It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors.
About Shazeer, from the article:
Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often by a small number of experienced ‘magicians,’ to even show any signs of life,” says Uszkoreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery right away. He decided to write his own version of the transformer team’s code. “I took the basic idea and made the thing up myself,” he says. Occasionally he asked Kaiser questions, but mostly, he says, he “just acted on it for a while and came back and said, ‘Look, it works.’” Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” he had taken the system to a new level.
SiempreViernes 16 hours ago [-]
> Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,”
Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.
ahmadyan 14 hours ago [-]
As a hacker, I kinda like naom's code. I was had to implement a TC MoE kernel, and stumbled upon his code from [tensor2tensor](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor/blob/master/tens...) and i think "alchemy" is justified. Dude writes some beautiful kernels.
He also saw LLM would replace search before anyone else, and that is something to look at the Lamda or GPT-1's output and think: yeah this will answer all of our questions one day.
jvican 13 hours ago [-]
There's no doubt about Noam's abilities. But I read through that code, and struggle to see its 'magic' or 'alchemy'. Can you elaborate what you find especially good about that code? (You may assume GPU kernel programming knowledge on my end.)
dekhn 13 hours ago [-]
To me the magic Noam moment was when he came to my team and said "that cluster has a bad node in it, but this other one doesn't" and we had to spend like a week tracking down a single bad processor out of thousands.
jeswin 13 hours ago [-]
Unrelated to the particular code above. There's a difference between writing code about or adjacent to a proven idea vs writing code in uncharted territory. I suspect that is what happened here. It's the same thing with say music and art. A lot of people today can play Chuck Berry.
jvican 13 hours ago [-]
It's a good point. Though I do wonder if the magic he casted was more at the conceptual level (intense belief on a set of primitives that ought to work) more than the code itself. Even by 2018's standards, the Tensorflow code above doesn't really look that impressive. It's hard to judge based on those past standards, though. But, wonder if somebody who knows more than me can elaborate.
eli_gottlieb 13 hours ago [-]
Also, evaluating complicated functions with numerical stability and automatic differentiation is hard.
dang 15 hours ago [-]
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Does that apply to quotes from an article? They seemed to be criticizing a second or third degree source for being PR, which feels fair.
dang 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, in the sense that if there's nothing interesting to say about a quote then there's no reason to copy it into the thread.
jdkfmtlym 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nrds 14 hours ago [-]
And, of course, "interesting" means "interesting to dang"; whether apparently technical sources have apparently received PR training is therefore not "interesting". Drop the "my preferences are actually just objective truth" routine for once. Why is it so painful to admit you curate this site by preference?
dang 13 hours ago [-]
It's not a question of painful - I'm happy to "admit" what's true, as best I can, and not what's not true. Let's see if we can sort that out a bit in the present case.
HN is certainly curated - I've been "admitting" that since the day I got outed as a mod here:
But we try hard to do the curation by principle, not by personal whim. What principles? Really there's just one: intellectual curiosity—we try to feature what enhances that and dampen what degrades it [1]. From that starting point, though, you can derive lots of other principles. Probably the most important is that snark and indignation are bad for HN (especially in combination!) because they drown out curious conversation. That's all that you need to see why I posted that reply to the GP; no personal preference required.
The current case still seems very heavy on personal preference. Principles application is subjective as we are all human. I found the comment as interesting as the quote it is answering.
dang 12 hours ago [-]
It does seem more of a borderline case to me when I reread it, too.
nrds 10 hours ago [-]
> snark and indignation
These are preference-based but you're pretending they're objective. I find _your_ comments to be full of snark and indignation more than any you respond to, but of course you won't agree. (But because you don't agree, that makes me objectively wrong, I know.)
"Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences." - someone smarter than the average HN commenter.
ViktorRay 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve never seen any of the moderators here be snarky or indignant to anyone.
Do you have any specific examples of where dang or another moderator posted in that way?
tadfisher 9 hours ago [-]
Such a good quote, defending probably the last person on this Earth anyone would call "working class", including himself.
linschn 7 hours ago [-]
Bourdieu ?
jdkfmtlym 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
blahblahfugg 9 hours ago [-]
Mods routinely lie and ignore their own code of conduct, okay favorites, and act highly partisan. This site is far from any sort of meeting ground of ideas.its a narrowly tailored set of mostly statist propaganda.
jdkfmtlym 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
epihelix 13 hours ago [-]
The "bells and whistles" label sounds more dismissive / perjorative to me. An odd, and not a particularly nice, thing to say. Makes me wonder how the "magic" and "alchemy" terms were intended in this case, also.
chvid 10 hours ago [-]
If I use the words alchemy and magic about a piece of code, those are not flattering words.
gniv 24 hours ago [-]
Wow. What could possibly have caused him to quit so soon after coming back?
