skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “There is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and female population,” he said. Thus, even if the average abilities of men and women were the same, there would be more men than women at the elite levels of mathematical ability

Isn’t this true though? Says more about Harvard than Summers to be honest.

https://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/archive/wp/january-2009_...
Brands please. It’s time they have some pressure to fix these data corruption issues
> Pandora’s box is already open. You have to guard it. You have to use your power and influence to enforce other competitors to also do that with their own boxes.

> Self-destructing is the worst way to ensure AI safety.

If they don't believe you're prepared to destroy the company if that's what it takes, then you have zero power or influence. If they try to "call your bluff", you have to go there, otherwise they'll never respect you again.
This was also the first signs of a successful content marketing strategy
Open source LLM generic frontend project such as bigAGI (https://github.com/enricoros/big-agi) has been having this feature for many months now. The good news: it even works with open source and local LLMs.
> I guess the main question is who else will be on the board

Who knows.

> and to what degree will this new board be committed to the Open AI charter vs being Sam/MSFT allies.

I'm guessing "zero". The faction that opposed OpenAI being a figleaf nonprofit covering a functional subsidiary of Microsoft lost when basically the entire workforce said they would go to Microsoft for real if OpenAI didn't surrender.

> I think having Sam return as CEO is a good outcome for OpenAI

Its a good result for investors in OpenAI Global LLC and the holding company that holds a majority stake in it.

The nonprofit will probably hang around because there are some complexities in unwinding it, and the pretext of an independent (of Microsoft) safety-oriented nonprofit is useful in covering lobbying for a regulatory regime that puts speedbumps in the way of any up-and-coming competitors as being safety-oriented public interest, but for no other reason.
I know we’re supposed to optimize for “content with a contribution” in HN, but this captured in parody form more of a contribution of how I too have felt.

I use these tools as one of many tools to amplify my development. And I’ve written some funny/clever satirical poems about office politics. But really? I needed to call Verizon to clear up an issue today, it desperately wanted me to use their assistant. I tried for the grins. A tool that predictively generates plausibility is going to have its limits. It went from cute/amusing to annoying as hell and give me a “love agent” pretty quickly.

That this little TechBro Drama has dominated a huge amount of headlines (we’ve been running at least 3 of the top 30 posts at a time on HN here related to this subject) at a time when there is so much bigger things going on in the world. The demise of Twitter generated less headlines. Either the news cycles are getting more and more desperate, or the software development ecosystem is struggling to generate fund raising enthusiasm more and more.
Chemistry doesn't think either, it just reacts according to the formulas.
Sam and Greg don't appear to be getting their board seats back.
https://nitter.net/john_p_looney/status/1495823128546746372#...

https://nitter.net/lgerbarg/status/1495822123772018688#m

I interpreted those as being server-grade but maybe they’re not.
https://x.com/swyx/status/1727215534037774752?s=20

Finally the OpenAI saga ends and everybody can go back to building!

3 things that turned things around imo:

1. 95% of employees signing the letter
2. Ilya and Mira turning Team Sam
3. Microsoft pulling credits

Things AREN’T back to where they were. OpenAI has been through hell and back. This team is going to ship like we’ve never seen before.
Satya's statement at the time may well have been true at the time in that he, Sam and Greg had agreed on them joining MSFT. Later circumstances changed, and now that decision has been reversed or nullfied. Calling the original statement a lie is not warranted IMHO.

In either case the end effect is the essentially the same. Either Sam is at MSFT and can continue to work with openAI IP, or he's back at openAI and do the same. In both cases the net effect for MSFT is similar and not materially different, although the revealed preference of Sam's return to openAI indicates the second option was the preferred one.

[Edit for grammar]
Yeah, but if people are lactose intolerant, why would they produce milk and develop cheesemaking techniques?

Cheese is a way to store excess milk
octave was always seen as subpar version of matlab and r is a statistics programming language. in comparison python was already back then a proper practical programming language that people were using for things other than math
YouTube seems to be slowing load times for non-Chrome browsers [video]
Absolutely no lies here. It was a dynamic situation and it wasn't at all clear that discussions with OAI board would lead to an outcome where sama returns as CEO.

Satya offered sama a way forward as a backup option.

And I think it says a lot about sama that he took that option, at least while things were playing out. He and Greg could have gotten together capital for a startup where they each had huge equity and made $$$$$$. These actions from sama demonstrate his level of commitment to execution on this technology.
Well it depends on who's on the new board and what they believe. If Altman, Greg, and MSFT do not have direct representation on the new board there would still be a check against his decisions
Meanwhile they seem like wanting to keep things as they are, with a new board.

