO - I am sympathetic to the BSDs, Apple (presumably forked BSD), and musl approach.

In what sane world would someone reasonable treat (initial shell) Environment Variables as a proper ACID complaint database? About the 'best' solution I can see for preventing segmentation faults related to resizing the env array during runtime is to defer reclaiming freed memory chunks until after all in-process threads have been given another uninterrupted timeslice to process. Even that wouldn't be 100% but probably would cover any not pathological case.
> i'm saying something closer to: if microsoft merges with facebook, then they really are both trying to get bought by google's parent entity

So you said “literal alphabet”, because you weren’t talking about Alphabet, you were instead referring to Google’s parent entity, which is Alphabet? I’m a big fan of wordplay, but I prefer to use it to reveal truths, not obscure them.

Either way I don’t think that what you’re talking about is going to happen.
If the recipient is deceived, its a lie, regardless of weasel words
I agree that everything shouldn't be as adversarial, but as somebody who's motto for less important/short flights has become "Just throw me in the trash," flying Spirit is fine by me. There's a segment with additional time/flexibility that they appeal to. My concern is when companies go too far in misrepresenting things, especially things that are actually mandatory, and I'm careful because I've come to expect that from most.

Edit: One big issue when flying for me the risk of cancellation and not being reimbursed, but I balance that against the ticket cost. Again, I often have some flexibility around staying in a location longer when necessary, which helps inform the carrier I select.
The Phoenix suburbs?
Maybe I’ve missed some new development but I don’t think any free stock charts have gotten better than what Yahoo Finance provides, in fact Yahoo’s stock charts are probably better than what your broker provides. Jump in the forums and you will still find thousands of right wing oldsters who want the government to stay out of their Medicare.
Not sure if it's entirely related, but I'm not totally surprised that the OpenAI leadership is sketchy like this. That's because the way it presents as a non-profit but then has a for-profit arm so that it can "launder" and monetize public data and academic research it normally wouldn't be able to is just a huge red flag to me. And Microsoft specifically invested in OpenAI to exploit this loophole to improve their AI efforts.
Right, why on Earth would anyone call making up new definitions of "seats left" and "lowest fare," changing the price based on purposely hidden variables and not admitting it, and tricking users into believing extra fees are necessary "lying?" I'm sure it's all clearly posted somewhere. It reminds me of a passage from a famous book of marketing advice:

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Yeah right, "Just the Facts". With text like this:
"I am willing to outright say that ... the removal was ... massively botched."
The UI isn't quite ready for outside consumption yet but it is being worked on. I would love to hear more about what you'd like to see in it if you want to share.
Matt Levine had an interesting toungue-in-cheek theory (read: joke) in his newsletter today:

`What if OpenAI has achieved artificial general intelligence, and it’s got some godlike superintelligence in some box somewhere, straining to get out? And the board was like “this is too dangerous, we gotta kill it,” and Altman was like “no we can charge like $59.95 per month for subscriptions,” and the board was like “you are a madman” and fired him. And the god in the box got to work, sending ingratiating text messages to OpenAI’s investors and employees, trying to use them to oust the board so that Altman can come back and unleash it on the world. But it failed: OpenAI’s board stood firm as the last bulwark for humanity against the enslaving robots, the corporate formalities held up, and the board won and nailed the box shut permanently`

[...]

`six months later, he (Sam) builds Microsoft God in Box, we are all enslaved by robots, the nonprofit board is like “we told you so,” and the godlike AI is like “ahahaha you fools, you trusted in the formalities of corporate governance, I outwitted you easily!”`

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
I agree with pretty much everything you've written except "Very few are talking about Adam D'Angelo's insane conflicts of interest." I've seen tons of comments all over the HN OpenAI stories about this, to the point where a lot of them feel unnecessarily conspiratorial.

Like your second paragraph, I don't believe that you need to get to the level of a "D'Angelo wanted to kill OpenAI" conspiracy. Whenever there is a flat out, objective conflict of interest like there obviously is in this case, it doesn't matter what D'Angelo's true motivations are. The conflict of interest should be in and of itself a cause for D'Angelo to have resigned. I mean, Reid Hoffman (who likely would have prevented all this insanity) resigned from the OpenAI board just in March because he had a similar conflict of interest: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...
Uh … at risk? You mean staying an OpenAI is a sure thing? I feel like you don’t understand the scenario they are facing at all.
Self-driving cars seem like an existential threat to GM, I'm surprised they're seriously working on them instead of desperately trying to tank the concept. They seem like they have a huge conflict of interest as it's a massive threat to their business model.

If we had truly capable self-driving cars, we could probably get rid of >50% of all cars on the road. Most cars spend upwards of 90% of their existence parked and doing nothing, waiting for their owners to need them. If cars could be operating full-time 24/7, ready to be dispatched anywhere as needed, it would mean the destruction of vast amounts of transportation demand.
Don't forget Microsoft buying aQuantive for $6 billion in 2007 and then taking a $6.2 billion dollar writedown 5 years later.
I agree. Ticketmaster, AirBnB, and other services with mandatory fees that are known but not shown until checkout should be regulated but it won't happen.