Thank you, I quit twitter 8 years ago and generally avoid twitter links.
Someone should write a bot to do this automatically. What is the HN policy on bots?
16 hours ago [-]
er4hn 18 hours ago [-]
signull is more of an anonymous sh*tposter than a known industry insider, but I think this does capture the sama contribution to OpenAI very well. At least from an outsider who follows this stuff based on vibes.
thewebguyd 18 hours ago [-]
That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture.
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
HDThoreaun 18 hours ago [-]
Google is facing a legitimate innovators dilemma here. It makes sense to have all this process when youre protecting a $4.5 trillion golden goose. The tragedy here is that one predictable outcome of this situation is google deciding to considerably cut research funding when they figure out it just serves to bootstrap future competitors.
eikenberry 18 hours ago [-]
This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.
pstuart 12 hours ago [-]
Or maybe just have your R&D teams focused on doing R&D with zero corporate interference. Staff it with personal assistants whose only job is to ensure the researchers have whatever they need and are never bothered with meetings or other corporate shenanigans. The assistants could then be the proxies to management to provide feedback to management, but only on best effort and still staying the fuck out of the way of the researchers.
Easy peasy!
ginko 17 hours ago [-]
Wasn't that what the whole Alphabet re-org was supposed to do?
breppp 17 hours ago [-]
Alphabet has Google with 99% of the profit through Ads, Search, Cloud, Gmail, Youtube etc
and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot
electriclove 18 hours ago [-]
Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.
whatever1 17 hours ago [-]
Google bloat gave us transformers. Apple bloat gave us a usable touchscreen only, pocket computer (famously an entire org within Apple had developed an iPod-based approach that was competing with what was released)
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
georgeven 7 hours ago [-]
innovation requires monopoly is a Theil one liner -- probably true too
lordfoom 17 minutes ago [-]
Probably not true
quentindanjou 17 hours ago [-]
I disagree. It's not about the culling, it has never been, and actually, it makes things worse. You spend countless hours and tons of money recruiting talented people not to lay them off because you don't want a bureaucratic org.
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)
zipy124 16 hours ago [-]
That depends who you are firing. There are many job roles who's primary output is meetings and documents.
What percentage of Google employees are engineers...
Herring 13 hours ago [-]
Is that you Musk? Twitter lost half its revenue, more than 80% of its valuation.
HDThoreaun 12 hours ago [-]
That was mostly because Elon told advertisers to fuck themselves at an advertising convention no?
nixon_why69 9 hours ago [-]
It's impossible to disambiguate but advertiser tools, brand safety, targeting, reporting etc all need a lot of ongoing effort. If it gets harder to advertise effectively on Twitter, those dollars can very easily go elsewhere.
afavour 12 hours ago [-]
Eh, what has X/Twitter delivered since the cull? It’s basically in maintenance mode. Which is fine if that’s what you want to do, but Google and Apple definitely don’t (and I’m glad for that)
tgma 11 hours ago [-]
> It’s basically in maintenance mode
Has been in more of a maintenance mode with a multiple of those people. If anything, the pace of the product has improved. Regardless of what you think about Musk, the company he bought was a bloated mess.
geori 12 hours ago [-]
He merged it with SpaceX, quickly created a few colossal datacenters for training runs and somehow turned that into a 3T company.
afavour 12 hours ago [-]
That has nothing to do with culling staff at Twitter though.
TiredOfLife 9 hours ago [-]
Working recommended feed
objclxt 16 hours ago [-]
> Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.
You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.
(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)
VirusNewbie 15 hours ago [-]
Google is competing with nvidia (TPU), AWS (GCP), Netflix (youtube), Tesla (waymo self driving), OpenAI (Gemini), Microsoft (Workspace), Apple (Android)....
esprehn 12 hours ago [-]
Apple was doing effectively everything on that list, though the self driving car was cancelled and the AI is now gemini.
VirusNewbie 11 hours ago [-]
Err, maybe some of those, but there's a reason Apple is using GCP and TPUs for training their custom gemini model.
UltraSane 11 hours ago [-]
"what Elon did with Twitter after taking over."
