Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

i highlighted this last night which seems to be making the rounds - https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1699369076529971545

Alec's CV (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alecradford/) seems to be:

- 2011-2016 BSc Eng from Olin College

- 2013+ started a data/AI consultancy as a sophomore that turned into a vague startup/product?

- 2015 first paper on GANs coauthored with soumith https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06434.pdf%C3

- 2016 first GAN paper under openai email https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2016/file/8...

- 2017 the generative reviews paper mentioend in the Wired article, with Ilya https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01444.pdf

- 2017 coauthor on PPO paper (precursor to instructgpt/rlhf) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.06347.pdf).

- 2018 lead author on GPT1 https://www.mikecaptain.com/resources/pdf/GPT-1.pdf

- 2019 lead author on GPT2 https://insightcivic.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/language-mod... blog https://openai.com/research/better-language-models

- 2019 coauthor on RLHF https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593.pdf)

- 2020 coauthor on gpt3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

- 2020 coauthor on scaling laws https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361.pdf%E4%B8%AD%E5%BE%97%E5%88...

- 2021 coauthor on DallE http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/ramesh21a/ramesh21a.pdf

- 2021 coauthor on Codex https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf?trk=public_post_comment...

- 2023 lead author on Whisper https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/radford23a/radford23a.pdf

name a more successful 7 year CS career post undergrad...

Update: FYI openai just announced a "developer day" in Nov - somehow not blessed by the HN gods https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408234

They all have crazy CVs. If you're really talented in the US you can get very far on talent alone. If he was in Germany he's be a Ph.d or Postdoc toiling in some outdated research field that nobody cares about.

The CTO has an even crazier CV. Born in the poorest European country, BSc at Dartmond (is that considered a good uni? idk), internship at GS, a stint at Tesla, couple of startups and hits gold with OpenAi. A BSc in mechanical engineering wouldn't even get you a job in Germany.

maybe Europe needs to lighten up a little on the credentialism. (i am not at all saying this is exclusive to europe tho)

Definitely, but it is not our only problem. We don't get those lucrative internships and neither do we get the boatloads of startup capital.

It's all caused by the same risk averse mentality, though.

The "risk averse" mentality is insightful to me, attempting to comprehend what cultural differences my (European issue) parents engage the world with

Oh, it's definitely one of the most distinctive difference between US and Europe. Of course it is not all the same. Germans are on the more conservative side, while the Dutch are known to be more entrepreneurial. But overall none is on the same level as you Americans.

It's caused by "a business that loses billions of dollars a year for over a decade isn't a sustainable business" mentality. The US is the exact opposite.

Even OpenAI, however amazing it is, is not a business (yet?). It's a money sink.

"Loss-leader" is the term, I believe

No, that's something different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

The thing being talked about doesn't have a widely-used nickname, though "Blitzscaling" is probably the closest.

Oh, I see, yeah maybe not the exact right fit is "loss leader" but it sounds good. Hmm. It's more like domination via attrition?

There's also price dumping involved in many of these schemes.

It's the good ol drug dealer adage just at blitzscale as gp put it.

The first hit is always free

Can you point to an example of a country that had/has a similar mentality to the US and it backfired?

I don't think there's a single country where people keep pouring infinite money into unprofitable businesses, and calling them successful and innovative.

Note: I'm not talking only about OpenAI. You can look at YConbinator's own top companies and try and find businesses that are profitable for longer than a year, and not with a history of "for a decade they were losing a billion dollars a year but are now finally profitable with 10 dollars of profit"

Most importantly, it’s bankruptcy laws in the US that encourage and reward risk taking which push technology forward. Last I’ve heard Europe is trying to update its laws for this exact reason

This is true. But this is also what happens when there is too much money at play, and not enough of a try-and-fail approach.

As somebody who grew up in Europe and moved to the US for a postdoc and then started working in tech and never left, the main difference is the lack of venture capital ecosystem in Europe. Why there is no VC ecosystem is a topic for another day. You can have a brilliant idea, but with debt financing, start-ups are not an inviting business for banks, whether the founders have the "right" credentials or not.

> If you're really talented in the US you can get very far on talent alone

While this seems true, I wonder how much selection bias is involved here. I mean, we wouldn't know about talented people that kept failing, right?

Edit: since they failed, they must be dumb, right? No matter how many PhDs they have. (I am being sarcastic, ofc)

The point is not that there are not failing people in USA, but that there are much less successfully ones in EU.

GP comment is saying that the situation is better in the US than in Germany for talented people.

I am wondering whether this is really true in average or just selection bias.

I am very happy to see an actual researcher and innovator get a significant piece of the proceeds from their work. This used to be a fairly rare event. The fact that it's becoming more common is a sign of progress.

Definitely. It is why I like to say that when it comes to the upper two quarters of income/wealth, there is way way way more upwards economic mobility in the US than in Europe.

Here in Germany it is very easy to go from broke to middle class if you are talented. But going from talented to rich is impossible. There is no access to capital so people fight over the few good paying corporate positions and even there you mostly get the position through nepotism.

Although that is impressive, isn't it just a side effect of the way AI companies have a culture of publishing research papers, some of which these days are sort of more elaborate blog posts?

There are probably quite a lot of people who have worked on some cool projects 7 years out from graduation, but in fields where they don't get to publish papers about it.

david luan

yale applied math grad (2013) ceo of startup (2011-2017) openai director then promoted to openai vp (2017-2020) google director (2020)

this is 7 years out of undergrad

he left google director position (7 digits/year btw) to become founder ceo of adept ai, which is now valued at $1 billion

this guy is more impressive in terms of career progression (not research)

Super genius or well connected?

i'm sure those things correlate

I had an opportunity to interview with Indico and some of the people around Alex (i.e. Slater). Still not sure if not pursuing that further was a mistake or not.

A true 10xer. Respect.

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