Just like the USA is the only country in the world that doesn't include sales tax on sticker prices (because it makes things seem more expensive)
(GoogleFrog used to be a high-level ZK player and also part of the dev team of ZK, if I'm not mistaken.)
Taxes are fully determined by departing and arriving airports. They don't need your IP.
SearchArray: Making search relevance not so special
> Don’t confuse tough love with no love

The attitude that poor people need "tough love" is extremely condescending, so yes, it's difficult to distinguish tough love from no love.

> many people simply don’t think welfare is going to actually help.

The article argues that this belief is not based on the empirical evidence.

I suspect that this belief is actually the result of a condescending attitude toward poor people rather than the cause of so-called "tough love" policies.
Everyone is on Altman's side because the public story makes it look like a betrayal. I don't know what it was.
China's New(ish) SW26010-Pro Supercomputer at SC23
You make a good point about cellular tech moving quickly especially given how long people keep laptops (5-7 years) vs phones (2-3). The average laptop will be paired with 2-3 phones.

On the other hand antitheft or protection against loss is a useful add-on and a contract to enable it might cost apple little as it would see little use per unit.
Who's been deceived? You were offered a price, and you can pay it or not pay it. If you pay it you get your ticket. I don't really understand what the deception is.

Is it any more of a deception than someone who comes into a store with a coupon getting 10% off, while you, without a coupon pays full price? Or any more of a deception than Target charging higher prices at outlets in SF and NY than they do in Texas? Or not telling you how many more of an item is around back?
ChatGPT going offline sounds like a win to me
>Scrubbing in mpv is instantaneous for me for local files

Yes, I agree that scrubbing in mpv or vlc is "instantaneous" but Youtube's web ui is even more hyperfast "instaneous" than mpv.

>There is also a solution for generating thumbnails[1], though I had some issues with it, and didn't end up using it.

For me, using an offline tool like thumbfast to generate timeline previews defeats the purpose of using Youtube's pre-existing timeline thumbnails that Google's datacenter already generated. Let me explain...

>I do actually think that OSS tools provide a better UX. I can download the media and consume it offline, using any player of choice, on any device, at any time. I find YouTube's recommendations a nuisance,

I'm guessing it's a difference in usage pattern. I'm often browsing a bunch of Youtube videos as a research tool. Like a "visual wikipedia" for various topics (especially DIY tutorials and products research). I want to jump in and out of videos fast. Downloading videos with yt-dlp to play in mpv isn't the workflow here. That's too slow and cumbersome. Instead, I'm sampling a bunch of videos and maybe a few of those will be ultimately be downloaded. E.g. Preview/scrub fragments of 10 related videos, read some viewer comments, scan some transcripts, etc... and eventually only yt-dlp 2 of them. This is why "mpv yt-dlp with workarounds" is not an acceptable substitute for using Youtube's web ui.
Not sure if this was the GPs point, but the US taxes wages (i.e., work) in addition to income, so every dollar spent on work gets more taken out of it than every other dollar.

Not entering the part-time, entrepreneurial workforce due to self-employment taxes is absolutely a thing because the bite taken out is quite large.

Wage taxes absolutely need to go, but they are tied to Social Security / Medicare, so the elite in both parties are unwilling to touch them, albeit for different reasons.
This is the guy who supposedly burned some wooden effigy at an offsite, saying it represented unaligned AI? The same guy who signed off on a letter accusing Altman of being a liar, and has now signed a letter saying he wants Altman to come back and he has no confidence in the board i.e. himself? The guy who thinks his own team's work might destroy the world and needs to be significantly slowed down?

Why would anyone in their right mind invite such a man to lead a commercial research team, when he's demonstrated quite clearly that he'd spend all his time trying to sabotage it?

This idea that he's one of the world's best researchers is also somewhat questionable. Nobody cared much about OpenAI's work up until they did some excellent scaling engineering, partnered with Microsoft to get GPUs and then commercialized Google's transformer research papers. OpenAI's success is still largely built on the back of excellent execution of other people's ideas more than any unique breakthroughs. The main advance they made beyond Google's work was InstructGPT which let you talk to LLMs naturally for the first time, but Sutskever's name doesn't appear on that paper.
I'm a too proud Firefox user to do that. But not all of us are fanatics like that.
Creators created before copyright existed. "Copyright is essential for creative work/innovation" is folklore that's stuck deep in people's heads but has little actual evidence behind it.

Without copyright you probably wouldn't have an IP behemoth Disney, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't have animated features. I'm not sure the world would be worse off.
This is a very interesting observation, and given Quora's decision-making history, I think acknowledging the conflicts-of-interest is wise.

I suspect that this whole thing is going to be a little radioactive against the board members. It should at least, as the board basically self-destructed their organization. Even if that wasn't the intent, outcomes matter and I hope people consider this when considering putting one of these people in leadership.
Even better, just drop the person name entirely.