You mean fire the very smart people who designed the core systems AND insult them so that anyone with options would never want to work there?
rgreasons 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks for this. I will be thinking about “we can create a permission working group” for a long time.
Insanity 18 hours ago [-]
If I had to make a guess, money played a role lol.
karmasimida 17 hours ago [-]
He is close or already a billionaire, not sure much more money will be do much heavy-lifting
efficax 17 hours ago [-]
you'd be surprised! people seem to have a limitless appetite for that money stuff. they just can't get enough of it, i've found
tedd4u 15 hours ago [-]
I know some pretty wealthy people. They are very aware of those who are 10x wealthier than them. If Noam has 1B, he is probably pretty aware of those that have 10B. He's met them and seen their properties, scope, and powers. Likewise, they are thinking about those that have 100B, and those are thinking about Elon, who now has "four commas."
yablak 8 hours ago [-]
That's not really Noam's style
eloisant 15 hours ago [-]
Most are happy and stop at multimillionaires, but of course we don't hear about them. The focus on hungry billionaires is survivor bias.
We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.
petra 8 hours ago [-]
For many business people, money is just a measure of status after becoming rich.
Maybe Noam measures status differently.
VirusNewbie 15 hours ago [-]
How much money do you have? or are you just commenting from the peanut gallery?
efficax 13 hours ago [-]
i’ve got 300k in a 401k, 50k in cash and i earn 230k pretax. i’m not sure what the point of the question is tho
brcmthrowaway 7 hours ago [-]
You're doing well, but what of you want to buy a house?
peanuty1 12 hours ago [-]
He left Character.ai for money.
16 hours ago [-]
busymom0 17 hours ago [-]
This reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. I wish that show was rebooted, they'd have so much funny material nowadays.
swader999 15 hours ago [-]
I think real life has far eclipsed the absurdity of the original show. They might have a hard time competing with just the news now days.
cguess 15 hours ago [-]
Even back then Mike Judge said he had to tone down the absurdity he saw on fact-finding trips to Bay Area. He said no one would believe how absolutely stupid so much of all of it he saw was.
busymom0 15 hours ago [-]
Or they might give tech companies more ideas!
beng-nl 16 hours ago [-]
I loved that show. The love that went into it really shows.
Sadly the gap between reality and satire has shrunk.
But yes. I also wish that show would come back.
Noam shazeer would be google head dreamer
HarHarVeryFunny 16 hours ago [-]
The gap between reality and satire was apparently already very small back when the the show was written. The creator, Mike Judge (who also created Beavis & Butthead, and Idiocracy) had worked in Silicon Valley as a developer and based the show on what he saw. Apparently it was very popular with SV insiders precisely because it was so accurate.
dekhn 15 hours ago [-]
Judge also consulted with various teams at places like Google; I worked with one of the guys who provided details that later showed up on the show (as well as many plushies). He didn't watch the show because "it hit too close to home"
zipy124 16 hours ago [-]
And office space!
jmaw 17 hours ago [-]
Gilfoyle was really ahead of the times with Son of Anton.
tedd4u 15 hours ago [-]
Three comma guy would now be four comma guy
busymom0 14 hours ago [-]
Wonder what the modern version of the hotdog app would be?
tedd4u 13 hours ago [-]
Agent harness?
cubano 16 hours ago [-]
Your dream may be only a prompt away.
tyre 18 hours ago [-]
going to go with "money" and a lot of BS from altman
petilon 18 hours ago [-]
Noam Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. (From Wikipedia)
tmule 18 hours ago [-]
This understates his criticality. The author list was randomized, but the critical idea was truly his. Wonder what this says about GDM …
HarHarVeryFunny 17 hours ago [-]
The architecture was Shazeer's, but the rough idea came from Jakob Uszkoreit who initiated the project.
Uszkoreit wanted to build a more efficient/scalable language/seq2seq model that could take advantage of GPU parallelism (replacing RNNs which were the main approach to sequence modelling at that time).
Uszkoreit's insight was that although language appears sequential, it is in fact really part parallel part hierarchical, as can be seen by linguist's sentence parse trees where at each level there is parallelism/independence between the branches of the tree, with them getting combined at the next level up. This is what gave rise to the idea of a model that consisted of a stack of of parallel processing layers (transformer layers). I believe that attention was also part of the plan from day one, as this had already been proven to be valuable (Bahdanau) with RNN seq2seq modelling.
