Hacker News Reader

Comment by machdiamonds | Hacker News Reader

Leave it to HN to be negative about a team going from nothing to training a model competitive with a world class lab like Meta in 4 months.

View on HN

There is a lot of prior, better (and open source) work at this point, so "going from nothing to [Grok.ai]" in 4 months doesn't mean much. The training process is hardly a mystery in 2023, now it just requires money and compute and human hours.

I applaud them for getting it out the door, though.

You don’t get points for showing up late to a race

Have you ever heard of Google Chrome? It showed up pretty late to the browser race.

In the tech world, just like in most other sectors, you don't get points for showing up early to a race; you get them for crossing the finish line, sometimes years after the race began.

Google Chrome showed up late, but paid off the crowd and judges to win.

? Chrome shipped with a fast JS JIT, simplified UI, per-process isolation. Acting like you had to pay someone to perceive a superior user benefit to Firefox, which at the time would crash and you'd like all your tabs, is ridiculously ahistorical.

You must have forgotten how they paid to put it in just about every installer, selected by default, and pushed it aggressively in every Google property. They may not have had to, but they used their monopoly position to cut the air off to every other browser. That's not ahistorical even if everyone seems to have forgotten.

We'll never know how things might have gone without that monopoly abuse. Maybe Mozilla would have had enough developers and testers to fix things without abandoning what made Firefox unique.

Not to mention they literally put it on billboards, in London at least. That was when I knew Firefox was, alas, not going to win.

Yeah, tough luck. Pretty much none of the companies that showed up first in the tech industry are still amongst the top 5-10 players today.

On the contrary, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, WhatsApp, Skype, Netflix and pretty much every single tech giant that enjoys a quasi monopoly over their market today, they all arrived pretty late. Not second to market, mind you. Waay late.

They didn't start from nothing. All the foundational work and numerous open source implementations are out there for anyone to study.

Plus they had Elon's wallet backing them... If I had billions of dollars in the bank and pulled up to a race in my 2002 Honda Accord and, after someone agreed to a race, quickly bought a Bugatti Chiron and paid to have it shipped to me before the race started, I wouldn't expect anyone would be impressed with my racing ability.

Please, this is the 2023 version of "view source / copy-paste" and add a little nonsense from some bored developers.

If you don't give it 8-shots (lol) it performs like ass.

Literally able to replicate in 5 minutes with a chatgpt api key and a prompt. Why impressed?

So you can replicate the performance by... piggybacking on the current leader's infrastructure and APIs?

That really isn't impressive at all compared to replicating said infrastructure. Why would you even mention it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com