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Comment by Version467 | Hacker News Reader

Must've been a difficult decision with him being a cofounder and all, but afaik he's been the highest ranked safety minded person at openai. He says it's not because openai leadership isn't committed to safety, but I'm not sure I buy that. We've seen numerous safety people leave exactly because of that reason.

What makes this way more interesting to me though is how this announcement coincides with Brockmans sabbatical. Maybe there's nothing to it, but I find it more likely that things really aren't going well with sama.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out and if he actually returns next year or if this is just a soft quitting announcement.

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Th reality is that every other person in tech now is hoping for Sama to fail. The world doesn't need AI to have a silicon valley face. Anthropic is doing a much, much better PR work by not having a narcissist as CEO.

Contrarily, I think the reality is that most of us couldn't care less about this AI soap opera.

I want the best model at the lowest rate (and preferably lowest energy expenditure) and with the easiest access. Anything else is just background noise.

Some people are wary of enabling ceos of disruptive technologies become the richest people in the world, take control of key internet assets and -- in random bursts of thin-skinned megalomania -- tilt the scales towards politicians or political groups who take action that negatively affect their own quality of life.

It sounds absurd, but some are watching such a procession take place live as we speak.

I still haven't seen it do anything actually interesting. Especially when you consider that you have fact check the AI.

It spends money really well.

I'm continously baffled by such comments. Have you really tried? Especially newer models like Claude 3.5?

I have, yeah.

Still useless for my day to day coding work.

Most useful for whipping up a quick bash or Python script that does some simple looping and file io.

To be fair, LLMs are pretty good natural language search engines. Like when I'm looking for something in an API that does something I can describe in natural language, but not succinctly enough to show up in a web search, LLMs are extremely handy, at least when they don't just randomly hallucinate the API. On the other hand I think this is more of a condemnation of the fact that search tech has not 'really' meaningfully advanced beyond where it was 20 years ago, more than it is a praise of LLMs.

> LLMs are extremely handy, at least when they don't just randomly hallucinate

I work in tech and it’s my hobby, so that’s what a lot of my googling goes towards.

LLMs hallucinate almost every time I ask them anything too specific, which at this point in my career is all I’m really looking for. The time it takes for me to realize an llm is wrong is usually not too bad, but it’s still time I could’ve saved by googling (or whatever trad search) for the docs or manual.

I really wish they were useful, but at least for my tasks they’re just a waste of time.

I really like them for quickly generating descriptions for my dnd settings, but even then they sound samey if I use them too much. Obviously they’d sound samey if I made up 20 at once too, but at that point I’m not really being helped or enhanced by using an LLM, it’s just faster at writing than I am.

I don't mean this as a slight, just an observation I have seen many times - people who struggle with utility from SOTA LLM's tend to not have spent enough time with them to feel out good prompting. In the same way that there is a skill for googling information, there is a skill for teasing consistent good responses from LLM's.

People also continue to use them as knowledge databases, despite that not being where they shine. Give enough context into the model (descriptions, code, documentation, ideas, examples) and have a dialog, that's where these strong LLMs really shine.

Summarizing, doc qa, and unstructured text ingestion are the killer features I’ve seen.

The 3rd one still being quite involved, but leaps and bounds easier than 5 years ago.

Why spend my time teasing and coaxing information out of a system which absolutely does make up nonsense when I can just read the manual?

I spent 2023 developing LLM powered chatbots with people who, purportedly, were very good at prompting, but never saw any better output than what I got for the tasks I’m interested in.

I think the “you need to get good at prompting” idea is very shallow. There’s really not much to learn about prompting. It’s all hacks and anecdotes which could change drastically from model to model.

None of which, from what I’ve seen, makes up for the limitations of LLM no matter how many times I try adding “your job depends on Formatting this correctly “ or reordering my prompt so that more relevant information is later, etc

Prompt engineering has improved RAG pipelines I’ve worked on though, just not anything in the realm of comprehension or planning of any amount of real complexity.

I hear a lot of people say good things about CoPilot too but I absolutely hate it. I have it enabled for some reason still, but it constantly suggests incorrect things. There has been a few amazing moments but man there is a lot of "bullshit" moments.

