skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking forward to the new season of Silicon Valley.
You don't understand how much value was lost, even if OpenAI perfectly migrates over to Microsoft (it will be messy). Sam had no incentive to not continue with the existing OpenAI structure.
I'm fine with all that in principle but then you shouldn't be throwing your weight around in board meetings, probably you shouldn't be on the board to begin with because it is a handicap in trying to evaluate the potential outcome of the decisions the board has to make.
How often do you think about the Roman Empire[1]?

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-roman-empire-tiktok-trend-w...
Ilya signed the resignation petition as well (signatary #12). Now that's confusing.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say it was all a ploy to get OpenAI to buy Quora/Poe, I do think it's increasingly plausible that Adam was the orchestrator out of this and that his motivation was purely that OpenAI had become an existential threat to both his primary ventures. In fact, it's hard to come up with any other explanation that fits all the variables -- Ilya wouldn't be expressing remorse if OpenAI was sitting on a dangerous superintelligent AGI that Sam was going to unleash on the world.
you prefer statically typed languages?
Hanlon's razor is enormously over-applied. You're supposed to apply Hanlon's razor to the person processing your info while you're in line at the DMV. You're not supposed to apply Hanlon's razor to anyone who has any real modicum of power, because, at scale, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
What's stopping them from doing that right now with the GPT-4 API?
Well I left facebook partially because their ads were so constantly irrelevant despite them tracking me around the net.

So their server costs to advertise to me is zero, but they still pay server costs to track me around the net. I see this as a good thing
Non-Linux. Most other UNIX platforms also have syscalls depend on the specific C library.
Best outcome for whom?

OpenAI's best asset isn't GPT-4. GPT-4 is just an interim step to GPT-5 and 6 and 7 and so on.

Imagine we had this conversation when GPT-3 was out. Just open-source it and disband the team! And what? Nothing.

The people are always the greatest asset of a software company. Always. That's even the case with AI. At least... until I guess we get an AGI which is so powerful that it can self-improve, then I guess screw the people. But then that applies not just to the OpenAI team, but the world as a whole.
Some themes related to this event:

Trust, once lost, may never be regained.

"Smart" people can do some very dumb things. / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

The opposite of agile is stable.
There's one thing this is missing... nobody knew AGI was possible in this timeframe when things were set up. (No, we haven't hit AGI as far as we know, but it now feels possible.)

Even 2 years ago, I don't think anyone predicted this is where we'd currently be. Sam said the night before he was fired that he saw something that is way farther along than anyone would expect.

It makes a lot more sense when you realize everyone underestimated the speed at which this would happen, and the fear (legitimate or otherwise) that provoked.
Only explanation-slash-conspiracy-theory I could come up is from weak link between Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk, that, in anxiety he could have had a call with Ilya that OpenAI could trigger that AGI clause to switch to vertical integration model, and that that would be a right thing to do as a ruling class individual, or some stupid advise in that direction.

I'll be more than happy to be readily dismissed.
The libertarian economist prevailed over his rival, Sergio Massa. Milei will be the next president of Argentina.
I love this rant with a passion.
European governments do not "trust" Azure. Data localization policies are mandated by law for many sectors (finance, health) and data export to U.S. in general is banned in EU. Due to Schrems I, Schrems II rulings data flows to U.S. out of EU are largely illegal. Due to TADPF these flows are now quasi-legal, but the deal announced by Commission will be struck down in CJEU in similar fashion as they were before.
However, to access any of those languages from rust you need to use unsafe.
The tweet was updated five minutes later to correct 550 to 505.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726599700961521762?s...
It's like ai wrote the script.

Sadly, i see nefarious purposes afoot. With $MSFT now in charge, i can see why ads in W11 aren't so important.
For now.
It's an amusing conspiracy theory, but if we believe these are super smart people behaving in a clever way to exploit a loophole... why would they make themselves look like such idiots doing so? I don't think looking like an idiot helps any possible legal defense; if you have a rock solid loophole, just use it and surprise people with your cunning, not your idiocy.
I've seen these signs. I stop patronizing the places displaying these signs. I'm not giving business to liars. I saw one of these kinds of signs, at a Dairy Queen no less, and contacted DQ with a photo of the sign. Lots of people stopped patronizing the locations owned by that franchisee and they had to sell to new owners.

When it comes to restaurants, I'm absolutely 100% in control of those with whom I do business. Show me you're a liar or an asshole and I'll stop doing business with you.
There are private hospitals all over the world. I would daresay, they're more common than public ones, from a global perspective.

In addition, public hospitals still charge for their services, it's just who pays the bill that changes, in some nations (the government as the insuring body vs a private insuring body or the individual).
https://keyoxide.org/ seems to be successor to keybase.
It seems the load on HN has caused a duplicate submission, please ignore this comment (I can't delete it).
> This is good for plant growth, is it not?

