Greg (2017)
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
Even though he was CTO and incredibly busy, he would find time to spend with individual engineers. Once he spent an hour pair-programming with me on a difficult issue. Even though his time was obviously not spent coding (and hadn't for years), it was a very productive session.
The founder acknowledge he really couldn't have done it without him, or someone like him on the team. I 100% agree they couldn't have built the org without him. He is just on a different level and it was awesome seeing him in action.
I really doubt it
Yo, bro what up. Want to grab lunch?
Above all else, what you need to build competitive models is a huge amount of money and access to compute. Money alone doesn't solve that either due to the global hardware shortage. You are competing for a globally limited pool of hardware with all other companies.
This means to do the right thing at Google would require fighting battles on all sorts of fronts as established mini empires within attempt to latch on to this new perceived opportunity to expand.
Determining what the right thing is the hard part. Unfortunately that’s also the case right now at OpenAI.
Nah Sam will just use GPT4 to code his vision. That's how it works now, we've been told.
OAI still have people who are true leaders in this deeply technical space - I don't see research wins going to a competitor unless they cultivate similar talent at the top.
It's also possible that Altman was privy to a breakthrough which makes it possible for him to execute from scratch on the AGI goal without a strong research org.
It's all speculation :)
Seems like he's always considered this a good measure of a founder's quality.
From a 2019 interview- https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-altman/
> You know, years ago I wrote a little program to look at this, like how quickly our best founders — the founders that run billion-plus companies — answer my emails versus our bad founders. I don’t remember the exact data, but it was mind-blowingly different. It was a difference of minutes versus days on average response times
Whether these people ultimately improve society, or create a better sense of purpose for their employees, or provide visionary direction for the company at a higher rate than other founders is kind of orthogonal (or perhaps anticorrelated) to being good stewards of invested capital.
Founders can, to some extent, get help with (or succeed financially despite the lack of) the other things, but I think it can be reasonably argued that if they're not personally regarded as good stewards of capital, then the whole enterprise is in doubt.
I'm pretty sure I have a completely different opinion on what constitutes a good founder and what constitutes a bad one compared to Sam Altman, fortunately I don't have enough clout to make authoritative statements on the subject.
It remains plausible that the connection is neither causal nor spurious, but after the announcement of the correlation, the correlation becomes useless
Responsiveness as a general approach to all email is a bad idea. But one needs to know who are the high-priority emailers, and how much they value quick replies.
If you can answer every mail in minutes from important people, then how can you meaningfully do other stuff?
It's perfectly fine to spend a day without answering to the head of YC if you've had the entire day full at hiring, talking to investors, etc. You can't do that effectively and be distracted by your phone all time.
This is about the nature of emails themselves, if they conveyed a more urgent information then a phone call would've been better.
I think the differentiator is that some people can and do remain effective at a primary task while handling a multitude of distractions, and that this trait strongly indicates high ability overall.
You're not entirely focused if you're answering emails on your phone.
Maybe Greg's 50% focus is still good enough for answering to Altman and doing other stuff? It's still giving 50% to both or a different mix.
It's also disrespectful if you're with other people imho.
Anyway my main point is that if you're expecting people to answer you urgently, don't write them an email but find a better channel.
Apple has context-specific notifications and manual DnD exception list.
Short iOS email VIP list can be manually curated.
Interrupt-automation exists to support a spectrum of human priorities and workflows.
Eg you’d expect a CEO to enter a meeting, receive a variety of reports from their staff and make a final call or two — and then moving onto another meeting in an entirely different domain — and do so fluidly without interruption.
Which would make it a lot easier to be readily available for ad-how things like emails. Though 5-minutes feels a little much.
It's speculated Sam Altman and Greg Brockman may start a new AI company.
So now seems like a good time to mention a few very high-level points in case they read it:
1. I love Sam Altman's ship early and often inclinations, even if that apparently got him fired. OpenAI was such a breath of fresh air compared to sclerotic companies like Google that can invent the Transformer architecture yet be organizationally incapable of shipping ChatGPT-level tools for years due to overly conservative safety concerns
2. I hate OpenAI (or Sam Altman's?) apparently puritanical inclination to anything considered Not Safe For Work, especially for paid API usage. Why not allow people to build and sell virtual partner chat bots with explicit NSFW content?
