skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me, the bigger revelation here is that they pursued Johansson at all. OpenAI went from the company that wasn't even that interested in building ChatGPT because they assumed someone else would do it, to the company that's trying to court a celebrity to recreate her AI voice from a movie. It feels like a complete tonal shift. They're no longer the company that's dedicated to research and advancing the state of the art. They're now just another company that's trying to pull off kitschy demos and headline-grabbing product announcements. The mask has been slowly slipping for years now, but this feels like the moment where we finally see that Sam Altman is out to build a commercial empire, not dedicated to the lofty goals OpenAI was launched with.

There's a meme on Twitter that OpenAI has "lost the mandate of heaven" over the past week or so, and while it makes for a funny joke, I think there really is some truth underneath it.
If it does do that then yeah, there should be backlash. But I don't see that stated anywhere in the notes nor do I see a hint of that in the app.

The only two AI interfaces I see are the "Engage Artificial Intelligence" menu item where you ask it how to form a command, and then a second interface in the Toolbelt called Codecierge where it tries to complete a task you tell it to do.

Both of which are completely optional and require an OpenAI key. If you do use them you're sending your request to OpenAI but as far as I can tell it doesn't get any of your command history or anything like that.
There are many people with voices similar to Scarlett Johansson's. If SJ is unwilling to be a voice actor for OpenAi, then why should OpenAI not find a similar voice and use that instead? SJ certainly does not have a monopoly on all voices similar to hers. Anyone in possession of such a voice has the same right as SJ to monetize it. And someone did in fact exercise that right. If you compare the Sky voice to SJ's, they're not the same.

OpenAI's mistake was caving to SJ. They should have kept Sky and told SJ to get lost. If SJ sued, they could simply prove another voice actor was used and make the legitimate argument that SJ doesn't have a monopoly on voices similar to hers.
int sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i)
sum += x[i];

Pretty much looks the same in all C-like languages. I've written that in Java, Go, TypeScript, PHP, etc...

On the other hand, that second 'clever' example always looks different for every stupid language. It's std::accumulate in C++, streams in Java, list comprehension in python, etc...

Clear is better than clever.
This “article” reads a lot to me like a CharGPT generated drivel. Material for maybe two paragraphs at most, spread over a book of nonsense.
Plus RAG isn't just referenced result augmentation.

It isn't just adding a vector based db

It isn't about less hallucination. In fact it doesn't even mandate that result should be referenced nor come from a vector db.

RAG's point is to remove the limit LLMs alone have which is that they are limited to the mind trained data as source of information.

A RAG can be queried for information an LLM doesn't have any knowledge of. The LLM part of a RAG can be instructed to use all sort of information retrieval, such as making a web search, checking the current stock market value of any particular tickers.

The article is nonetheless interesting as it touches on the beauty of LLMs being in their input interface rather than their ability to outputs aggregated content that reads beautifully, usually.

RAG is more than what the author says it is. It's even what the author says is most wanted.

RAG is more comprehensively what the author wants. It can be instructed to provide relevant references, always answer a particular way, and most importantly can get asked to perform (live) search engine queries to find the most up to date information. The example in the article is OK given the recipe is pretty old and has been very likely mined during training.

What about:

> I missed the games Lakers played from the 1st to 21st of April. Could you give me the list of opponents and scores please.

LLMs input interface won't help. RAGs can make LLMs answer that.
Brave’s crypto reward features might be a better analogy, but I like the comparison.

Fortunately I get paid to throw shade. Here is a free sample:

“Unsupervised use of LLMs can increase the risk of exposing sensitive information. Mitigation strategies and capabilities are not mature.

“Exploiting AI requires rapidly increasing the capital expenditures (input) per worker while the horizon for productivity gains (output) is uncharted and unknown.
Vietnam isn't doing too badly:

> Viet Nam leads Southeast Asia in share of low-carbon generation (42%), primarily from hydro (29%). From 2015 to 2023, solar and wind grew tenfold to 13% of electricity generation, on a par with the global average and exceeding peers like Thailand (4.7%) and the Philippines (3.2%).

Stats from Ember climate report.
Search country W or country X 'weaponizes' Y or Z. It's another widespread tournure that could make one wonder if one organisation is writing the whole load of rubbish.
We’re talking about reaching out to an individual for consent, not getting consent, and then deliberately choosing a voice actor to circumvent that lack of consent.

