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▲Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI (twitter.com)self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__=self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__||[];self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__.push("2:I[\"aadde9aaef29\",[],\"default\",1]\n3:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Children\",1]\n5:I[\"bc2946a341c8\",[],\"LayoutSegmentProvider\",1]\n6:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Slot\",1]\n7:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"ErrorBoundary\",1]\n8:I[\"a9bbde40cf2d\",[],\"default\",1]\n9:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"NotFoundBoundary\",1]\na:\"$Sreact.suspense\"\n:HL[\"/assets/index-BLEkI_5r.css\",\"style\"]\n")pan>
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It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors. About Shazeer, from the article:
Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often by a small number of experienced ‘magicians,’ to even show any signs of life,” says Uszkoreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery right away. He decided to write his own version of the transformer team’s code. “I took the basic idea and made the thing up myself,” he says. Occasionally he asked Kaiser questions, but mostly, he says, he “just acted on it for a while and came back and said, ‘Look, it works.’” Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” he had taken the system to a new level.
Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.
He also saw LLM would replace search before anyone else, and that is something to look at the Lamda or GPT-1's output and think: yeah this will answer all of our questions one day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HN is certainly curated - I've been "admitting" that since the day I got outed as a mod here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621 (March 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507229 (April 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962942 (June 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569117 (Nov 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15556105 (Oct 2017)
But we try hard to do the curation by principle, not by personal whim. What principles? Really there's just one: intellectual curiosity—we try to feature what enhances that and dampen what degrades it [1]. From that starting point, though, you can derive lots of other principles. Probably the most important is that snark and indignation are bad for HN (especially in combination!) because they drown out curious conversation. That's all that you need to see why I posted that reply to the GP; no personal preference required.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
These are preference-based but you're pretending they're objective. I find _your_ comments to be full of snark and indignation more than any you respond to, but of course you won't agree. (But because you don't agree, that makes me objectively wrong, I know.)
"Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences." - someone smarter than the average HN commenter.
Do you have any specific examples of where dang or another moderator posted in that way?
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
Someone should write a bot to do this automatically. What is the HN policy on bots?
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
Easy peasy!
and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)
What percentage of Google employees are engineers...
Has been in more of a maintenance mode with a multiple of those people. If anything, the pace of the product has improved. Regardless of what you think about Musk, the company he bought was a bloated mess.
You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.
(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)
You mean fire the very smart people who designed the core systems AND insult them so that anyone with options would never want to work there?
We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.
Maybe Noam measures status differently.
Sadly the gap between reality and satire has shrunk.
But yes. I also wish that show would come back.
Noam shazeer would be google head dreamer
Uszkoreit wanted to build a more efficient/scalable language/seq2seq model that could take advantage of GPU parallelism (replacing RNNs which were the main approach to sequence modelling at that time).
Uszkoreit's insight was that although language appears sequential, it is in fact really part parallel part hierarchical, as can be seen by linguist's sentence parse trees where at each level there is parallelism/independence between the branches of the tree, with them getting combined at the next level up. This is what gave rise to the idea of a model that consisted of a stack of of parallel processing layers (transformer layers). I believe that attention was also part of the plan from day one, as this had already been proven to be valuable (Bahdanau) with RNN seq2seq modelling.
So, this is what Uszkoreit wanted to build, but by his own account he failed to come up with an implementation that matched or outperformed the prevailing RNN approach that he wanted to replace. At this point, Uszkoreit mentioned the idea to Shazeer, who got on board and eventually arrived at a performant architecture which was then pared back by an ablation process resulting in the initial encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Shazeer later came up with the mixture-of-experts architecture, and also other optimizations after he left to found character.ai
I'm talking from plenty of group project experience here.
He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead.
Now he’s leaving Google again for OpenAI.
Exciting times!
Google bought him back (with lots of money) and made him one of the leads of Gemini.
https://youtu.be/v0gjI__RyCY?is=nz77XP4KiJy7L1AX
What is exiting about this?
>> Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a "bright and beautiful boy", had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai app in late spring 2023.
People become obsessed with them. The builders have to know that their 'customers' are explicitly people with mental issues. Nobody sane or normal is talking to these things.
If you want to see how bad it is go checkout the reddit discourse when OpenAI deprecated one of their older models. Thousands of people acting like OpenAI had 'killed' their partners and best friends.
There are a lot of grey areas engineers work in when it comes to social stuff, privacy stuff, etc. There's no grey area with these. You're trying to hook people who are unwell and the people working on it should be ashamed.
---
Edit replying to below post, as I am rate limited:
> Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
You replied to my post, so I thought your post perhaps had some relevance to mine rather than being unrelated soapboxing.
I don't particularly agree with your soapboxing, at any rate. Character.AI was not a "relationship bot" company. Like any LLM, they could simply be prompted to respond as such, in the same way that ChatGPT can. As you pointed out yourself, ChatGPT has the same issue with people forming parasocial bonds, despite not attempting to cater to that market in any way at all. Should people who release chatbots be legally required to censor them heavily when users attempt to use them for anything other than technical questions? That seems excessive, and it seems that ascribing moral responsibility of that degree is akin to holding video game, music, or movie producers responsible for violence committed by someone who saw a piece of violent media. Moreover, how far does it go? Should distributing open-weight models be made illegal, because you're making available something that can't be censored?
Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
Google lost three critical years chasing AGI, and got acquired by SpaceX, now a Dyson Sphere startup whose pitch deck is just: "What if we put a paywall around the Sun?"
Not really.
Altman couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.
Noam is OTOH and IIUC the real deal.
Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.
- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.
You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.
- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.
It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.
It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?
Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)
also "empty handed" is just unnecesarily dramatic, he left all the knwoledge base he helped build, that's google's IP and is worth m(b?)illions
should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?
I have no dog in this race as I'm not fond of either OpenAI or Google.... but employees not being loyal to their big tech employers is a wild thing to be concerned about in 2026 when year after year many large tech companies (Google very prominently among them) continually post record profits and still lay people off by the thousands.
The Attention is all you need paper has Google logo, not character.ai
Noam is the real deal, he was pretty legendary within old-time ('00s) Google engineering. Paul Buchheit had a story about interviewing him with the "how to write a spellchecker" question and then him coming up with something better than the state-of-the-art, then basically delivering Google's spell corrector in his first 2-week Noogler project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilk-76W9rE&t=60
"Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides" - https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/google-character-ai-lawsuit...
Be aware...very disturbing: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac...
Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.
Seems like there are some insights here!
edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable.
1 liner summary:
To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.
> The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine in 1922. British rule and Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration led to growing violence between Arabs and Jews, causing the British to announce its intention to terminate the Mandate in 1947. The UN General Assembly recommended partitioning Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. However, the situation deteriorated into a civil war. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, the Jews ostensibly accepted it, declaring the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948 upon the end of the British mandate. Nearby Arab countries invaded Palestine, Israel not only prevailed, but conquered more territory than envisioned by the Partition Plan. During the war, 700,000, or about 80% of all Palestinians fled or were driven out of territory Israel conquered and were not allowed to return, an event known as the Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe') to Palestinians. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing for decades, about 850,000 Jews from the Arab world immigrated ("made Aliyah") to Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine
Also, it was Ottoman territory for hundreds of years up to WWI. I've had friends tell me for some reason about how Palestine was an independent country before... literally wasn't.
To some it still means favoring any existence of a Jewish state. The inertia isn't there because aside from the original partition plan being pushed by the UK, other countries have attacked Israel several times later in ways they would've have withstood without outside support.
Now that is a valid use of the term. I think the problem it that Zionism means so many different things it is nearly useless as a description. It seems more useful as a slur which has become very common in some circles.