Hardly. Higher temps in temperate climate zones, and higher CO2 in atmosphere help, yes.

But many warmer areas will become too warm for almost anything to grow. Let alone agriculture.

Increased rainfall is a blessing in some areas. But (increased) floodings are a curse elsewhere.

Agricultural zones will move towards the poles. See how that works out on a globe: smaller area.

And quickly changing climate + more regular weather extremes increase the chance of crop failures. Not to mention collapse of ecosystems. Or spread of diseases & pests. Or that a tree killed in a drought (or wildfire!), takes 50+ years to regrow.

All in all: bad news.
Given the cost of training AI models, I find that to be incredibly unlikely.
I don't see how that would benefit OpenAI at all.

You're saying that would be the best outcome, but... why?
Doesn't matter to anyone at OpenAI, only to Microsoft (which doesn't get a vote). If Google or Amazon were to swoop in and say "Hey, let's hire some of these ex-OpenAI folks in the carnage", it just means they get competitive offers and the chance to have an even bigger stock package.
I doubt this would happen. Americans don't want a place that is as chaotic and corrupt. If they can get their act together there is a chance they could join, but until that happens there is no way it would happen.
Do not ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.
And yet specifically disallowed people from creating second facebook accounts to use on their Quests specifically so that they could separate their social accounts from the purchases.
I have to agree - the amount of self-importance in this is hilarious. I would really like someone to be able to point to something definitive that Sam has actually built. In my view, he was a classic techbro who built one MVP and immediately went on an Regulation World Tour to secure his market cap. It seemed pretty transparent, but I guess people must like that?
There is a great interview with Devon Zuegel about her observations about money in Argentina:

Econtalk: Devon Zuegel on Inflation, Argentina, and Crypto

When inflation is often high and unpredictable, people look for unusual ways to hold their savings. And when banks are unreliable because of public policy, people look for unusual ways to keep their savings safe and to make financial transactions. Welcome to Argentina, where Zuegel finds surprising applications of cryptocurrency for solving problems.

https://www.econtalk.org/devon-zuegel-on-inflation-argentina...

Interview is based on Zuegel's article: "Inside the crypto black markets of Argentina"

https://www.freethink.com/hard-tech/crypto-argentina-black-m...
Using your same rhetoric and attitude: please outline exactly what language I used that was so offensive to you.
Timothy Gowers: Today I start my seventh decade, here are a few reflections
CEOs don't need an offense to be fired. They are entirely at will. The board can fire a CEO because it feels like it. The offense could be as muddy as 'we broadly dislike the current direction'.
I can pretty much assure you that this is not even on the radar of the vast majority of people, even in the US. This is mostly a tech bubble story.
Agreed.

Board took the fastest growing commercial enterprise ever and the talent responsible for this real-world harry potter sh*t and decided to dance it underneath a flame for a giggle.

Something doesn't add up.
"Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”"

insane
I hope everyone just gives up on AGI and focuses on making tools that do things humans need. Very, very few tasks need autonomous intelligent agents to perform them correctly or well. AGI is just a nebulous dream that fulfills the god complexes of egotist CEOs and 12-year-old boys. Automation does not need intelligence, just reliability. Data synthesis does not need intelligence, just data and the time/equipment to crunch it.
> the moment you link against any 3rd-party library, you program can have arbitrarily many threads before it even reaches main().

what?! name one library that does this?
I guess Microsoft has that much money where they sink 10 billion into OpenAI and then hire all the staff so that it will so that they will need another 10 billion to destroy OpenAI
People like conspiracy theories because it simplifies the world, aligns things into easy to understand Big Bad actions that they can understand. But conspiracies don't work because the world isn't that predictable.

The real world is messier. When you zoom in, people have emotions, misunderstandings, different values. Noone can predict how it all plays out.
I can only speak of my experience having gone to school for Architecture. They told us that with each recession, the profession loses a generation of Architects. I was wrapping up grad school just before the Great Recession, and professors were surprised that a relatively greater percentage of graduates had stayed in the field due to continued economic prosperity since the mid 90s and the dot com boom hadn't impacted the Architecture field all that much.

Of course, once the Great Recession hit, myself and many others that I graduated with either left the profession for other employment or simply never found jobs to begin with (that was me). Luckily I was already programming in grad school, and what was something I was filling my time with while looking for an architecture job became a new profession and I never looked back. Given all the comparative benefits of Software Engineering over Architecture, it's been a good move for me.
"Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”"

wow, this is a crazy detail
>You know what is an even bigger temptation to people than money - power.

