sama

we make a little money on it!

AI FTW!

(dang please don't ban me for a low-quality comment :) i couldn't resist but will not make it a habit!)

That was the specific inspiration, yes.

"Understand" is up for debate, but it's clearly learning something. The fact that it's possible to learn general structure as well as we can from unlabeled data does seem like a significant development.

I think people should be impressed, but also recognize the distance from here to AGI. It clearly has some capabilities that are quite surprising, and is also clearly missing something fundamental relative to human understanding.

It is difficult to define AGI, and it is difficult to say what the remaining puzzle piece are, and so it's difficult to predict when it will happen. But I think the responsible thing is to treat near-term AGI as a real possibility, and prepare for it (this is the OpenAI charter we wrote two years ago: https://openai.com/charter/).

I do think what is clear is that we are, in the coming years, going to have very powerful tools that are not AGI but that still change a lot of new things. And that's great--we've been waiting long enough for a new tech platform.

Thanks, but it's Sam McCandlish doing the demo (and the project).

The entire partnership is incredible and does a huge amount of valuable work, and startup advising, that they don't get nearly enough credit for.

I'll still be involved (and will ensure we continue to take risks and grow!), and obviously Michael is amazing.

added as a footnote

I also wrote this, which I think counting reprints is my most-read blog post ever:

https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...

The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks.

Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(

It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible.

I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.

I just re-read this for the first time in years--it needs a re-write. I will try!

But first this has inspired me to get to work on the forgotten Part II.

rigged IMO

We are playing with regular couriers for the first time! And against a pro team.

You are comparing startups at the end of 3 months of intensive work to ones at the beginning. They're totally different.

It never stops being amazing to watch a team go from an idea to a profitable, fast-growing business in 3 months.

Update: we will have something to share tonight, and I think people will be pretty happy :)

We feel awful about this and we're working on a solution. We'll have more to share in the next 24 hours, hopefully sooner.

Edit: ok, here's what we've got: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17806459.

It's definitely an area where we will have to tread carefully, and the concerns are for sure real. It was important to us to find an extremely ethically aligned leader.

However, I think it's easy to fall into a trap of assuming that everything about China (or any other culture) is worse just because it's different. My experience in China, and talking to Chinese people about their experiences in China, has been very different than what I assumed it would be.

We fund startups all around the world! In the rare cases where a founder is unable to get a US visa for the duration of our program, we are open to doing something remote. We offer a lot of help figuring out the US visa system, which is in my opinion extremely sub-optimal. I believe talent is equally distributed in the world, and the US should want as many talented founders to come create businesses here as possible.

China is an especially interesting market to us given the quality of companies and entrepreneurs we see there.

I am interested in trying some version of this! Have been thinking about all the edge cases.

I am happy to help, and honestly if I had more time right now I'd take this on directly--right now is an unusually busy time for me. I agree with you it's critical to Silicon Valley.

I worry about that. It would be a devastating blow to the country if the next wave of technology doesn't happen here.

I'd guess about 5 founders emailed me, and I always assume that indicates there are a lot more who don't.

I can't believe I have to say this given everything I've written on the subject (here is the first thing: http://blog.samaltman.com/trump) , but I don't support Trump in any way.

My point in the parent-linked article is just that Trump beat us using our own playbook, and shame on us if we don't notice that and adjust for next time.

I said later in the article I thought Trump was a bad outcome of the effects of technology.

I think that our side should be ashamed we got beat with out own playbook and not let it happen again.

I also think if we don't realize what happened, we will not win future elections. So I hope we learn this very painful lesson soon.

I could just refuse to comment for these articles, but I'm more interested in us winning elections in the future than not facing criticism. It's important to me to engage and point out what I think is important.

For sure it's easier for me than almost anyone else to recruit a cofounder, but I think (hope) the observations about important traits to look for are helpful more generally.

I am planning to cover both of those!

Here's more info: https://blog.ycombinator.com/onlineclass/

Bug fix: in an earlier version I used 12.5% and 20% as the rough targets for seed and A rounds. Then I decided to switch to 10-15% and 15-25% ranges. Somehow that change only partially got made, indicating 10% and 15-25%. Now it's fixed.

I love typography too! I really do. This is my one sin in the field...

Thanks! Will add this in next time. Plenty of misses to write about!