So, this is what Uszkoreit wanted to build, but by his own account he failed to come up with an implementation that matched or outperformed the prevailing RNN approach that he wanted to replace. At this point, Uszkoreit mentioned the idea to Shazeer, who got on board and eventually arrived at a performant architecture which was then pared back by an ablation process resulting in the initial encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Shazeer later came up with the mixture-of-experts architecture, and also other optimizations after he left to found character.ai
abixb 15 hours ago [-]
Curious about others' contributions, such as Vaswani, Parmar, Jones and Gomez, to the paper. What sucks about co-authorship in research papers is that you don't get a clean breakdown of who contributed what to the research paper, and the distribution (in more cases than not) is very much like a pareto distribution.
I'm talking from plenty of group project experience here.
senordevnyc 15 hours ago [-]
Can you expound on the ablation process? Is that referring to a stripping down of the data or weights or something? Or a stripping down of the transformer architecture structurally? Just curious
tedd4u 15 hours ago [-]
You train the model then do a baseline evaluation. Then you evaluate many variants where you have removed or nulled out different layers or chunks of the model. By comparing the performance of those mutated models to the baseline you can learn a lot about the model. What parts don't have much value and can be removed, the location of "functions" or "facts." Etc. Google it.
tintor 10 hours ago [-]
How come they didn’t ablate encoder? OpenAI GOT models are decoder only.
HarHarVeryFunny 34 minutes ago [-]
It was originally built as a general purpose sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model.
The research history leading up to this was interesting - there had been a bunch of work, in various domains, on "autoencoder" architectures used to learn compact representations for things like dimensionality reduction and sequence representation. The idea was to have an encoder-decoder pair, connected by a limited bottleneck representation, with the training goal of the decoder reconstructing the encoder input from the bottleneck representation.
One example of this was to learn a fixed size(!) sequence (e.g. sentence) representation using an LSTM-based autoencoder (LSTM->embedding->LSTM), which at the time seemed rather shocking - the ability to represent a variable length sequence with a fixed size embedding. Equally shocking was that you could use this for machine translation simply by connecting an LSTM encoder for one language to an LSTM decoder for another language.
This type of LSTM->LSTM seq2seq encode-decode architecture for machine translation was then improved by Bahdanau by replacing the fixed size representation with an attention mechanism so the decoder could learn to be more specific about input-output relationships.
This type of LSTM-based seq2seq encode-decode architecture, using attention, is what Uszkoreit et al set out to improve - to make more efficient by using a parallel vs sequential (RNN) architecture. The Transformer was never conceived of as purely for language modelling, or as an "AI" architecture. Later when the usage focused on language modelling (generation, not translation), the encoder was dropped since input and output are the same thing.
mike_hearn 7 hours ago [-]
If you read the Wired article linked elsewhere on this thread, then it explains that. The work was being done by people from the Google Translate team.
flebron 17 hours ago [-]
Source for this? The notion of attention dates to a content-addressable lookup during sequence alignment (as well as, concurrently, memory lookups in neural Turing machines). Attention had been used in other models, like GRUs and LSTMs with attention. The Vaswani et. al. paper did not introduce attention, just removed everything _but_ attention (and FFW) from the network. Are you claiming the "critical idea" of removing the GRU and LSTM parts and just keeping attention was "truly" Noam's?
daemonologist 16 hours ago [-]
At some point in late 2017 the paper was updated with this additional detail:
Equal contribution. Listing order is random. Jakob proposed replacing RNNs with self-attention and started the effort to evaluate this idea. Ashish, with Illia, designed and implemented the first Transformer models and has been crucially involved in every aspect of this work. Noam proposed scaled dot-product attention, multi-head attention and the parameter-free position representation and became the other person involved in nearly every detail. Niki designed, implemented, tuned and evaluated countless model variants in our original codebase and tensor2tensor. Llion also experimented with novel model variants, was responsible for our initial codebase, and efficient inference and visualizations. Lukasz and Aidan spent countless long days designing various parts of and implementing tensor2tensor, replacing our earlier codebase, greatly improving results and massively accelerating our research.
In any case, if the authors considered their contributions equal, that's good enough for me.
tmule 15 hours ago [-]
Thanks - wanted to point to this, and indeed should have worded my claim more precisely. And yes, am aware of prior work on attention.