Sam’s statement partially contradicts this by saying they contracted the voice actor before ScarJo - but I believe there’s enough intent shown in ScarJos original tweet that Sam as a default disregarded the entire interaction as an inconvenience where he could be “naughty” and get away without consequences.
> He kind of ruined that argument when he tweeted "Her"

Why? The grandparent is not saying it's coincidence. Why is it not okay to hire someone who has a voice similar to celebrity X who you intentionally want to immitate? I mean if you don't actually mislead people to believe that your immitation is actually X - which would be obviously problematic?
Does Everything search file contents? I've only used Everything for searching filenames (and it is fantastic for that). Google Desktop's sweet spot was searching within files.
Can you be a "good" and "ethical" person if, throughout your entire professional life, you bully and berate nearly anyone around you?
I probably spent 100 hours trying to tame FreeCAD, and ended up thinking CAD was just not for me. I then tried Onshape and found out that the problem was elsewhere.
> in which case at least you cost them more than they cost you

Did you really? Monetarily you did of course. How much time does it cost you though? It might cost the company a couple hours.
"I'm sorry Sam, I'm afraid I can't do that"
You’re very dismissive of the reasons the people are stating. An “objective, secular, non-vibes” approach would be taking people at their word.
>> You can’t copyright look and feel though, can you?

Microsoft argued in court that you can not and won. See Apple vs Microsoft if I recall correctly.
Not sure why so many people get so emotional and project so much. Let the courts decide. I do think they should not have pulled it so quickly, why go through all this effort with this expected outcome. Not a good look.
my gut tells me the dyson sphere is easier.

we can sorta-kinda imagine how to make a dyson sphere now, the engineering is just tremendous and our product would kind of suck.

as far as i'm aware we're still pretty clueless about interstellar travel in a human time span.
Love your optimism. I wish I was as optimistic as you. My guess is that they’ll fire these employees and not improve their processes.

These are highly skilled, highly profitable companies. If they’re not doing something, chances are they don’t wanna do it rather than incompetence
using namespace std;

is considered kinda bad since you don't want your namespace to be polluted with a bunch of std stuff. For example if you have `int count` lying around somewhere you'd want to be able to call `std::count` without fear of it being shadowed.
He strongly implied that it wasn’t an imitation.
I'm not sure you're aware of the ramifications of all of this, or else you just don't care. The voice acting industry is now entirely dead thanks to your opinions on this matter. Nobody is going to reach out to Liam Neeson for his voice, they'll just have some voice tool recreate it and read the script as long as the tool can recreate the same emotional tones they're looking for, and it's cheaper than hiring the actual actor. There's tangible damages here. But I guess you don't mind because you're not a voice actor and this doesn't directly affect you.

And before you try this rebuttal, this is different from machinery taking the jobs away from manufacturing plant workers, it's much bigger than that. With manufacturing plant workers, at least humans were still needed for recognizing a fault in the machinery and stopping the line. Humans still needed to maintain the machines. Humans needed to design and build the machines. In this scenario, a couple of central parties are creating these tools, and then nobody is needed to ensure a quality product any further down the chain than that. There either needs to be a legal consequence to this, or a 4.4 billion dollar industry is now just closing their doors. That's all well and good until all of those peoples' families need to eat their next meal or sleep in a home. But I guess their lives aren't your problem.

It won't be anytime all that soon, in my opinion. But generative AI is coming for many (most? all?) sectors of work. And if history is any indicator, millions of people will have to suffer and/or die before governments step in to do much of anything about it. Probably especially-so in the US, since we tend to lean towards "free markets" that benefit the massive companies that have already made it, and allow them to chew through human resources (the people, not the department) mostly any way they see fit. So many people are going to lose their jobs and never find work in their field again, and they will all either die or retrain for all the same laborer positions and end up with a massive surplus of workers in those fields too. And that's only until we become skilled enough in robotics and generative AI to automate the trades too.
IIRC Jobs also later blamed Wozniak's head injury from a plane crash for him not remembering several good things Jobs did for him, as a cover for those things never happening.
Crocodile or Alligator?
> it's not good to have that sort of technology out in the wild

Cat's already out of the bag: https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intel...
Well, those, and that one time when he ripped off Woz, but yeah, great guy, except for all those incidents.
This is true, but in code reviews and such, it often boils down to familiarity above anything else, like someone preferring

names = []
for record in records:
names.append(record["name"])

to

names = [record["name"] for record in records]

Now, I might say something if I saw this:

import operator
names = list(map(operator.itemgetter("name"), records))

Seems a bit unidiomatic given that list comprehensions are in the language... but probably many disagree.
I have accounts in the USA and in EU zone. Moving money between them is a pain and costly. This is probably not a niche though.
Reminds me of those contracts (that are completely formulaic and you definitely can't negotiate) that say "I agree this rate has been negotiated".
I'm fairly certain both Lunar Lake and upcoming Ryzen chips will clear the 40 TOPs performance bar here.
I’ve been a C++ dev for a couple of decades and know my fair share of unreadable code. I’ve recently started learning Python and holy shit, it’s like you get accolades in this language for doing as much as possible in as few characters as possible. Guess I’m getting too old for these young whippersnappers.
Most restaurants have paper menus if you ask.