Do you think profit minded people and organizations aren't motivated by a desire for power? Removing one path to corruption doesn't mean I think it is impossible for a non-profit to become corrupted, but it is one less thing pulling them in that direction.
How many didn't you see because they got strangled in the crib by regulation?
Beware when buying argentinian bonds, they may pay you back in the same way.
No reason to continually jump through ever changing Microsoft hoops when you can just break the trust you have in them and easily install an OS that doesn’t play games with you.
Well said. I am in such despair over the world's shift from "doing wrong things is wrong" to "understanding the motivations of those who do wrong things is wrong." Just more of the war on reason, and it's sad.
There is also nothing in the HTTP spec that allows a cache to randomly return a CAPTCHA instead of the cached content.
Yes, many visitors--many logged in and using the site's features--along with typical traffic are stressing the server.

@dang recommended¹ staying logged out for reading things, although submitting articles requires staying authenticated.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310213
Unintelligible on several dimensions, well done OpenAI!
Has ANYONE been able to articulate what the "safety" concern is or more likely is it just companies trying to build an artificial moat around a statistical model built on free/stolen data?

Currently the for-profit models are Nerfed to not allow bigoted or sexist (against women) text to be generated but that seems to be it. What kind of text are we being protected from?
> First, there is no such thing as “galactic RAM”

And there goes my plans for floating a “secondary system wrapper” around openGRAM’s apis and VCing my way to the top of the unicorn charts. Oh well.

“This is why I come to hn”.
Yeah, disparate sizes are hard to understand.

Another example: when the Ever Given ship was stuck in the Suez Canal, all the internet wags were saying "why can't they just excavate the dirt?" Well, this pic shows the scale difference involved: https://i.redd.it/5g9jvoecj6p61.jpg
To be honest, their charter describes some all-loving evenly distributed cosmic utopia after making everyone lose their jobs. This never made sense in the first place, and Ilya confirmed that he has no actual intention to "evenly distribute" it, because of the safety. So him being a true believer sounds pretty much like a politician being one.
Prioritize Effectively
Parents Sue Gaming Companies over 'Video Game Addiction'
A New Kind of Magnetism
Once people get woke to the right-to-repair their devices, maybe we can have a discussion on how open-source is the software version of the same thing. Perhaps even broach the discussion of interoperability and standards (vs proprietary and locked-in).
Brilliant! I remember playing this as a kid on my Apple II+. I can’t remember how many hours it took me, but I eventually managed to make it through the entire thing. Many happy memories of this game helped lead me to a career in software engineering.
They're able to hide that, now.

It's actually an interesting question; if you're paying for placement, are you an advertiser? I would think yes, probably, but it'll be one for the courts, I would think.
Amount of OpenAI employees demanding board resignation grows to 650
After Balmer I couldn’t have imagined such competency from Microsoft.
GitHub is a great example of how an OpenAI team can thrive under Microsoft. Github has drastically improved and has never been better.
I feel there's merit to that idea. Basically, in the current regulatory environment in the US under Lina Khan, an outright acquisition by Microsoft would have been met with significant resistance. Especially since AI has just been declared a national risk that needs regulating and Microsoft just bought Activision in what's pretty much the largest deal of 2023.

So, instead of buying OpenAI outright with all its complicated org structure, paying 13 billion for 49%, acquiring the rights to OpenAI's models and code and then insinuating today's events with a majority of OpenAI's staff leaving for Microsoft would be a really elegant and cunning way to do this.

If it is, it might be the most daring bit of business maneuvering we've seen in a decade. But, given Occam's razor, it might just as well be a colossal fuckup. Time will tell.
My interpretation... the author is arguing against creating a new Domain Specific Language when you could just use the host language.
so who has (owns, can build) LLMs-sized datacenters?

doesn't facebook (i.e. Meta) have their own infrastructure???

my "high level" view of this: the letter M (microsoft xOr meta) fighting for the ONE spot in the literal "alphabet" (google)
Most of the world is at this point. Fair or unfair is a long debate, but every time he opens his mouth, he loses more supporters. And it's his choice to keep opening his mouth.
This is the alternate history in which Mark Antony grabs the mic first, and Brutus never gets to articulate a coherent sentence before he is forced to flee.

Sam and his allies have been extremely effective at getting their voice out on all the media outlets over the weekend. The OpenAI board, on the other hand, seems to have broken apart already.
How the Password Game Was Beaten in 59 Characters [video]
Replit Core: Go from idea to software, fast
Disagree. Both theism and atheism assert absolute knowledge of the unknowable. The opposite is not asserting such knowledge.
Legal tender has an even narrower definition in some countries. For instance, in the UK, legal tender is the currency that has to be accepted by a court of law when a debt is to be paid to them. In all other cases, for instance if there is a debt to a private individual or a company, then the law has nothing to say. Mostly we get by on the "Oh, don't be ridiculous" principle.
Techmeme is a great tracker of the day's essential reports and discussions
situations are capable of being small scale wins for some and big picture losses at the same time, what boring commentary
Builder Profile: Michael Jelly
Ultorg has a bundled internal PostgreSQL database that is used for query execution over Excel/GSheets/CSV/MS Access sources. The tables are automatically dumped into PostgreSQL in an efficient manner when necessary. If you hit the Refresh button in the toolbar (F5 or Ctrl+R), Ultorg checks if there are changes in the original sources and refreshes the extracts if necessary.