Even when we get a gen AI that exceeds all human metrics, there will 100% still be people who with a straight face will say "Meh, I tried it and found it be pretty useless for my work."

Your bar for interesting has to be insane then. What would you consider interesting if nothing from LLMs meets that bar?

For example there exist quite a lot of pure math papers that are so much deeper than basically every AI stuff that I have yet seen.

So if LLMs weren't surprising to you, it would imply you expected this. If you did, how much money did you make on financial speculation? It seems like being this far ahead should have made you millions even without a lot of starting capital (look at NVDA alone)

> So if LLMs weren't surprising to you, it would imply you expected this.

I do claim that I have a tendency to be quite right about the "technological side" of such topics when I'm interested in them. On the other hand, events turn out to be different because of "psychological effects" (let me put it this way: I have a quite different "technology taste" than the market average).

In the concrete case of LLMs: the psychological effect why the market behaved so much differently is that I believed that people wouldn't fall for the marketing and hype of LLMs and would consider the excessive marketing to be simply dupery. The surprise to me was that this wasn't what happened.

Concerning NVidia: I believed that - considering the insane amount of money involved - people/companies would write new languages and compilers to run AI code on GPUs (or other ICs) of various different suppliers (in particular AMD and Intel) because it is a dangerous business practice to make yourself dependent on a single (GPU) supplier. Even serious reverse-engineering endeavours for doing this should have paid off considering the money involved. I was again wrong about this. So here the surprise was that lots of AI companies made themselves so dependent on NVidia.

Seeing lots of "unconventional" things is very helpful for doing math (often the observations that you see are the start of completely new theorems). Being good at stock trading and investing in my opinion on the other hand requires a lot of "street smartness".

Re: NVIDIA. I wholeheartedly agree. Google/TPU is an existence proof that it is entirely possible and rational to do so. My surprise was that everyone except Google missed.

Okay so $0 it sounds like, you should figure out a way to monetize your future sight otherwise it comes off as cynicism masquerading as intelligence

> cynicism masquerading as intelligence

Rather: cynicism and a form of intelligence that is better suited to abstract math than investing. :-)

I see it do a lot that's interesting but for programming stuff, I haven't found it to be particularly useful.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong?

I've been writing code for ~30 years, and I've built up patterns and snippets, etc... that are much faster for me to use than the LLMs.

A while ago, I thought I had a eureka moment with it when I had it generate some nodejs code for streaming a video file - it did all kinds of cool stuff, like implement offset headers and things I didn't know about.

I thought to myself, "self - you gotta check yourself, this thing is really useful".

But then I had to spend hours debugging & fixing the code that was broken in subtle ways. I ended up on google anyway learning all about it and rewrote everything it had generated.

For that case, while I did learn some interesting things from the code it generated, it didn't save me any time - it cost me time. I'd have learned the same things from reading an article or the docs on effective ways to stream video from the server, and I'd have written it more correctly the first go around.

then why are you reading hacker news comments about it?

I guess I have a masochistic streak.

I agree and I think that sane people will eventually prevail over the pathological narcissist.

Outlier success pretty much requires obsessive strategic thinking. Gates and Musk are super strategic but in a "weirdo autist" way, which doesn't have a big stigma attached to it anymore. Peter Thiel also benefits from his weirdness. Steve Jobs had supernatural charisma working in his favor. sama has the strategic instinct but not the charisma or disarming weirdness other tech founders have. Sama is not unusually Machiavellian or narcissistic, but he will get judged more harshly for it.

I think you are in one of the extreme bubbles. The general tech industry is not subscribed to the drama and has less personal feelings on individuals they do not directly know.

You are right. I should have said every other person (or every person) in HN.

Maybe the vocal minority that have a passionate dislike for someone they don't know?

It's not just the narcissist, it's the betrayal. The least open company possible. How did I end up cheering for Meta and Zuck?

What is a “Silicon Valley face? Does nvidia’s CEO have it? Google’s founders?

I guess anthropic’s founders don’t have it?

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