If they don’t accept cash, don’t patronize them? Also, a debit or credit card isn’t a smart phone, so I am not sure what you are arguing for here.

You have a choice to vote with your wallet and not go to places if they don’t have services that match your needs.
The voice decoder used in GPT-4o is different from voice cloning techniques, which are already being used to facilitate scams: https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intel...
Aspire doesn't provide parity with production. Locally it has its own container host and production deployment is outside of Aspire. Aspire has a bit more flexibility to run things that are not containers.
Related to Synapse collapse: https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/16/a-us-trustee-wants-trouble...
In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023
I didn't see at all where OpenAI claimed that sky is associated with Scarlett Johansson. If true I agree that is bad.
> "Move fast and break things" is explicitly, exactly the wrong attitude for the person/team in charge of a world-changing superpower.

Thankfully, they aren't in charge of anything like that.
He appears to be a big fan of the opt out model of consent (when it suits him).
I think there should be a non-AI build so companies can allow this specific flavor and not ban iTerm2 completely. There is always going to be somebody using it when they shouldn’t.
But not same performance. One of the reason QC not releasing anything but controlled benchmarks is most likely the subpar performance of Windows on ARM. This will be the biggest hurdle for QC Elite chips, competing with M-seried which is design in tandem with MacOS.
The founding principle of Silicon Valley.
The same way problems get resolved when someone's sob story goes viral? Presumably an employee sees it and files a ticket that says "hey this stranger is having problem XYZ." Then a support person investigates and takes the appropriate action.

(Just a guess, I don't know the process at Meta.)
We DO recommend that individuals with high risk of injuring themselves wear helmets. People have varying levels of risk tolerance before they take steps to mitigate them; I'm sure some people choose to wear helmets because they estimate the risk of falling to be too high. In your hypothetical, I would probably not care, because to I and to most people the risk of falling at any given moment isn't high enough to warrant mitigating it. On an airplane, your risk of encountering turbulence is markedly high, enough so that it is worth mitigating. If you disagree then feel free to take your belt off, but don't complain if you die a very avoidable death. (Not that you could at that point.)
If you get 10 random people in a room and blindly played a clip of Scarlett Johansson speaking normally (ie not lines from a movie), I'd put money that exactly zero out of 10 people could identify the speaker.

It's one thing to copyright a performance or own a likeness. Owning the sound of a voice is scary territory we do not want to get into, or the estate of every singer will be suing the estate of every other singer who will be suing the remaining actual living singers.

Thinking about replying to this comment? Don't make your writing style sound too much like mine, I have lawyers standing by. And all you trendy kids that type without caps and punctuation can expect a visit from the estate of e.e. comings.
Probably a lot of extra high frequency content. How does your dog feel about dog (or regular) whistles?
Also lost Google Toolbar in 2011. Though that was far less essential once Chrome came out.
Not when you build the CPU. You can pipeline the operation. All these ops have very long latency.
Curious to know what equivalence you’re making?
You should take it upon yourself to save your data, if it is really important to you, so that if all your relays fail, you can simply rebroadcast all your events to a new one and you will be fine.
It's a problem solved in a collaborative and decentralized way.
Perpetual benefit of the doubt given for every implication as though it’s happening in a vacuum is how humanity keeps putting megalomaniacs and sociopaths into positions of power and influence.

It’s really a shame.
See? Beneficial criticism in action.
Thank you for telling us that! The story has been repeatedly flagged on HN, even this extremely detailed and reasonable post on lesswrong:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
> I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this.

For folks who aren't familiar with FB, maxrmk is absolutely right. But some more color would probably help:

When one of the privacy teams discovers a violation of this kind, the employee is generally called into a meeting with HR and fired the very next day.

A friend of mine did this inadvertently - just trying to help a real personal friend with an account issue, and inadvertently accessed a system in a way he didn't realized was a privacy violation. Months later, he was investigating data for a project, which triggered an audit. They walked him out the door the next day after finding it.

So: yeah. This is not a very good business idea.
"I think it's fine for a profit-driven corporation to impersonate people on a large scale without their permission. Jim Carrey did it..."
You reach out to someone to do a job, they decline to take the job, you find someone else who can do the job in a similar way. You do not need the consent of the person who declined the job to hire someone else.

I'm sure lots of movies have tried to cast Scarlett Johanson for a role and she declined, so they went with another actress who looked similar. Should she sue them too?
Yep. I now find it enjoyable to refactor my code to the point of making it feel obvious and straightforward. Not always easy.

