skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft gave Sam and the for-profit arm of OpenAI a paved road towards a much larger GPU supply and access to other resources, much quicker than OpenAI could procure naturally. This allows the for-profit arm of OpenAI to grow much faster, albeit with more directional influence from an external entity that does not have a position on the board. Microsoft's investment, significantly motivated by business interests, rather than philanthropy, creates tension in OpenAI. The for-profit arm is being tugged in two directions, one that wants to capitalize and recoup investments at the cost of less risk assessment of the impact of AI, and the other direction that wants a slower, more guided approach towards building an approach to AI more focused on ethics, sustainability and improving the human condition.

The fact that Microsoft might not have directly recruited Sam and his team is less significant in light of their promise of substantial growth, which ultimately swayed Sam's decision, whether he consciously realizes this or not. This now leads to him misrepresenting information to the board, leading to his removal. This scenario humorously mirrors a common personal dilemma: choosing between financial gain and leading a meaningful, sustainable life. Sam's choice is hyperbolically likened to 'selling one's soul to the devil', reflecting this paradox.
Scale’s remarkably consistent in Star Wars. There exist crazy-comprehensive analyses on the Web that check relative sizes of ships and elements of ships (and even things like blaster bolts) against one another in different scenes/shots and against stated sizes in other sources and it’s clear that’s something the SFX crews on (at least) the original trilogy paid tons of attention to, despite how much pain that must have caused, since they were working with physical models.
For me, the weirdness here is that Ilya, supposedly the brains behind GPT, is a signatory.

The sacking would never have happened without his vote; and he must have thought about it before he acted.

I hope he comes up with a proper explanation of his actions soon (not just a tweet).
Looks great. For people wondering about wether postgres really is a good choice for a job queue I can recommend checking out Oban in Elixir that has been running in production for many years: https://github.com/sorentwo/oban

Benchmark: peaks at around 17,699 jobs/sec for one queue on one node. Probably covers most apps.

https://getoban.pro/articles/one-million-jobs-a-minute-with-...
How do they bylaws work?

1. Voting out chairman with chairman abstaining needs only 3/5.

2. Voting out CEO then requires 3/4?

Did Ilya have to vote for any of this to happen?
Lots of counterfeit US dollars are in circulation in Argentina, though :)
What is a normal non targeted ad?

If a feminine hygiene company has to show non targeted ads to 50% men, who benefits? They have to advertise more than twice as much, Facebook can't charge as much, and I get weird irrelevant ads that make my experience worse.
> Wanting to offload heavy work to a background job is absolute as old of a best practice as exists in modern software engineering.

Yes. I am intimately familiar with background jobs. In fact I've been using them long enough to know, without hesitation, that you don't use a relational database as your job queue.
Question: what’s Sam’s role at MS? To bring in outside investment? I can’t imagine so. To lure talent from Oai? Sure. But what does Satya need him for after he staffs up? Are the going to share duties? What’s the end game? Salary man Sam? Does Sam get to pursue his chip venture while working for MS?
The free market is meme. We don't have one, basically never have. And Adam Smith didn't argue for one anyways. We have a highly regulated economy. One that suffers from regulatory capture to the extent that several industries have subverted their regulators and make them work in their favor instead of in the interests of the people.

Most of our problems would be fixed by liberating the regulating authorities of industry cronies. The argument over more or less regulation is red herring at this stage.
really crappy graph...
...and Satya/etc just pretended surprise, and the board declined to state this shocking news, and for some reason Sam thought it was better to stay at OpenAI while negotiating "for months"?

It takes some pretty good gymnastics to land that theory.
There are two "types" of right to repair. One is "you can't use the law to prevent me from fixing things", the other is "you have to make them easy to fix".

Based on the article, particularly the part that describes the bill [1], this is the former.

Amending the law so that it doesn't prevent repairing things adds absolutely no cost to manufacturing...