(I need to look it up, but I recall Noam saying publicly that he wouldn’t have agreed to random ordering of contributions if he knew this was going to be this big).
mi_lk 17 hours ago [-]
I don't know we can just say things now. Ah we're on the internet
dyauspitr 13 hours ago [-]
That’s not true. Jakob, Ashish and Ilia for the core idea and initial implementation and Noam for several critical details on implementation.
d4rkp4ttern 17 hours ago [-]
Is this a generally well known thing?
tmule 15 hours ago [-]
Nope, but it’s not particularly unknown either. It shouldn’t be a surprise; he had remarkable research contributions before and after (separately, he was also an IMO gold medalist).
markdown 17 hours ago [-]
Even more important, I wonder what it says about HBW...
khazhoux 17 hours ago [-]
Even if we knew, we’d still fail to understand GHO
fastball 17 hours ago [-]
But more importantly the impact this has on TLAs
ltononro 33 minutes ago [-]
I wonder about the motivation to switch teams.
What has Google done wrong? Was he tired?
He could retire, open his own lab, raise capital.
So many opportunities, why go to OpenAI?
Folks talking about the amount of money paid, wasnt he the guy that was acqhired for billions? would OAI pay billions (basically to google) to get him?
gzer0 17 hours ago [-]
Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.”
He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead.
Now he’s leaving Google again for OpenAI.
Exciting times!
nl 13 hours ago [-]
For context, the reason he left Google the first time was because Google wouldn't ship the chatbot-type products that he saw were possible.
Google bought him back (with lots of money) and made him one of the leads of Gemini.
paulmist 16 hours ago [-]
I first saw Noam on Dwarkesh’s podcast together with Jeff Dean. Recommend if you want a taste of what’s Google’s folks take on things.
At this point is it even pay that’s tempting or is it more about what they get to do? I would assume Google could easily pay them what openAI can, unless as an older company it’s harder for Google to match something really out there
p1necone 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah my current feeling is that once I had double digit millions earning further money would be pretty meaningless to me, and the difference between 'large salary' and 'even larger salary' would be even more meaningless, but who knows maybe it really would change me. I kind of assume people like this are primarily chasing the most interesting/impactful work though.
nrds 14 hours ago [-]
The problem with this belief is that it implies that all of bigtech is massively overpaying for top talent who would happily stay on for pennies. While bigtech overpaying talent is more plausible than any other bigcorp doing so, it's still rather unlikely.
chaos_emergent 12 hours ago [-]
I think money’s marginal utility just changes from a vehicle for material comfort to a way to keep score.
gwern 12 hours ago [-]
Only if there was a cartel which would agree to never outbid each other, of course... You can ask Steve Jobs about that one.
zaat 15 hours ago [-]
It gets to the point where what you do is the main question while payment is barely a minor concern way earlier than that point, at least in my experience. You don't need to be in the top AI research tier for that.
dudus 16 hours ago [-]
How can an acquired dude leave after less than 2 years?
mikeyouse 15 hours ago [-]
OpenAI pays for the earn out he would’ve otherwise received at Google + a new comp package. Made up numbers, if Google still owed him $10M for lasting the full two years, OpenAI can just pay him market rate +$10M.
deadbabe 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, but what about the audacity of it? Get paid a lot to join a company but then decide to get up and leave again 2 years later? He just wants to be passed around?
mlmonkey 13 hours ago [-]
There's a possibility that he lost out in internal political battles, and things weren't going his way. Google is full of battle-hardened political warriors who will do anything (subterfuge, sabotage, etc.) to win battles. It is possible that a guy who just wants to build cool shit would feel like a misfit in such an environment.
fsuts 6 hours ago [-]
But he worked there previously and is Intelligent so knew all that before rejoining?
mikeyouse 15 hours ago [-]
You can have character and be loyal to Google (lol) or make $xx million… I’m not surprised when people choose the latter.
quantumink 15 hours ago [-]
I would argue its not the millions though, but rather that sweet rare compute - OpenAI has more of it for his interests than anyone - it is understandable why an exceptional mind would prioritize access to greater capabilities above all else
drevil-v2 14 hours ago [-]
Oh my goodness think of the poor multi-trillion dollar company!! No honour among thieves these days...
ddmma 16 hours ago [-]
Hopefully will get to the conclusion that "Hopfield Networks is All You Need"
cubefox 16 hours ago [-]
> Exciting times!
What is exiting about this?
kkotak 15 hours ago [-]
Right?! Unless you think this move is going to generate general excitement in our lives, it's just another rich guy moving from one high paying job to another.
dude250711 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe he figured out a good way to short AI companies?