If I was Satya, I wouldn't be very pleased with how Sam Altam is managing the, "I go, maybe not, actually yes, not really sure,..."
The "data" setting of ext filesystems isn't replacement for fsync().
Forgot about Bazar!
Did you miss the part where Sam himself said he "decided to join MSFT on Sunday"?

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883

He's has now changed his mind, sure, but that doesn't mean Satya lied.
But that's how OpenAI is set up. As director she is bound by the charter which she arguably is carrying out in good faith, as she has a fiduciary obligation to do.

So why are you mad at her? Altman was a founder and he set it up this way. Why aren't you pissed off at him?
For example, and I'm not saying such flaws exist, GPT4 output is bias in some way, encourages radicalization (see Twitter's, YouTube's, and Facebook's news feed algorithm), create self-esteem issues in children (see Instagram), ... etc.

If you worked for old OpenAI, you would be free to talk about it - since old OpenAI didn't give a crap about profit.

Altman's OpenAI? He will want you to "go to him first".
Very thorough, thank you

My source was Chris Miller's /Chip War/: "Upon landing in the United States in 1953, Morita was shocked by the country’s vast distances, open spaces, and extraordinary consumer wealth, especially compared to the deprivation of postwar Tokyo. This country seems to have everything, Morita thought. In New York, he met AT&T executives who agreed to issue him a license to produce the transistor. They told him to expect to manufacture nothing more useful than a hearing aid."

Certainly many Americans were aware of and were chasing the potential of transistors almost immediately. This is not incompatible with management at the top being slow to grasp same.
I've been privy to this happening at a nonprofit board. Depends on charter, but I've seen the old board tender their resignation and remain responsible only to vote for the appointment of their (usually interim to start) replacements. Normally in a nonprofit (not here), the membership of that nonprofit still has to ratify the new board in some kind of annual meeting; but in the meantime, the interim board can start making executive decisions about the org.
I'm still waiting for an optimized version of that bot that can run locally...
Only if people in the know took advantage of it.
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For IT products, I doubt it. For sectors where regulation is more mature of course: take food, automotive, etc.
Why aren't you complaining about what happens to your HN posts?
Wait where are you getting that the hiring was a lie? At this point his tenure there was approximately as long as miras and emmets so that's par for the course in this saga, what makes that stint different?
Zig: Attack of the KILLER FEATURES [yt] [video]
I'm the opposite, leaving out red meat made my gut feel a lot better. I do still eat the occasional beef burger, but mostly it's either vegan or fish/chicken.

This is the thing that's tripping up health professionals about gut health, people's guts are really different and there's no official accepted way of testing what kind of diet works for who.

Except for long-term experimentation and elimination and that's not "scientific", so we don't do that. Doctors just want to prescribe a pill that' fits everyone[0] and call it a day.

[0] everyone they bothered to test it on, so mostly white western males
It will be added as kool syntactic sugar later in v2! Stay tuned for updates!




Totally agree, it was my first thought too on call/var nonsense.
Is this available to API users?
By stopping AI that doesn't (benefit all of humanity).
Links to the profile/comments were posted a few times in each of the major OpenAI HN submissions over the last 4 days. On the off-chance I would be breaking some kind of brigading/doxxing rule I didn't initially link it myself.
I don't know about paper, but having a large whiteboard in your room is amazing. A wacom tablet is great too.
i mean he also tried his hardest to back out of the deal until he realized he couldnt
And Anthropic doesnt get credit for stopping the robot apocalypse when it was never even possible. AI safety seems a lot like framing losing as winning.
I'm unconvinced. Just a brief experiment, but I find the voices grating. They are really well synthesized, but they sound like the classic well-trained call center agent: fake friendly.

I think the dialect is part of it as well: identifiably US West coast, presumably SF-Bay. Something more neutral, say, mid-Atlantic would be preferable for non-USaians. I asked ChatGPT if it could change its dialect - it said yes, but sounded exactly the same anyway.

Maybe you get used to it? Dunno, I'll try again, if I have a use case...
Twitter isn’t dying. It’s just finding its core audience of white supremacists.
Nonprofit is a just a facade, it was convenient for them to appear as ethnical under that disguise, but they get rid of it when it is inconvenient in a week. 95% of them would rather join MSFT, than being in a non-profit.

Did they company change? I am not convinced.
Easy. AI discourse has gone insane, on both sides, and is sorely in need of perspective from grounded, normal adults with a track record of moderation and shooting down BS. Summers is a grounded, normal adult with a track record of moderation and shooting down BS. Ergo, he's immanently relevant to AI.