[1] "The bill would amend the Canadian copyright act, allowing individuals or independent repair shops to break digital locks in order to make software fixes."
Maybe they believe less in the Board as it stands, and Ilya's commitments, than what Sam was pulling off.
Just going off this tweet, it seems to be user-agent based: https://fixupx.com/endermanch/status/1726605997698068630
I also noticed they didn't speak much to the mission/charter. I wonder if the new entity under Sam and Greg contains any remnants of the OpenAI charter, like profit-capping? I can't imagine something like "Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity" making it's way into the language of any Microsoft (or any bigcorp) subsidiary.

I wonder if this is the end of the non-profit/hybrid model?
Microsoft created shareholder value by selling stuff people like. Many techies argue it was the exact wrong thing they were selling and the world would be a better place if MSFT followed rather than led - but there is no arguing that people wanted and used what they were selling. Also it's hard to find a company with more shareholders than MSFT.
Outside of FOSS, that's the present ;)
How do they bylaws work?

1. Voting out chairman with chairman abstaining needs only 3/5.

2. Voting out CEO then requires 3/4?

Did Ilya have to vote?
Why did this post suddenly disappear from HN?

EDIT: ok it's back but at a much lower rank, weird.

I guess I don't understand the ranking algorithm because this post is now lower ranked than others 10x as old and 1/4th the engagement.
In general you are right, but as the readme says, this project was an experiment to try out the stack. The intended consumer of the repo is probably not someone who wants to run yet-another-chatgpt-clone, but someone who wants to poke at the code, in which case the stack is the most relevant information!
The main danger (but certainly not the only danger) is that the AI kills us all for reasons that have been articulated for 20 years including in books by respected academics like Nick Bostrom. The techniques used to 'steer' or 'aim' the AI stop working once the AI becomes better than humans (and human institutions like the FBI or Microsoft) at certain cognitive capabilities like making intricate plans that will succeed in spite of determined human opposition. Researchers employed full-time at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute have been trying to solve this 'control' or 'alignment' problem continuously for 20 years, but progress has been very slow compared to 'progress' on just building dangerous AI.
> Makes what the world would look like if, say, the Manhattan Project would have been managed the same way.

It was not possible for a war-time government crash project to have been managed the same way. During WW2 the existential fear was an embodied threat currently happening. No one was even thinking about a potential for profits or even any additional products aside from an atomic bomb. And if anyone had ideas on how to pursue that bomb that seemed like a decent idea, they would have been funded to pursue them.

And this is not even mentioning the fact that security was tight.

I'm sure there were scientists who disagreed with how the Manhattan project was being managed. I'm also sure they kept working on it despite those disagreements.
Was social media required to feed those people? I don't think hunger in the 90s was a technology problem.
See

> Some think they do - but don't. (idiots)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38350698
Author of this (Hanspeter Mössenböck) works on GraalVM.
Sam is often talked about as a talented fund raiser. Will his skills really be useful at a ~$3T corporation that doesn't really need to do that?
That's how Ned Stark bit it. Trying to be honorable, lost the first move, then had his head chopped off.
Yes, there are certain things in UNIX which _are_ part of the standard (POSIX / IEEE1003) but _aren't_ usually implemented as system calls.

Name lookups (whether user identities or network resources) are the biggest chunk of these. You have a "choice" as a user/programmer here. Say, the existing name lookup interfaces in most libc implementations don't do DNS-over-HTTP (DoH); you can implement that yourself and just use the addresses returned by your library/package where the system calls ... want addresses.

If you have the go stance, go all the way. Don't say "the C runtime is sh*te but I really really really want that one particular teensy tiny bit of it could someone somewhere somehow please do something to make it a little less sh*te". Legacy baggage is a burden and backwards compatibility shackles you. The C/Unix interfaces are full of this, and with the hindsight of 50 years noone today, not even "C programmers", would implement them all the same way again. But that doesn't mean their behaviour can be arbitrarily changed.
Do you know that brandur's been writing about Postgres job queues since at least 2017? Cut him some slack.

https://brandur.org/job-drain

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15294722
Still, doing so publicly still isn't a good idea, IMHO.
Please, no cancel-culture.
That's pretty clearly anti-competetive.
Oh well, bullshit unaccountable ethics major, ex member of Congress, I guess CIA agents on boards are fungible these days
The new CEO wants AI development to slow down to 10-20% what it is. How would open sourcing GPT-4 align with that?
Last week in FOSS: Blender 4.0, Calibre 7.0, GNOME's €1M funding, and more
Why on earth would I care about some contracts when talking about M$, as if they wouldn't breach any number of contracts if they could get away with it?