The same mechanism kicks in if you join tables from different data sources in a single visual query. E.g. you might join a table in a remote PostgreSQL database with a table in a local CSV file. Both tables end up getting extracted locally.

There's a "Generated Extracts" folder in the sidebar where you can see a list of table extracts that were auto-generated on the local machine. The process is otherwise seamless, and queries in fact often perform much better locally than being executed on a remote database. The latter is due to no network latency, powerful laptops, and a custom PostgreSQL configuration on the local database that is tuned for single-user ad hoc queries.
Rendering Counter-Strike Demos in the Browser
I dunno, the guy has basically infinite money (and the ability to fundraise even more). I don't find it tough to imagine that he gets far more than monetary value from being the CEO of OpenAI.

He talked recently about how he's been able to watch these huge leaps in human progress and what a privilege that is. I believe that - don't you think it would be insane and amazing to get to see everything OpenAI is doing from the inside? If you already have so much money that the incremental value of the next dollar you earn is effectively zero, is it unreasonable to think that a seat at the table in one of the most important endeavors in the history of our species is worth more than any amount of money you could earn?

And then on top of that, even if you take a cynical view of things, he's put himself in a position where he can see at least months ahead of where basically all of technology is going to go. You don't actually have to be a shareholder to derive an enormous amount of value from that. Less cynically, it puts you in a position to steer the world toward what you feel is best.
Yep, this is part of the reason I avoid google like the plague. Everything else works like a charm in FF, so why would I use an inferior product? Granted, I don't use youtube, but everything else has better alternatives away from big evil.
> and destroys OpenAI

You mean destroy the rubble that's currently left in the offices of the company formerly known as OpenAI? If 500-750 key employees have departed to a competitor, what's left to protect?

Yeah, it would 80% be a "fuck you" move, but the other 20% would represent a pivot to an "open source" model like the name once implied
> Leaking tens of bytes is for sure NOT worse than crashing.

I do really disagree here. The answer is not clear at all.

But then, you are mischaracterizing the problem. The issue is not with crashing, you can get plain bad data too, and this is clearly worse than both leaking memory and crashing.

Also, the GP is mischaracterizing the options. You don't need to leave the old values around, you can just copy them into userspace memory.
My reasoning is simple - the issues here can be avoided if you're careful about how you use `setenv()` and `getenv()`, which many programs already are. The memory leak in contrast would never be avoidable regardless of how you use it.
Sam Altman's OpenAI was a local optimization for the ChatGPT use case. The more resources diverted towards that, the less chance of progress on real AGI. With that distraction out of the way, perhaps OpenAI can actually make progress on its charter.
If microsoft had any idea wouldn’t they have a board representation after pouring billions into this?
Perhaps they were put in that position precisely because of their incompetence, not despite of it.
Very reasonable? Microsoft doesn't control any part of the company and faces a high degree of regulatory scrutiny.
Copyright is wildly abused, for sure. But let's not baby-bathwater this.

I quite like the formulation in the American Constitution:

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

The good parts of this is that it has a purpose (which is NOT profits), and that the exclusivity should be time-limited.
The US has already used similar software solutions for suppression of it's own citizens for at least a decade, so what can "AI" improve for China (see probation policy in many jurisdictions, often decided by a test fed to a black box that says whether or not you need to be monitored)?
~1%; On their 2yr chart this weekend isn't even noticable
So, just finished reading those books. Surprsingly, neither one (Galaxy Guide 1: A New Hope nor the Deathstar source book) have anything to say about which trench was attacked during the Battle of Yavin.

The Deathstar sourcebook gives us some, propably not canon anymore, details about the Deathstar, e.g. it being divided into 24 sections, 12 per hemisphere, that there are the equatorial, and mid-hemisphere (one each north and south) and polar trenches (again, one each north and south) running parallel to the equator. Or there being trenches running between those 12 sections per hemisphere. But nothing about which trench was attacked. Maybe the Alliance and the New Republic have yet to de-classify that information.
Matt Parker (Standup Maths) has a Labrador retriever named Skylab.
What GP is suggesting is that 'cui bono' isn't a good explanation in most cases. It's always good to ask the question of whom benefits. But using it as an explanation for anything and everything is intellectually dishonest.
How are OpenAI expected to align a hyper-intelligent entity if they can't even align themselves....