For me, it helps imagining some colleague read my code and judge me. And fortunately, I work at a place where I trust people to recognize when something that looks obvious is not actually dumb. Not that I'm so great at dumb but I try at least.

Tooling that allows you to move classes, methods, rename stuff, inline or extract functions efficiently helps a lot. It pains me a bit to write this, as someone whose favorite code editor is a text editor, not an IDE.

I find there's comparable joy in writing. Rephrasing and simplifying a text to find the most efficient / obvious phrasing. I suspect writing software might affect writing in such ways, though I don't think I would be able to tell a developer's writing apart.
Part of the problem is the government issued licence. The old paper / dumb card versions are easy to duplicate, and that's what happened. Now they can be a smartcard signed with a government key which can't so easily be forged. "Now" means any time in the last 30 years.

Ditto all government credentials - birth certificates, passports, other licences. All should have been changed decades ago.

But we are talking about the USA. The credit / debit card industry figured this out and published the EMV standard (aka "chip and PIN") in 1995. A few countries made EMV mandatory for credit/debit cards in 2003, most had done it by 2015. The USA waited to 2021 to force the issue using a liability shift.

Now identify fraud is approaching epidemic proportions. In Australia at least the major source of these identity document leaks is data breaches of organisations who were forced by the government to collect copies of licences by Know Your Customer regulations. The penny has finally dropped finally here, with our Feds finally moving to mandating electric ID's and licences. If the governments in haven't realised they a similar position now, they will be soon.
Oh, I know.

I'm responding more to the idea of "legitimate" businesses just cloning people's voice to associate their identity with a product by comparing it to something slimeballs do to the elderly, including my late grandmother.
And obligatory related HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306
Hey, that's great!

But wait, we already had a working mechanism to signal exactly this type of opting out[1] so let me rephrase the OP question: why does OpenAI get to be exempt from existing opt-out mechanisms and implement their own?

It certainly does seem as if they're trying to position themselves as a new standard against which content owners have to actively opt-out, and thus disregarding the already existing active opt-out signals. But that would mean that they don't actually care about privacy, and their opt-out signal is disengenuous! That can't be right, can it?? Surely everything they do is in good faith, just like every other corporation ever!

Anyway, the fact that they disregard existing privacy standards and rolled out their own privacy standard definitely gives me a lot of confidence that they will forever follow the privacy standards they themselves created!

Now excuse me, but I have to go get treatment for terminally metastasized sarcasm.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
It's only training if it remembers it after the conversation is over.
Sometimes clever code creates a good abstraction. Clever code that doesn't create a suitable trade-off with complexity isn't actually clever at all.

Of course, never code golf outside actual code golfing puzzles.
>> You cannot compare the suborbital booster return to an oribital reentry, they are two completely different things.

Agreed, but I expect Starship to be doing the same in a few years.
I think most people would be thinking "hmm now I need to read what 'reduce' mean in this context"
Plot twist: this is a honeypot marketplace designed to catch employees selling access like this.
I'm not really sure what this proves, since there aren't really good reasons for spawning 1 million processes that do nothing except sleeping. A more convincing demonstration would be spawning 1 million state machines that each maintain their own state and process messages or otherwise do useful work. But examples of that on the BEAM have been around for years.

So, in interest of matching this code I wrote an example of spawning 1_000_000 processes that each wait for 3 seconds and then exit.

This is Elixir, but this is trivial to do on the BEAM and could easily be done in Erlang as well:

#!/usr/bin/env elixir

[process_count | _] = System.argv()

count = String.to_integer(process_count)

IO.puts "spawning #{count} processes"

1..count
|> Enum.map(fn _c ->
Task.async(fn ->
Process.sleep(3_000)
end)
end)
|> Task.await_many()

The default process limit is 262,000-ish for historical reasons but it is easy to override when running the script:

» time elixir --erl "+P 1000001" process_demo.exs 1000000
spawning 1000000 processes

________________________________________________________
Executed in 6.85 secs fish external
usr time 11.79 secs 60.00 micros 11.79 secs
sys time 15.81 secs 714.00 micros 15.81 secs

I tried to get dotnet set up on my mac to run the code in your example to provide a timing comparison, but it has been a few years since I wrote C# professionally and I wasn't able to quickly finish the required boilerplate set up to run it.

Ultimately, although imo the BEAM performs quite well here, I think these kind of showy-but-simple tests miss the advantages of what OTP provides: unparalleled introspection abilities in production on a running system. Unfortunately, it is more difficult to demonstrate the runtime tools in a small code example.
You don’t need a separate build. This has the exact same risk profile as somebody just navigating to the openAI website, and can be blocked in the exact same way, with network policy. I could see the argument that the iterm needs a more clear way to explicitly disable these features (rather than not configuring them) but I don’t think a separate build solves anything.