As far as I'm concerned literally everyone else is "one of the good guys" when the other side we're talking about is M$ and the psychopaths that are involved with it, regardless of their actions.
That sounds like a reasonable assessment, FartyMcFarter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_Balwani
Imagine putting all your energy behind the person who thinks worldcoin is a good idea...
I meant "know" in the sense you used "heard".
You could even put a note in the man page that `setenv()` will leak memory. Then ten or twenty years from now there will be a blog post about how a currently trendy language/runtime can be manipulated into looping over `setenv()` zillions of times and OOM'ing, and comments about how no one can possibly be expected to read the man page for this horrible footgun, and it's wrong to expect developers to have any idea about what they're doing, give a shit, or pay attention at all.
I reckon it's more webkit rather than Chrome. I think Mozilla is the only major non-webkit browser now.
if staya's tweet is to be used a reference for information it's more creating a company/startup owned by msft than a creation a new division. much like their deal with github, linkedin, blizzard/activision/king
don't forget the old Microsoft is still here. We have two Microsofts now!
LLMs have the potential to be one of the most toxic technologies in human history.

Sexist etc content is a footnote compared to the potential for an automated, proven, and tuneable technology of mass persuasion and impersonation.

So - massively addictive adtech. Reliable and effective political and ideological propaganda. Bot farms and "credible" fake media content produced at scale.

Imagine those being used against a relatively defenceless population to creative division, undermine personal and collective confidence, and encourage stochastic terrorism and other kinds of violence.
Ten MegaDollars.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344458. Nothing wrong with your comment—I'm just trying to prune the heaviest subthreads.
So what was going to happen 5 years from now is happening now I.e MS acquiring OpenAI
Morse was usually pretty good for this, and fairly regularly had shots of not-that-pretty bits of Oxford. Certainly the earlier ones.

Lewis, however, regularly teleported significant distances in the pursuit of A Clue.
> Whatever they did, MS is not an environment where ideas thrive or execution sparkles. They've always been mediocre and probably always will

Worse, they're increasingly user-hostile. Any tech in their hands can't be trusted to respect users.
It's not generally considered rational to base one's conclusions on imagined future emails.

If it was planned, there were simpler ways to do it. Seeing conspiracy in chaos is a warning sign.
This whole thing is like some board members watched the first few episodes of _Succession_ and thought "What a great idea!" without watching the rest of season one
I am incredibly excited for Industrial Annihilation, really looks close to my ultimate dreams RTS.

> IA is a unique blend of genres: deep factory building combined with real-time strategy action.
Status is a relative thing and openai will pay you much more than all your peers at other companies.
I should have been more specific. I was referring to the writer of the original post, not Altman.
Wow, all this drama over a glorified chatbot.

I can't wait until people realize how much of a nothingburger ChatGPT really is.
Silicon Valley outsider here. Am I being harsh here?

I just bothered to look at the full OpenAI board composition. Besides Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, why are these people eligible to be on the OpenAI board? Such young people, calling themselves "President of this", "Director of that".

- Adam D'Angelo — Quora CEO (no clue what he's doing on OpenAI board)

- Tasha McCauley — a "management scientist" (this is a new term for me); whatever that means

- Helen Toner — I don't know what exactly she does, again, "something-something Director of strategy" at Georgetown University, for such a young person

No wise veterans here to temper the adrenaline?