"The inertia isn't there"
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
> Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
US and UK, yes. Not just cause of the weapons and money to Israel. After them, the top recipients of US foreign aid in the area are the bordering countries Egypt and Jordan, so that they don't attack.
And how is that?
Israel has a population of 10 million people and a very modern military and nuclear weapons. If it's existence was ever truly threatened things would get VERY ugly.
I have doubts about their ability to self-defend because otherwise we wouldn't be giving so much money, the situation would be stable. Even if they can severely hurt the attackers, it doesn't really matter if the attackers stop at nothing. We just lost a war against Iran despite having full air superiority and killing their leader. And especially if you're considering the scenario where Israel never got Western support, and thus never got those advanced weapons.
Israel razed Gaza to the ground. It was a genocide.
A non-zionist Israel would be one where all peoples had the same right, e.g.
They fail to understand that their skill doesn't generalise.
That and the hyperglazing and platforming they get for having said skill makes them a prime candidate for exposing how average they are.
> "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender," Shazeer wrote, news site the Information reported Friday. "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them."
It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this. But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic, which clearly crosses the line into disrupting work.
And of course he's not directly accusing his coworkers of "sterilizing children", but he's 1) using language that compares politically sensitive health services that many of his coworkers or their families may have used and/or may feel defensive about to atrocities and 2) accusing his coworkers of supporting atrocities. That feels quite disruptive and inappropriate in the work environment IMO.
Anyway, to double back once, it actually doesn't really "assume it's a medically necessary procedure"; we can soften it to something like a "medically desired procedure" and the point in fact still stands that Shazeer's wording - which really should be the point here, not re-enacting the tired trans healthcare debate - is deliberately incendiary and manipulative. Broadly, no one is advocating for parents to be sterilizing their children as an end to itself, so it shouldn't be characterized as such.
Another controversy is physician-assisted s–... euthanasia. Some doctors would consider it medically necessary, but they can't legally perform or even recommend it, as it's considered murder. They can in Canada. Abortion of a viable fetus not threatening the mother is illegal in all 50 US states, but legal in many states in earlier stages, again based on what the states consider murder (but the doctor judges what is viable or a threat to the mother).
Anyway if gender-affirming care is just medically desired but not medically necessary, the sterilization is accepted but not necessary. I agree with the spirit of the wording, even though it's imprecise, because it highlights that children are taking on an irreversible side effect. It's a short quote and not a whole essay where he gets to clarify.
For me it was a really confusing issue until I became close friends with someone whose childhood best friend is trans.
If he was born a decade earlier, he probably would have killed himself (this was the path he was on, which is incredibly tragic and all too common); the gender dysphoria invoked depression was unbearable.
Instead, he was able to work through therapy and medical care to understand his gender dysphoria and receive gender affirming care in his late teens.
Now (over a decade post treatment) he’s among the most cheerful people I’ve ever met. He inspires joy as a band teacher, is inspiringly happily married, and is raising a beautiful baby girl.
I often think about him when people talk about the issue in the abstract. The hundreds of children whose lives he’s impacted for the better, let alone the lives of his friends and family. Removing gender affirming care is implicitly saying you don’t want any of that to happen, because the logical conclusion of removing is people like him in a pit of depression and despair that often ends in suicide, all over an affliction that they did not choose.
This is where the “medically necessary” part of gender affirming care comes from.
I didn’t understand it before I knew him and his story so I don’t begrudge people who are in shows I used to walk in. But I’d encourage people to try to understand and lead with empathy and meet people where they are.
It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates. So I can't support it. I still think people should have the right to do it on their own dime, and won't judge them for it either way. I can't trust any studies on this anymore because it's become politicized and weirdly speech-policed. This isn't a unique or nuanced opinion, it's probably the majority one and I sound like the rest.
Google knows Shazeer's value & paid $2bn to c.ai for it: Its undesirable for anyone (regardless of their seniority) to engage in a discussion without being invited to it. Flaring up discord isn't how someone in a leadership position at a huge company is supposed to operate. It is another thing if they've got the "fuck you" money & a few feathers to rattle; then they do whatever without care.