Why shouldn't the court entertain it? If Character is innocent, shouldn't they have the opportunity to have the accusations disproven?
applfanboysbgon 16 hours ago [-]
The case is so blatantly frivolous it should have been thrown out. Nobody should have to spend legal fees defending claims that they're responsible for somebody killing themselves over saying "come home to me".
swader999 16 hours ago [-]
Won't they get those fees back if dismissed or if the plaintiff doesn't prevail?
applfanboysbgon 15 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that this is generally not the case in the US.
swader999 14 hours ago [-]
That would explain much. I'm not a USA citizen.
basisword 15 hours ago [-]
These AI 'relationship' type bots are everything wrong with tech.
>> Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a "bright and beautiful boy", had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai app in late spring 2023.
People become obsessed with them. The builders have to know that their 'customers' are explicitly people with mental issues. Nobody sane or normal is talking to these things.
If you want to see how bad it is go checkout the reddit discourse when OpenAI deprecated one of their older models. Thousands of people acting like OpenAI had 'killed' their partners and best friends.
There are a lot of grey areas engineers work in when it comes to social stuff, privacy stuff, etc. There's no grey area with these. You're trying to hook people who are unwell and the people working on it should be ashamed.
applfanboysbgon 15 hours ago [-]
None of this pertains to the legal case whatsoever. If you think chatbots should be legislated out of existence, you are welcome to your opinion, but while they exist, trying to hold a particular company legally liable for a chatbot saying "come home to me" is beyond absurd.
---
Edit replying to below post, as I am rate limited:
> Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
You replied to my post, so I thought your post perhaps had some relevance to mine rather than being unrelated soapboxing.
I don't particularly agree with your soapboxing, at any rate. Character.AI was not a "relationship bot" company. Like any LLM, they could simply be prompted to respond as such, in the same way that ChatGPT can. As you pointed out yourself, ChatGPT has the same issue with people forming parasocial bonds, despite not attempting to cater to that market in any way at all. Should people who release chatbots be legally required to censor them heavily when users attempt to use them for anything other than technical questions? That seems excessive, and it seems that ascribing moral responsibility of that degree is akin to holding video game, music, or movie producers responsible for violence committed by someone who saw a piece of violent media. Moreover, how far does it go? Should distributing open-weight models be made illegal, because you're making available something that can't be censored?
basisword 15 hours ago [-]
>> trying to hold a particular company legally liable for a chatbot saying "come home to me" is beyond absurd
Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
root-parent 17 hours ago [-]
The Netflix documentary will reveal he was secretly working for Sam Altman the whole time... (Cue diabolical VC-backed evil laugh.)
Google lost three critical years chasing AGI, and got acquired by SpaceX, now a Dyson Sphere startup whose pitch deck is just:
"What if we put a paywall around the Sun?"
tomalbrc 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ur-whale 17 hours ago [-]
> Sounds like yet another Scam Altman, perfect match indeed.
Not really.
Altman couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.
Noam is OTOH and IIUC the real deal.
17 hours ago [-]
shimman 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rd 16 hours ago [-]
Give it a rest, you've gotten the point across.
rvnx 17 hours ago [-]
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artninja1988 17 hours ago [-]
Companies are not your friend who you need to be loyal to. There's a reason noncompetes are illegal in California.
rvnx 17 hours ago [-]
Think of it like if this:
Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.
- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.
You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.
- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.
It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.
It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?
QuesnayJr 17 hours ago [-]
This is not at all what happened. They did deliver, in the form of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which Google made public. They took nothing from Google that wasn't already public.
Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.
fragmede 16 hours ago [-]
The original traitorous eight who left Shockley to found Fairchild semiconductor are what literally gave Silicon Valley its name. You want to keep valuable employees, you got to treat them really well. Given the number of tech giants coming out of silicon valley, there's something to that being a cornerstone of its culture.
You do realize Google received a patent on the transformer right?
sieabahlpark 16 hours ago [-]
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DroneBetter 17 hours ago [-]
I think it becomes somewhat more defensible when considering that the alternative was operatiny Google's policy (before the advent of competition) of "these models would bring unknown dangers in the hands of the public, we shouldn't release them until we better understand the implications" (or perhaps more selfishly "these effectively nullify all our detectors of generated text, if released they would instantly lose us the war on SEO").