3. I dislike his apparent inclination to build a regulatory moat to block others from developing advanced AI -- it's easy to interpret this as purely in the self-interest of OpenAI shareholders
Without Sam Altman's inclination to move fast I imagine OpenAI may become slow, sclerotic and less capable of shipping early, like what Google has become.
Good luck Sam, and keep on shipping!
1. They couldn't fire him as an employee (or felt it was an overreach of their mandate)
2. They wanted to signal a clear distinction that they lost faith in him as Chairman, while not losing faith in his work as an employee.
3. They felt like it would play better with the company if his ultimate departure was his decision rather than theirs.
4. Mira, as the new acting CEO (and someone who had nothing to do with the actions), declined to fire him even though she knew it was ultimately futile.
The board may know something nobody else does, but I think (given the current information) it's significantly more likely that they _are_ who they purport to be... it's just that the board wanted something different.
I don't think that is either's fault, the US is just very puritan and a lot of it is because credit card companies and banks don't like it.
> it's easy to interpret this as purely in the self-interest of OpenAI shareholders
My guess is that this is probably what the board didn't like, Altman focused too much on profits in various ways.
AI doesn’t. Image generators know what naked people look like, and they know what children look like. And they’re really good at mashing ideas together like that.
Text generators will happily compose any scenario for you.
I’m not here to argue ethics, but it’s easy to see why a nsfw open ai would immediately run into major problems.
Even it seems Patreon (which I've actually heard it described as an "NSFW launderer") -- is fundamentally built upon interactions with credit card and banks.
I don't know how true it is, but I've read that payment processors like Visa and Mastercard are actually agnostic -- it's the high-rates of chargebacks that they have a problem with.
> GitHub Copilot has reportedly been costing Microsoft up to $80 per user per month in some cases as the company struggles to make its AI assistant turn a profit.
> According to a Wall Street Journal report, the figures reportedly come from an unnamed individual familiar with the company, who noted that the Microsoft-owned platform was losing an average of $20 per user per month in the first few months of 2023.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-is-reportedly-losing...
It is a non-profit after all, who owns a for-profit company. I'm just trying to imagine how the board sees it.
Ilya is the technical mastermind behind OAI. The technical breakthroughs needed for AGI are not there yet. Ilya, Yann, Demis and many others are aware of it.
An aggressive push for applied research and commercialisation means less resources for technical breakthroughs.
This is a tricky situation.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811403
I'm certain of this though... when Greg Brockman walked out the door, they lost a major piece of talent.
That guy was a true believer. His enthusiasm was infectious. It traveled across the video link... You could feel how passionate he was about the future of artificial intelligence and it's capacity to change humanity for the better.
I'm sure he'll throw himself at something very cool for the next run.
OpenAI wouldn’t have happened without Greg. He commits quickly and fully to a fellow bro, and I fully trust that when the board of director dickheads fire me, Greg will dutifully bail within a day or two.
One of the first startups I joined, I remember the engineers would routinely stay late and get shit down. The COO would made sure food was ordered (dietary needs were meet), cleaned up and made sure the gears stayed oiled. This significantly helped moral.
Honestly I don’t understand the drama around 2 executives who have not done any transformer research or whatever will come after transformers
The GenAI world will be fine without the ceo of cryptoballs or whatever his other company is
I feel like this is a point that is not being talked about enough. Yes, OpenAI gave us GPT and DALL-E. But had sama and gdb remained there, would we have gotten anything new that is as groundbreaking as the original GPT and DALL-E, or would we have continued getting GPT-12 and DALL-E-19? Sure, iPhone 15 sells, but some may say Apple has stagnated since iPhone was released.
I'd argue right now that we're at the "iPhone 3G" point on the technology curve, with significant improvements to come over the next few years as the tech gets polished.