Edit: the term clusterf*** comes to mind here.
Aeon: Purposeful Universe
Between belief in a creator and belief in a designer, is there a cosmic purpose?

Spoiler:

> I take a middle way between these two extremes. I think human life can be very meaningful even if there is no cosmic purpose, so long as we engage in meaningful activities, such as kindness, creativity and the pursuit of knowledge. But, if there is cosmic purpose, then life is potentially more meaningful. We want our lives to make a difference. If we can contribute, even in some tiny way, to the good purposes of the whole of reality, this is about as big a difference as we can imagine making.

The author seems to take an extended Stoic view, extended with a cosmic meaningness to life.
There are multiple factions hiding behind safety. The regulatory capture faction and the BuildingGodInOurImage factions both currently say similar things to the public, but the underlying motivations are very different.

But neither seem likely to want to open anything meaningful that is is AGI related-- locking the public out of powerful AI is a point in which all the major 'safety' factions are aligned. (well not the monopolization concern faction, but they're not a player here and usually don't hide behind the safety banner)
> Given that Sam has since joined Microsoft, that seems plausible, on its face.

He is the biggest name in ai what was he supposed to do after getting fired? His only options with the resources to do AI are big money, or unemployment?

It seems plausible to me that if the not for profits concern was comercialisation then there was really nothing that the comercial side could do to appease this concern besides die. The board wants rid of all employes and to kill off any potential business, they have the power and right to do that and looks like they are.
Such great writing. Clear, compelling, and entertaining.
> I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging unambiguously behind Altman.

Lots of reasons, or possible reasons:

1. They think Altman is a skilled and competent leader.

2. They think the board is unskilled and incompetent.

3. They think Altman will provide commercial success to the for-profit as well as fulfilling the non-profit's mission.

4. They disagree or are ambivalent towards the non-profit's mission. (Charters are not immutable.)
Only if they're myopic.

People think you open-source something and it starts improving rapidly. But that's not exactly how it works. The first push is almost always commercial. And only when the product is mature, well understood in and out, and people get bored of paying for it, then open-source initiatives start showing up to democratize this product type for everyone without dependency on a single vendor.

Think like Unix -> Linux. Linux is largely stagnant, but that's also because it's "done". Sure tons of patches flow in, but if you need a major architectural change, with breaking changes, FOSS can't deliver that most of the time, if ever.

Are we done developing AI? Nothing major to add, that's it? Hell, no. We're merely starting. And so... we need to see what commercial companies (even under the guide of not-for-profit ones) can do, before we start demanding open-source versions.
It's almost like Ilya was sitting at his desk programming, deep in thought, someone stopped by and said 'sign this', and he does. Then few hours later he finishes programming and sees the news that he voted out Sam.
Personally experince was that DVDs became unplayable way more often than VHS tapes, especially if kids had any part in the handling. It's all anecdotal but I really soured on CD/DVD media due to the apparent need for clean-room handling to keep them playable.
My bet is on M$ wanting an exclusive deal and board being against it.
I’m just glad they read it.
Who can afford it? When LawyerAI and AccountAI are used by all of the mega corps to find more and more tax loopholes and many citizens can’t work then where will UBI come from?
This article is comically oblivious to what happened and did 0 research. The games from Gucci and Karlie Kloss are nothing like his app other than they fall under the fashion category. His app provides a utility to player that the other games nominated don't offer. See for yourself:

Catalog Avatar Creator: https://www.roblox.com/games/7041939546/Catalog-Avatar-Creat...

Gucci Ancora Fashion Show: https://www.roblox.com/games/7830918930/Gucci-Ancora-Fashion...

Fashion Klossette New: https://www.roblox.com/games/10762579692/FASHION-KLOSSETTE-N...
This is my favorite OpenAI fanfic so far.
Thank god I didn't question what josephg wrote regarding the text-based OT :D

I'm actually part of the team that built real-time collaboration for CKEditor 5. As the article says, we use a tree-structured representation for rich-text data and decided (many years ago) to go with OT. My guess always was that GDocs also uses a tree structure as the internal data model or that at least Google Wave did. I think I based this on a comment from a Google employee who summed up their OT implementation as hard to stabilize, even over many years.