> But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic
Per reports, Sergey Brin said something similar in the internal forums, too. Don't think its the only problem. After all, Shazeer can literally pick & choose where they want to work, and probably has more leverage over GDM than GDM does over him.
(To my understanding, the closest equivalent is “ummah” in Arabic, where the connotation is flipped: goy can refer to a Jewish person but typically does not, whereas the ummah typically refers to Muslim peoples as a collective but can also be a general stand-in for “nation” or “world.”)
Which is why I think that story is very likely bullshit. It’s from an account that very frequently posts pro-IRGC content, and has previously used “the G word” itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247908
I explained my reasoning for avoiding the word downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591986
Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the second post is actually about (a) me having understanding for a position of someone i disagree with harshly, and (b) the logical structure of an argument, not the underlying topic itself. it was in reference to the content of the link that was posted.
anyway, mods can take it down, i get why the rules are there. you're also right to ask folks to keep it clean. but i stand by it; dude just seems to have a trifecta of awful traits and i'm so so so tired of super rich tech dudes ruining the world.
as evidence, what it _means_ to be a man, woman, etc, differs from society to society. if you ask me to quantify this precisely, i will struggle. but it's plain for all to see.
The idea that gender is a social concept is so blindingly obvious that, like bbeonx I kind of assume that anyone making comments like yours about "common sense" is either blindly parroting talking points without thinking about them, or arguing in bad faith.
I think you're putting words into peoples mouths there.
Acknowledging that there is a social construct we generally know of as "gender" and acknowledging that certain stereotypes and common understandings of that concept exist is not at all the same thing as demanding that people should fit into the narrowest stereotypes that you can think of.
Also worth noting that you acknowledging the existence of sexist stereotyping is an acknowledgement of the existence of gender as a social construct.
An example of using the category normatively would be saying someone isn't American because they burn the flag. My experience is that most of the people using "gender" normatively don't differentiate it from sex.
What's even worse is Google refused to work with the American military in the past, but as soon as it was Israel, #1 priority for them. So it's pretty clear where their loyalty is.
Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.
I'm no super-insider, I only hear industry scuttlebutt like everyone else, but I have about a 95% confidence that the last 18 months has just been about more and better, without any kind of real leap or breakthrough. More hardware, more data, better technique. Well, technique diffuses as people change companies, hardware can be built, and data can be gathered (or stolen!).
From my admittedly outsider perspective, the only years-long moat there is who has the most hardware. If you have the hardware, you can give away the compute to get the data (hello, subsidized subscriptions!). Technique can simply be hired. The only durable, multi-year advantage is the hardware.
So is that a moat? Sure, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the leading model companies of the moment. ASML is the real moat, and so it's ASML China is besieging, correctly (IMO) identifying that everything else can be caught up easily enough.
Check back in a few years...
Don't we all want to (automatically) and passively invest in a company losing billions of dollars ?
At least we can diversify our portfolio from SpaceX.
That's their moat.
Maybe also stolen copyrighted content that cannot be found anywhere else now, so they are the only ones who can train on it.
Grabbing market-share if you have investors that are ready to burn cash infinetely. Find a hot niche, buy a banana 1 USD, sell it for 0.10 USD.
Example: Cursor, they became popular because they were selling ChatGPT unlimited for 20 USD / month.
When they launched, just a reskinned VS Code, "fastest growing AI company"
No coincidence they were bought by SpaceX, who wants to consolidate revenue even if non-sense as long it helps other investors to exit. It shows rapid growth.
Profit is the real moat.
One example: Nvidia. Proprietary tooling, proprietary IP, proprietary hardware, no alternative, expensive.
You don't know what Cursor's game plan was. Maybe acquisition was their plan.
Buying at $1 and selling for $0.1 is still viable as long as they have money in the bank, until they achieve their goals. Most startups start out that way. Even giving away their services for free.