(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)
diegolas 17 hours ago [-]
talent poaching is something pretty common in tech, google knows something like this can and will happen, so does openAI
also "empty handed" is just unnecesarily dramatic, he left all the knwoledge base he helped build, that's google's IP and is worth m(b?)illions
sandeepkd 16 hours ago [-]
Not sure what kind of take is that in the light of so many layoffs done by companies despite making profits. It was at-will employment, its over and people moved on. If there is/was any wrong doing then the companies have enough resources to pursue individuals.
john_strinlai 17 hours ago [-]
i dont keep up on this stuff so maybe i am missing some context.
should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?
HarHarVeryFunny 16 hours ago [-]
Google essentially (but not exactly) aqui-hired Shazeer from character.ai in a deal that cost them $2.7B, with Shazeer personally making something in the region of $1B from it. Presumably there was some sort of retention period specified in the contract (you are not going to pay $2.7B to hire someone, then let them leave with no penalty the next day), but in the event Shazeer only stayed for 22 months before now leaving. Maybe he paid some penalty for leaving, but if so presumably more than compensated for by OpenAI.
raincole 17 hours ago [-]
What a crazy take lol. Even by HN's standard this is crazy. First of all the idea that an employee should be loyal is bad enough. And the following statements are only getting worse. Leaving Google empty-handed? How do you think corporations work? Google chose to publish their research results, not him.
Jtarii 17 hours ago [-]
Oh no, he wasn't loyal to the soulless trillion dollar mega corp :( what a terrible person
georgemcbay 17 hours ago [-]
> Well in terms of employers loyalty
I have no dog in this race as I'm not fond of either OpenAI or Google.... but employees not being loyal to their big tech employers is a wild thing to be concerned about in 2026 when year after year many large tech companies (Google very prominently among them) continually post record profits and still lay people off by the thousands.
btian 16 hours ago [-]
What are you talking about?
The Attention is all you need paper has Google logo, not character.ai
The context is AI made some knowledge work less cushy so now some folks are trying to point out random imaginary flaws (e.g TP or "water usage") when they're not busy trying to convince everyone AI doesn't work.
shimman 16 hours ago [-]
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bethekidyouwant 16 hours ago [-]
Good thing Elliott Smith is already dead or I imagine you would have a bone to pick with him.
CamperBob2 16 hours ago [-]
And when you file the edges off of every tool in your house, what will you do when you need to cut your steak^H^H^H^H^H celery sticks?
shimman 16 hours ago [-]
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fartcoin67 17 hours ago [-]
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nostrademons 17 hours ago [-]
[Edit: note that my comment was reparented, it was originally a response to someone claiming Noam was another "Scam Altman". I don't mind the reparenting or the killing of the original subthread, but I feel like this is necessary context to understand this.]
Noam is the real deal, he was pretty legendary within old-time ('00s) Google engineering. Paul Buchheit had a story about interviewing him with the "how to write a spellchecker" question and then him coming up with something better than the state-of-the-art, then basically delivering Google's spell corrector in his first 2-week Noogler project.
Wow, he was using AI to solve problems in 2000 already, that spell corrector being trained on the Web and becoming the first widely used AI tool. Decades ahead.
root-parent 16 hours ago [-]
If he is supposedly extremely smart, then surely he would have known what he was doing. So how can anyone claim all this was just an accident?
Is this genuinely confusing for people? He helped invent the transformer, he didn’t solve content moderation.
mikeryan 16 hours ago [-]
he didn’t solve content moderation.
Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.
freejazz 16 hours ago [-]
Just from reading the threads here it seems readily apparent that he then went to start this company that did these bad things. Does not seem confusing at all?
s1artibartfast 10 hours ago [-]
What bad things?
HPMOR 2 days ago [-]
Wow - Google paid a couple billion dollars to bring Noam back. Really impressive by OAI if this reporting is accurate!
Love the choice of words by Noam- exceptional team for OpenAI, amazing team for GDM.
john_strinlai 17 hours ago [-]
it would sound weird to say either word twice in such a short blurb.
david_shi 17 hours ago [-]
Love this type of detailed textual analysis.
1 days ago [-]
DrScientist 4 hours ago [-]
Sorry to bring up the elephant in the room - but could this decision be in part the opportunity to acquire large amounts of stock before a massively inflated IPO?
SilverBirch 42 minutes ago [-]
Google acquired his company in 2024 for $2.7Bn with him taking about 40% of that. I'm quite sure that no matter where he went, any lab or his own start up, he would be fine financially.
DrScientist 26 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure he was fine financially when he first worked at Google - without leaving to found the startup as well.
