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The other side of it: some statements made internally can be really bad but employees brush over them because they inherently trust the speaker to some degree, they have additional material that better aligns with what they want to hear so they latch on the rest, and current leaders' actions look fine enough to them so they see the bad parts as just communication mishaps.

Until the tide turns.

Worse: employees are often actively deceived by management. Their “close relationship” is akin to that of a farmer and his herd. Convinced they’re “on the inside” they’re often blind to the truth that’s obvious from the outside.

Or simply they don’t see the whole picture because they’re not customers or business partners.

I’ve seen Oracle employees befuddled to hear negative opinions about their beloved workplace! “I never had to deal with the licensing department!”

Okay, but I've also heard insiders at companies I've worked completely overlook obvious problems and cultural/management shortcomings issues. "Oh, we don't have a low-trust environment, it's just growing pains. Don't worry about what the CEO just said..."

Like, seriously, I've seen first-hand how comments like this can be more revealing out of context than in context, because the context is all internal politics and spin.

> Btw Sam has tweeted about an open source model. Stay tuned... https://x.com/sama/status/1932573231199707168

Sneaky wording but seems like no, Sam only talked about "open weights" model so far, so most likely not "open source" by any existing definition of the word, but rather a custom "open-but-legal-dept-makes-us-call-it-proprietary" license. Slightly ironic given the whole "most HN posters are confidently wrong" part right before ;)

Although I do agree with you overall, many stories are sensationalized, parts-of-stories always lack a lot of context and large parts of HN users comments about stuff they maybe don't actually know so much about, but put in a way to make it seem so.

There are ten measures by which a model can/should be open:

1. The model code (pytorch, whatever)

2. The pre-training code

3. The fine-tuning code

4. The inference code

5. The raw training data (pre-training + fine-tuning)

6. The processed training data (which might vary across various stages of pre-training and fine-tuning)

7. The resultant weights blob

8. The inference inputs and outputs (which also need a license; see also usage limits like O-RAIL)

9. The research paper(s) (hopefully the model is also described in literature!)

10. The patents (or lack thereof)

A good open model will have nearly all of these made available. A fake "open" model might only give you two of ten.

Open weights is unobjectionable. You do get a lot.

It's nice to also know what the training data is, and it's even nicer to be aware of how it's fine-tuned etc., but at least you get the architecture and are able to run it as you like and fine tune it further as you like.

> Open weights is unobjectionable

Yeah? Try me :)

> but at least you get the architecture and are able to run it as you like and fine tune it further as you like.

Sure, that's cool and all, and I welcome that. But it's getting really tiresome of seeing huge companies who probably depend on actual FOSS to constantly get it wrong, which devalues all the other FOSS work going on, since they wanna ride that wave, instead of just being honest with what they're putting out.

If Facebook et al could release compiled binaries from closed source code but still call those binaries "open source", and call the entire Facebook "open source" because of that, they would. But obviously everyone would push back on that, because that's not what we know open source to be.

Btw, you don't get to "run it as you like", give the license + acceptable use a read through, and then compare to what you're "allowed" to do compared to actual FOSS licenses.

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

This is so true. And not confined to HN.

I agree with the sentiment.

Having been behind the scenes of HN discussion about a security incident, with accusations flying about incompetent developers, the true story was the lead developers new of the issue, but it was not prioritised by management and pushed down the backlog in place of new (revenue generating) features.

There is plenty of nuance to any situation that can't be known.

No idea if the real story here is better or worse than the public speculation though.

> I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public.

To most people I'd think this is mainly for entertainment purposes ie 'palace intrique' and the actual facts don't even matter.

> The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context.

That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).

> What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident.

What conclusions exactly? Again do most people really care about this (reading the story) and does it impact them? My guess is it doesn't at all.

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in.

This is a well known trope and is discussed in other forms ie 'NY Times story is wrong move to the next story and you believe it' ie: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

> coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true

My profile is trivially connected to my real identity, I am not anonymous here.

How is it trivially connected to your real identity exactly?

I am not seeing how it is at all.

> That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).

Not only that, but how can we know if his interpretation or "feelings" about these discussions are accurate? How do we know he isn't looking through rose-tinted glasses like the Neumann believers at WeWork? OP isn't showing the missing discussion, only his interpretation/feelings about it. How can we know if his view of reality is accurate and unbiased? Without seeing the full discussion and judging for ourselves, we can't.

> How can we know if his view of reality is accurate and unbiased? Without seeing the full discussion and judging for ourselves, we can't.

I agree with that of course.

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

Some topics (and some areas where one could be an expert in) are much more prone to this phenomenon than others.

Just to give a specific example that suddenly comes to my mind: Grothendieck-style Algebraic Geometry is rather not prone to people confidently posting wrong stuff about on HN.