I know it's possible to kind of represent rich-text data in form of a linear structure. This makes the implementation of the OT much much simpler. But then the editor itself becomes much more limited or you need to combine multiple instances of its model to represent more complex data. E.g., AFAIK Quill (mentioned in the other comment) does not offer stable tables implementation. Something that wasn't that big of a deal for us.
OpenAI is doing a lot more work than just a LLM, despite that being there headline product for now. I'd rather have OpenAI leading the way than Microsoft or Google in this stuff. Despite it's own issues.

I get your pessimism, but the same has been said about a lot of tech that did go on to change the world, just because a lot of people made a lot of noise about previous tech that failed to come to anything doesn't mean to say this is the same thing, it's completely different tech.

A lot of OpenAI's products are out in the real world and I use them everyday, I never touched Crypto, now maybe LLM's won't live up to the hype, but OpenAi's stuff is already been used in a lot of products, used by millions of users, even Spotify.

'A plausible sentence generator is just that: the next hype' - Maybe, but AI goes far beyond LLM as does the products OpenAI produces.
Show HN: Hotlist, a Tauri powered daily todo list for your Mac menu bar
:) maybe as a personal challenge, will see.
Perfect reply. Every statement and its contrary can be made plausible with right arguments.
> If they work at OpenAI they are already among the highest lifetime earners on the planet

Isn't the standard package $300K + equity (= nothing if your board is set on making your company non-profit)?

It's nothing to scoff at, but it's hardly top or even average pay for the kind of profiles working there.

It makes perfect sense that they absolutely want the company to be for-profit and listed, that's how they all become millionnaires.
Funny, I would’ve thought this one would have been more appropriate

https://youtu.be/6qpRrIJnswk?si=h37XFUXJDDoy2QZm

Substitute with appropriate ex-Soviet doomer music as necessary
I think the simplest explanation is the most likely. In this case, that the hold out board members are idiots.

Even if Sam deliberately provoked them and this was a set up, no normal person would be this obstinate about it. They would’ve given up now if this was anybody’s doing but their own.
> should be triggered iff the transaction commits

Agreed. Which is why the design doesn't make any sense. Because in the scenario presented they're starting a job during a transaction.
Nice, that actually does fit. :D
Maybe this is for the best. The ones who are in for the money can go to MS, and the ones with a higher calling can stick with OpenAI and we'll see who wins.

I'm convinced an actual, true open approach (ideally open source) will win out, everyone thinks MS has executed a masterstroke, but more likely they've shot their load too early with LLMs only being a signpost on the way to higher-order AI (AGI is a ill-defined fantasy).
This rings true, though I will throw in a bit of nuance. It's not greed, the desire of making as much money as possible, that is the shaping factor. Rather the critical factor is building a product for which people are willing to spend their hard earned money on. Making money is a byproduct of that process, and not making money is a sign that the product, and by extension the process leading to the product, is deficient at some level.
Sounds like your work needs to provide you hardware to support their restrictions.
Every engineer would benefit from it too.
It's not just Microsoft. Big tech has an obligation to put profits and growth as priority (even often short term at the expense of long term). This is often at odds with the customer as we have seen by so many dark patterns, decline in privacy, PRISM etc etc.

Google changed their motto from "Don't be Evil".

Companies may start with good intentions but the pressure of shareholders (and agencies) will take that away over time.

Interested to hear examples to the contrary.
The mother of some of his kids was on the board for a while.
Opposite for me, I'm on a 10 yr old Mac and FF runs just as well as it always did while Chrome is more sluggish. On Android, FF feels a bit slow to render while Chromium browsers do fine.
Oh no.. My post here ruined the Google search results for Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
I am experiencing delay on both Firefox and Waterfox
I can take your comment on good faith of people relationships, but on the solidarity thing aren't they all placing faith on a black box and/or a person promoting it.