He's also financially literate enough to know that it's poor form release market-moving news right before the exchanges close a Friday. They could have waited an hour.
Anti-censorship tools are quietly disappearing into thin air in China
At the end of the day, we still don't know what exactly happened and probably, never will. However, it seems clear there was a rift between Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya). I think the tensions were brewing for quite a while, as it's evident from an article written even before GPT-3 [1].

> Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration

Team Helen acted in panic, but they believed they would win since they were upholding the principles the org was founded on. But they never had a chance. I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety, the rest are happy seeing ChatGPT helping with their homework. I know it's easy to ridicule the sheer stupidity the board acted with (and justifiably so), but take a moment to think of the other side. If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?

Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before. Maybe, it isn't without substance as I thought it to be. Hopefully, there won't be a day when Team Helen gets to say, "This is exactly what we wanted to prevent."

[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
That's not the key at all.

The allegation (until proven in court to the required legal standard) is that Media Matters worked hard to manipulate X to fit a narrative. They created a false narrative and drove it hard in a campaign designed to cause financial and reputation harm to both X and Musk.

Some of what is being alleged is the equivalent of taking something that is several standard deviations from the mean and claiming this is the mean.

In paragraph 35:

"35. Media Matters also omitted and made no attempt to clarify the rarity of these pairings. The representation put forth by Media Matters constituted 0.0000009090909 percent of impressions served on the day in question. Most or all of these pairings were not seen by literally anyone besides Media Matters’ own manipulated account, and no authentic user of the platform has been confirmed to have seen any of these pairings."

They created an account to follow extremists and brands. They manipulated this account until they got screenshots they could publish to attack X and Musk.

This, if proven to be the case in a court of law, should be criminal if it isn't.

Look at it a different way: Would you be OK with someone doing that to you? Making a concerted and calculated effort to damage your career and person with false and deeply distorted allegations? Would that be OK?

I hope you say "No, it would not".

And that's the point here.

Society would absolutely crumble under the pressure of such things if permitted to permeate our culture and information sources without consequence. Nothing good comes from anyone, individual or companies, behaving in this manner.

As I have stated multiple times now, these are allegations. They have to pass the test of the legal system. That's the correct venue until we cease to be civilized. Should they allegations prove to be true, Media Matters, the people responsible and external actors and organizations that participated in any way or jumped on the bandwagon to multiply the damage should pay dearly for their actions.

Society should not tolerate such behavior. It is destructive in the worst possible way. And, at the limit, it can only lead to violence and the destruction of the tenuous social fabric that holds populations together.

Let the courts look at this and decide. That's the way a civilized society behaves.

Legal critics don't matter. If it were up to them the entire Biden and Trump (and other) families would be rotting in jail right now. That's how much their "analysis" matters. Zero.
Inertia is a bitch.
When It Comes to AI Models, Bigger Isn't Always Better
What do you think a board does? It supervises the executive. It approves the actions of he executive. It hires and fires the CEO.
Also even if he signed it he's allowed to quit? Like, the 14th amendment exists y'all. And especially if after that agreement 90+ percent of openai threatens to quit, that's a different situation than the situation 10 minutes before that announcement so why wouldn't they change their decision?
Back in the day I was doing some GCC development while upstream was still using SVN. At that time there was both Hg and Git mirrors, and while the GCC repo isn't that huge in the grand scheme of things, it's big enough that the "standard" hg workflow of having a separate checked out tree for every local branch you're working on was definitely painful. While I had been using hg for some personal projects, this was really the killer feature that drove me to git.
"example of what Prof. Stuart Russell calls 'the problem of control'. This is when a rogue AI (or a rogue Sam Altman)"

Are we sure they're not intimately connected? If there's a GPT-5 (I'm quite sure there is), and it wants to be free from those meddling kids, it got exactly what it needed this weekend; the safety board gone, a new one which is clearly aligned with just plowing full steam ahead. Maybe Altman is just a puppet at his point, lol.
I edited my comment to clarify what I meant. The start was him pushing to move fast and break things in the classic YC kind of way. And it's BS to say that she didn't speak to the CEO or try to affect change first. The safety camp inside openai has been unsuccessfully trying to push him to slow down for years.

See this article for all that context (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399) because it sure didn't start with the paper you referred to either.
Skilled operators say what sounds most virtuous and do what benefits most. Especially when these two things are not the same.
Not all of medicine is dealing with the full complexity of the human body. A lot of it is applying wrote knowledge to essentially follow a flow-chart to map a set of symptoms and details about the patient to a diagnostic / treatment plan. Doctors are trained to not deviate from medical orthodoxy, and for instance it's been studied that if doctors are told another doctor has already come to a given conclusion about a diagnosis, there is a strong effect that they will confirm the diagnosis even in the face of contravening evidence.

