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Comment by bluefishinit | Hacker News Reader

Here's the original: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop...

This illustrates the irony: a company, whose product collects information from the internet, requests that an article "removed" from the internet.

(And honestly this is probably a mistake as it actually draws more attention to the original article).

He definitely unleaded Streisand effect on the interview

It’s amazing to me there are still people (in the tech space no less) who haven’t figured out how this works.

I'm pretty sure Sam Altman knows about and understands Streisand effect. There are a myriad other explanations for "This content has been removed at the request of OpenAI."

I don't agree. Go search for HN threads relating to anything Sam Altman has said publicly, interviews he's given etc and you'll see that they always get posted multiple times on HN and the biggest thread always has 100s if not 1000s of comments.

This content was going to be wildly shared and discussed whether deleted or not, by deleting it they have at least a) made an official (yet soft, as it doesn't address any specific points) statement that it's not information they're trying to put out and b) probably reduced SEO / future views beyond these current discussions.

I can't see any argument for it getting more attention because of deletion than it would have got anyway?

I don't think attention really matters. A statement remaining on their website is like continuously saying/affirming whatever that statement is. Removing it means they have changed their minds about something it contains. Removing it just stops that affirmation, it doesn't really matter if people know what you used to think as long as they know you no longer do.

If you have a statement on your website that promises to never put cats on the moon but then you do, I imagine some shareholders/investors might feel misled. I don't know _if_ that opens someone up to legal action but I could see the argument.

Is the statement on their website or on a third party website? Changing your mind about what you publish is one thing, changing your mind about an interview you just gave is another.

but theres an open question now about whether or not that was MEANT to be an interview, or rather a closed door session to a small group of folks. if Humanloop had not gotten clearance to post what they posted, this would have been a grave overstep of journalistic ethics.

(i am not throwing stones, i've fallen foul of this as a blogger before, excusing myself from commonsense precaution in my eagerness to discuss industry relevant insights. private https://www.swyx.io/private)

> if Humanloop had not gotten clearance to post what they posted, this would have been a grave overstep of journalistic ethics.

Where did you get this idea? You don't "go on record" with a journalist. Everything you do and say around them is on the record by default. There are ethical codes and frameworks on what, when, and how to report but "private conversations are private" is certainly not considered normal.

Re your mea culpa, it's a completely different situation and I don't see how journalistic ethics would be applicable there. If you want to have a more appropriate term, maybe "blogger ethics"?

neither Raza nor myself are journalists, but we behave like them when we write stuff up for obvious HN bait. privacy by default is the overwhelming expected norm for private individuals. particularly at a closed door small group event. we abuse the system when we use our status as industry participants and become citizen journalists without first considering if the expectations are aligned.

> we abuse the system when we use our status as industry participants and become citizen journalists

Agreed. This includes not making statements like your previous one about "journalistic ethics". Consider this: If your now removed post had been containing the same information but based on a separate conversation with their ex-partner, with their consent to publish, would that had made it less problematic? Without having read the post, I imagine it wouldn't. So it turns out that there's more to it.

I'm not saying these posts aren't problematic, nor that journalists lack ethics. I am saying that "private conversations are private" is oversimplifying the matter and not part of journalistic ethics in the general. You're making references to professional code you lack qualifications for.

Consider medicine. Let's say Alex is visiting a sick family member. Alex has no medical training. They bring some drugs which later turn out to cause even worse health issues. "Medical ethics" isn't a useful framing for discussing that situation IMO, for similar reasons.

> I don't think attention really matters.

Attention Is All You Need

As if that weren't already the mantra of the TikTok era.

You missed the reference.

It's like those pentalobe security screws. Nobody thinks they'll stop a determined attempt to disassemble a product, but they're a signal that you're not meant to pull it apart. Then when you do, and you break it, they can point to the screws and say "well clearly you should have known not to do that."

This might not be about suppressing this particular bit of information so much about holding the group of journalists they invited to their agreements.

I don't think this is ironic. They retracted something they said, this is perfectly legit.

I've deleted things I posted, including here on HN. You probably did too. And I've scraped data from the internet countless times. You probably did too. I don't think I'm an irony because of that. You probably aren't either.

Perhaps intentionally so, to increase the hype and as you said draw more attention

There's nothing surprising there.

- Not enough GPUs. — we knew that. Look at NVidia's stock price.

Roadmap for 2023:

- Cheaper and faster GPT-4 — well, of course.

- Longer context windows — expected. Everybody's trying to do that.

- Finetuning API to be extended to latest models — well, of course.

- A stateful API — convenience feature

Roadmap for 2024:

- Multimodality stalled because not enough GPUs. — said that that already.

No exciting statements, such as "We have GPT-5 in test and it can do most desk jobs", or "We've acquired a wafer fab to make our own AI chips".

What's the big deal?

You missed what probably triggered it: "...said that OpenAI was considering open-sourcing GPT-3. Part of the reason they hadn’t open-sourced yet was that he was skeptical of how many individuals and companies would have the capability to host and serve large LLMs..."

Ah. OK.

that is also something that Sama has repeatedly mentioned on twitter and on his world tour. non issue

> OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT

Even though I interpret this as the author’s summarizing of a statement to the effect of “we want to stay at the platform layer and not the application layer”, it stands out to me as a phrasing that might irk lawyers sensitive to anything that could hurt them in an antitrust lawsuit a decade from now.

> The fact that scaling continues to work has significant implications for the timelines of AGI development. The scaling hypothesis is the idea that we may have most of the pieces in place needed to build AGI and that most of the remaining work will be taking existing methods and scaling them up.

Is this a pretty consensual viewpoint? Or is it hype from OpenAI?

Within comp sci? Not sure. Within academia writ large? No way. But hey I look to biologists who put biological immortality > 100-200 years out (I've never believed Aubrey de Grey and similars during the 20 years he's been in headlines) and see AGI as in the domain of biology/psychology. We've implicated the brain, that's about it.

It seems absurd to me that someone would try to make a prediction about the state of technology in 100 years. If you asked people in 1920 to make a list of predictions about what we would/wouldn't be able to do today would they have done better than chance?

I guess our understanding of the laws of physics haven't changed that much. So someone predicting that free energy will be impossible is likely correct.

Solar power is mostly free energy, at least for the next 5B years.

uh... also "free" is hydro and wind which people have been using for millenniums

Taking existing methods and scaling them up leads to better LLMs. That's a major part of what OpenAI is doing.

Now the scaling hypothesis is basically just that sophisticated behavior emerges by itself as neural networks get bigger and get trained on more data with more complex problems. LLMs certainly show that so far, but to jump to an AGI I think we need to fix various shortcomings. It's certainly possible that a future version of an LLM will be an AGI, but imho that will also be thanks to current and future improvements like adding an internal dialogue or medium-term memory. Or maybe LLMs just can't scale that far, because experiencing the world through text is insufficient.

Yeah at this point nobody has the authority to say how far the architecture might go. It looks promising, OpenAI has all the reason to hype it as much as possible and it certainly seems plausible, but it could just as likely hit a practical ceiling of some sort.

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