Obviously there will be failures. Doesn't mean they have no moat. Can you say a business with 100 customers and $1000 debt is less viable than one with a single customer and no debt?
Possibly true. Any smart innovations developed by one organization will be smuggled into others.
Training, inferring, and data collection, infrastructures are definitely moats. High-volume usage feedback is also hard to come by for new entrants.
Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels.
It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
As do thousands of people say this point. You think the head of deepseek doesn't?
1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).
2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.
Because I think as far as running the existing models and handling whatever nuances, it must be well understood by oai and ANT -- but you don't what you don't know.
And Deepminds Demis Hassabis was the single other? Or were there more?
So didn’t they get on? The latter is in London so time difference to put up with too
Question two: Why are OpenAI spending that money taking talent from Google, who can definitely outspend them for talent, and not Anthropic, who are leading the market and are at least somewhat financially constrained.
But I'm sure for at least some folks, this is true, given recent valuations.
What is going on at Google?
Karpathy to Anthropic, now Noam to OpenAI.
I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo&ra=m
As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle:
- huge, quasi unmatched data war chest
- huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure
- native AI chip design and production (TPU)
- the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there
- deepmind, enough said
- pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT
- a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...)
- supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley
Why do the best people leave ?
Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ?
Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance?
The only answer I can think of is:
- culture is completely broken
- management sucks something fierce
- company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore
Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1].
The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission.
Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is.
1: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI
I always appreciated Jeff having a level head ... which this article seems to confirm:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts...
I've seen engmisc and industryinfo, and I agree they are sometimes insufferable but having a level head would be ignoring them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo
What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.
Popular entertainment and unique progress of human civilization can’t be really compared either
I'd argue that professional sport is the closest thing to a true meritocracy - doesn't matter who your Dad knows - you ability is there for all to see on the pitch.
And at the team level - if cosy cliques form, again - team performance doesn't lie - hard work, team work and talent is ultimately what delivers results on the pitch.
The other interesting part of professional sport is that the 'workers' have managed to capture more of the value than is traditionally the case - this is precisely because they are so hard to replace.
If you think professional footballers earn too much and are interchangable - feel free to try and get in the team.
So take this scenario - I'd argue that if you want to make progress in the field of these particular ML models, then you are going to need resources ( compute/data etc ) that is beyond most individuals capability to muster. ie you have to join a company with resources ( or persuade somebody to give you them ).
Right now there is one of those scenarios where capital is chasing talent - and so talent, if they are so inclined, is able to make the most of that.
But in normal times that's typically not the case - most of the time scientists are chasing the capital ( directly or indirectly in the form of a job in a well resourced company ) in order to be able to science, rather than the other way around.
It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.
I doubt that the money had anything to do with it.
I also doubt that the state of the technology at OAI vs. Google had much to do with it, Google is behind no doubt, but the gap is not as far as we know, insurmountable.
I suspect that this is a leadership clash. Noam was working in GDM. GDM somehow went away from coding and RSI into "world models" and that has played out very poorly. Who made that call? Who was still playing politics?
Given this is Noam the list of people that could be pissing him off is very small: Demis, Sergey (?!), a couple of VPs in GDM.
What the hell happened?
Based on what?
Do they really? What does it cost them if they're wrong?
Needless to say, the OP could be right but they could be right without proof. Or proof would out them. Or it's malicious posting. Don't take anything on the internet too seriously, even in such sanctimonious spaces as HN.
C'mon people, if you don't know Noam personally, who are you to fling such accusations?
I really hate the low bar of HN discussions lately. It's late-Slashdot-level. Brrr.
Also, why didn't they nail him down contractually when they bought character.ai ... isn't that pretty standard with these type of superstar (re)hires?
OpenAI is in a unique position right now to grant pre-IPO options (probably in the form of RSUs). And they wanted him badly enough to grant the extra options necessary to effectively 'buy out' whatever unvested Google bonus he's walking away from.
LOL.