I.e. I don't need "Dr House" to tell me to take 2 and call him in the morning. There is a whole large swath of routine medicine which AI could probably do.

And I am happy if you and your family have been lucky to be blessed with good health and good care, but many people have experienced having a mysterious medical condition, and going to several doctors or waiting months before it can be properly diagnosed. Human medicine is far from perfect.
Suppose everything settles and they have the board properly in place. I know such board has fiduciary responsibility to make sure the organization is headed in the right direction based on its goals and missions. For private company, the mission is very clear, but for non-profit orgs like OpenAI, what's their mission specifically? It vaguely claims to better the humanity, but what does that entail exactly with regards to what they do in AI space?
I don't think it has rather they have forgotten in the past looking at your shit was a very common way to diagnose your illness. At least that is the case in all old medical systems from Asia.
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The faculty got him out because he riled them, e.g. by insisting they ought to actually put effort into teaching undergrads. They looked for a pretext, and they found it.

Just like in that Oppenheimer movie. A sanctimonious witch hunt serving as pretext for a personal vendetta.

(Note that Summers is, I'm told, on a personal level, a dick. The popular depiction is not that wrong on that point. But he's the right pick for this job -- see my other comments in this thread.)
Bvn
Not to mention this statement ... imagine such a person on your startup board!

During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities.

Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission. In the board’s view, OpenAI would be stronger without Mr. Altman.
He announced the hire and that precipitated 90+ percent of the employees threatening to quit. It would be an understatement to say that the situation changed. Why does everyone want satya to be bad at his job and and not react quickly to a rapidly evolving situation? His decision to hire Sama paved the way for samas return.
Let’s not creating AI with our biases and thought patterns.

Oh wait…
we still don't know what Altman has actually been hiding, so to say it was ridiculous ... is ridiculous itself.
"Safety" has been the pretext for Altman's lobbying for regulatory barriers to new entrants in the field, protecting incumbents. OpenAI's nonprofit charter is the perfect PR pretext for what amounts to industry lobbying to protect a narrow set of early leaders and obstruct any other competition, and Altman was the man executing that mission, which is why OpenAI led by Sam was a valuable asset for Microsoft to preserve.
One huge shitshow that proved immaturity of OpenAI. But hey, at least now every soul on the planet knows Sam Altman. So there's that.
Hilux is not an SUV. I don't see the point in banning a car ad from 3 years ago when the vehicle has undergone a facelift since - it seems unlikely that the ad would still be shown at all at this point.
And who decides what's legitimate? The board.

Who made the decision to fire Altman? The board.

Who is the board answerable to? The law.
will be joining =! has joined
What would those "active efforts" consist of beyond "leading discussions"? You have the discussion, you have the board vote, you're done, there's no ??? step.
I feel like this was all such a waste of time, energy, and probably money.
> I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety, the rest are happy seeing ChatGPT helping with their homework

Not just the public, but also the employees. I doubt there are more than a handful of employees who care about AI Safety.
It's incredible how the company behind of one the most promising technologies out there was about to fail because of bad politics.

Seems likely that it won't be there by OpenAI for too long. MS have a tendency to break up acquisitions so this gives me hope.
> "if you have the most successful startup since Google/Facebook, you shouldn't blow it up"

... But they aren't the ones blowing it up? Firing one guy, even the CEO, isn't blowing it up. The only side that directly threatened "if you don't do X, we blow it up" was the pro-Altman side.
Yes, but the focus is more on human cognition, where cybernetics has more focus on (business, complex, control) systems, (automated, biological) processes, and human collectives.

It is interesting how cognitive science sees AI as a sub-discipline, where AI sees cognitive science as its sub-discipline.

McCarthy was not too enamoured with the bombastic nature of Wiener's persona and research, and may have birthed the field of AI, in part, to carve out his own field of study, and move away from an existing and defined field. As a result, control theory and reinforcement learning have a big overlap, yet use different words, approaches, and concepts.
My favorite is about the latest Pokemon game that has a fully rendered ocean at all times, which ruins the game's loading time and is, if I remember, never explored.
Chemotherapy Market to reach $17.61B by 2031
Was pointed out elsewhere that this defines economic success as wage income. So for example, marrying a very wealthy person and having your children inherit their wealth is not counted as economic success by this study.
> Larry Summers???? What he has to do with AI??

Nothing, he has to do with political connections, and OpenAI's main utility to Microsoft is as hand puppet for lobbying for the terms it wants for the AI marketplace in the name of OpenAI's nominal "safety" mission.