OpenAI was releasing innovations in the GenAI space at a breakneck pace. Remember, GPT-1 didn't change the world, it was GPT-3.5/4 from earlier this year. OpenAI was at peak innovation when sama and gdb left.
And folks used to say Apple was stagnant, but after Apple Silicon completely upended the personal computer world (along with some other things) the dissidents have been mostly silent.
How did it upend the personal computer world? Apple's chip developments are an amazing technological achievement, but they don't have anything innovative to put them in. Apple slaps them in grossly thermally limited form factors, where the chips can't operate anywhere close to their capability. It's kind of a silly exercise, in my opinion. At the end of the day, Apple has made the same computers, phones, and tablets for the past 10 years. I'm not sure where the innovation is.
Checks temp of iMac, while encoding video and maxing all cores.... nope.
And, outside of the Cynicism-Is-Intelligence hackernews crowd, basically everyone has been fawning over the breakneck speed of progress coming out of OpenAI, even at the recent OpenAI devdays.
So while Greg's work would have been extremely valuable, it's value is on a lesser order of magnitude than many of the other researchers and engineers who OpenAI had collected into its ranks. More essential innovative value will be lost to the bleed of loyalists and startup bettors who will peel off from those ranks.
That's not necessarily true for (say) the rare high-end graphics board you use for running local inferences. It's also expensive -- even less expensive than the car -- but replacing it can be a bigger deal and cause a complete interruption.
There are countless experienced late-career generalists who can keep projects moving by contributing to critical, smart support. I'm one of them. We're extremely valuable indeed.
But there really are far fewer people who were ahead of the curve and years-deep into the AI research central to OpenAI's entire existence. Those people are beyond critical, they're essential.
That doesn't make them better people, or smarter people, or in any other way elite. It just means that in the context of OpenAI those people are much harder to come by and can be much more disruptive when lost.
The founding team does however bring tactical experience that is (maybe) unmatched. They also have experience solving problems that turn cutting edge AI models into usable products. It's easy to devalue non research contributions, but they have legitimate value and are instrumental in OpenAIs success.
I’ll stick to celebrating the actual brains, like Ilya Sutskever.
https://impossiblehq.com/well-see/ (or google "we'll see story")
Is that supposed to make him look good? Because it doesn't, in fact it makes him look very out of touch at best and a complete fool at worst.
Not trying to subvert this thread. Do we think that cash will still exist in 50 years time? Assuming we don't, how will it work.
He had a thought (maybe crazy) and went with it. I respect that, irrespective if we think it was correct or not.
Here's a video on explaining how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
And here's a video explaining what's wrong with the scheme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
But the TLDW version is that environment required for fusing He3 with deuterium also leads to deuterium fusing with itself, a reaction that creates neutron radiation that irradiates its environment.
What is the issue, as long as the containment containers are properly designed?
Long story short: Helion plans a net-electricity demo in 2024 and to start selling to the grid in 2028. The timeline seems too good to be true but no one says it's impossible. Many says they have not enough publications and that there are many scientific unknowns. Failure is a possibility, success also. Given the timeline we'll know soon.
Btw, the first result in the search you posted links back to the video...
https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/133ttne/can_we_talk...
So we have "handing out money," OpenAI, a typical fusion outfit (breakeven next year, every year), and a cryptocurrency that has already been chased out of the one country that tried to adopt it.
I like Sam Altman and he seems to be a genuine person with laudable goals, but OpenAI is the only place where he really seemed to deliver, and even then there are a lot of people unhappy with the non-profit/private subsidiary surprise structure.
I haven't read any of his blogs and thought "wow, how insightful?" - rather, they read similar to press releases I see constantly on LinkedIn. "You have to put something out there" type of stuff. Just doing it to do it, not to share insight.
That's my take, anyway, from basically all I've seen of him, and this gives a "not special" vibe, but my gut tells me that's very, very intentional ...
With an extra dash of unctuousness that actually repels me.
Maybe he also has a "reality distortion field" that only works up close, and I never came near.