Generally (to abstract from this example [pun intended]): I guess topics that

- take an enormous amount of time to learn,

- where "confidently bullshitting" will not work because you have to learn some "language" of the topic very deeply

- where even a person with some intermediate knowledge of the topic can immediately detect whether you use the "'grammar' of the 'technical language'" very wrongly

are much more rarely prone to this phenomenon. It is no coincidence that in the last two points I make comparisons to (natural) languages: it is not easy to bullshit in a live interview that you know some natural language well if the counterpart has at least some basic knowledge of this natural language.

I think its more the site's architecture that promotes this behavior.

In the offline world there is a big social cost to this kind of behavior. Platforms haven't been able to replicate it. Instead they seem to promote and validate it. It feeds the self esteem of these people.

It's hard to have an informed opinion on Algebraic Geometry (requires expertise) and not many people are going to upvote and engage with you about it either. It's a lot easier to have an opinion on tech execs, current events, and tech gossip. Moreover you're much more likely to get replies, upvotes, and other engagement for posting about it.

There's a reason politics and tech gossip are where most HN comments go these days. This is a pretty mainstream site.

> There's a reason politics and tech gossip are where most HN comments go these days. This is a pretty mainstream site.

HN is the digital water cooler. Rumors are a kind of social currency, in the capital sense, in that it can be leveraged and has a time horizon for value of exchange, and in the timeliness/recency biased sense, as hot gossip is a form of information that wants to be free, which in this context means it has more value when shared, and that value is tapped into by doing so.

I too worked at a place where hot button issues were being leaked to international news.

Leaks were done for a reason. either because they agree with the leak, really disagree with the leak, or want to feel big because they are a broker of juicy information.

Most of the time the leaks were done in an attempt to stop something stupid from happening, or highlight where upper management were making the choice to ignore something for a gain elsewhere.

Other times it was there because the person was being a prick.

Sure its a tiny part of the conversation, but in the end, if you've got the point where your employees are pissed off enough to leak, that's the bigger problem.

I totally agree that most articles (pretty much all news/infotainment) is devoid of any information.

At the same time all I need to know about Sam is in the company/"non-profit's" name, which is in itself is now simply a lie.

This is a strangely defensive comment for a post that, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to say anything particularly damning. The fact that you're rushing to defend your CEO sort of proves the point being made, clearly you have to make people believe they're a part of something bigger, not just pay them a lot.

The only obvious critique is that clearly Sam Altman doesn't believe this himself. He is legendarily mercenary and self serving in his actions to the point where, at least for me, it's impressive. He also has, demonstrably here, created a culture where his employees do believe they are part of a more important mission and that clearly is different than just paying them a lot (which of course, he also does).

I do think some skepticism should be had around that view the employees have, but I also suspect that was the case for actual missionaries (who of course always served someone else's interests, even if they personally thought they were doing divine work).

The headline makes it sound like he's angry that Meta is poaching his talent. That's a bad look that makes it seem like you consider your employees to be your property. But he didn't actually say anything like that. I wouldn't consider any of what he said to be "slams," just pretty reasonable discussion of why he thinks they won't do well.

I'd say this is yet another example of bad headlines having negative information content, not leaks.

With no dogs in the fight, the very fact he's talking to his employees about a competitor's hiring practices is noteworthy.

The delivery of the message can be milder and better than how it sounds in the chosen bits, but the overall picture kinda stays the same.

To me, there’s an enormous difference between “they pay well but we’re going to win the race” and “my employees belong to me and they’re stealing my property.”

Notably, I don’t see him condemning Meta’s “poaching” here, just commenting on it. Compare this with, for example, Steve Jobs getting into a fight with Adobe’s CEO about whether they’d recruit each other’s employees or consider them to be off limits.

I've experienced that. Absolutely.

But I've also experienced that the outside perspective, wrong as it may be on nearly all details, can give a dose of realism that's easy to brush aside internally.

Sounds like someone is upset they didn't get poached.

Your comment comes across dangerously close to sounding like someone that has drunk the kool-aid and defends the indefensible.

Yes, you can get the wrong impression from hearing just a snippet of a conversation, but sometimes you can hear what was needed whether it was out of context or not. Sam is not a great human being to be placed on a pedestal that never needs anything he says questioned. He's just a SV CEO trying to keep people thinking his company is the coolest thing. Once you stop questioning everything, you're in danger of having the kool-aid take over. How many times have we seen other SV CEOs with a "stay tuned" tweet that they just hope nobody questions later?

>if you had actually been in the room for more of the conversation you'd probably feel different

If you haven't drunk the kool-aid, you might feel differently as well.

SAMA doesn't need your assistance white knighting him on the interwebs.

Technically, after being labelled a missionary you can't really blame people for spreading the word of the almighty.

Little Miyazaki knock offs posting on the Nazi Hellsite former known as Twitter isn't really helping how the "public" feels about OAI either.