But money at that level isn't about being financially secure - to have a roof over your head and food to eat - it's about power.
Money at that level gives you the ability to shape the world in ways others can only dream of - whether that be starting your own company where you can set the values, funding a cure for Malaria, or political lobbying.
Depends on whether the person in question has strong views and a strong belief that they are in the right.
Full disclaimer - I have no insight or knowledge about this particular person - just making the rather obvious and general case that joining OpenAI now at a senior level is likely to generate a serious windfall, and such a windfall is power.
As I said, no idea what motivates this particular person - don't know them at all - the money may be entirely coincidental and it's all about getting stuff done - but he did choose OpenAI rather than somebody like Anthropic....
What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.
Rumudiez 14 hours ago [-]
I'm confused, is 78 years a long time? even the US is considered a toddler by empirical terms. zionism wasn't a thing until a minority group had the loudest voice in the room when the allies were discussing what to do with all the european refugees after ww2, and it happened to align well with the brits abandoning their failed colony in the region due to disputes with the locals
Rumudiez 14 hours ago [-]
here's a quote from wikipedia. it was an utter land grab and an easy way out of responsibility for those in power
> The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine in 1922. British rule and Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration led to growing violence between Arabs and Jews, causing the British to announce its intention to terminate the Mandate in 1947. The UN General Assembly recommended partitioning Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. However, the situation deteriorated into a civil war. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, the Jews ostensibly accepted it, declaring the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948 upon the end of the British mandate. Nearby Arab countries invaded Palestine, Israel not only prevailed, but conquered more territory than envisioned by the Partition Plan. During the war, 700,000, or about 80% of all Palestinians fled or were driven out of territory Israel conquered and were not allowed to return, an event known as the Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe') to Palestinians. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing for decades, about 850,000 Jews from the Arab world immigrated ("made Aliyah") to Israel.
Yes, this is the important thing to know. I've heard way too many conversations that go back and forth about every act of vengeance in either direction after this, it's all noise. Partition plan started this. But I wouldn't call it an easy way out of responsibility; UK's leaders took a clear and binding position in favor of Zionism.
Also, it was Ottoman territory for hundreds of years up to WWI. I've had friends tell me for some reason about how Palestine was an independent country before... literally wasn't.
UltraSane 14 hours ago [-]
You didn't actually answer my question. How does using the word for people who want to create a Jewish state make sense when a Jewish state has existed for 78 years?
frollogaston 13 hours ago [-]
One reasonable possibility is they're referring to people like Ben-Gvir who have themselves claimed that Zionism means fighting for Israeli control over more territory like the West Bank. They're the ones calling the shots right now. I don't know whether Zionists 78 years ago would've agreed, it's possible.
To some it still means favoring any existence of a Jewish state. The inertia isn't there because aside from the original partition plan being pushed by the UK, other countries have attacked Israel several times later in ways they would've have withstood without outside support.
UltraSane 12 hours ago [-]
"Zionism means fighting for Israeli control over more territory like the West Bank."
Now that is a valid use of the term. I think the problem it that Zionism means so many different things it is nearly useless as a description. It seems more useful as a slur which has become very common in some circles.
"The inertia isn't there"
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
frollogaston 11 hours ago [-]
I think it's valid to use the word the way that Israel's present leadership is using it.
> Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
US and UK, yes. Not just cause of the weapons and money to Israel. After them, the top recipients of US foreign aid in the area are the bordering countries Egypt and Jordan, so that they don't attack.
UltraSane 11 hours ago [-]
> I think it's valid to use the word the way that Israel's present leadership is using it.
And how is that?
Israel has a population of 10 million people and a very modern military and nuclear weapons. If it's existence was ever truly threatened things would get VERY ugly.
frollogaston 11 hours ago [-]
Because that's what matters. The original Zionists aren't alive to ask what they think. Self-proclaimed Zionists are taking the West Bank and Gaza. In fact they've been kinda doing it for decades under previous governments, but more slowly. If there's some other kind of Zionism around, the most it's doing is complaining, and it's been outvoted.
I have doubts about their ability to self-defend because otherwise we wouldn't be giving so much money, the situation would be stable. Even if they can severely hurt the attackers, it doesn't really matter if the attackers stop at nothing. We just lost a war against Iran despite having full air superiority and killing their leader. And especially if you're considering the scenario where Israel never got Western support, and thus never got those advanced weapons.
UltraSane 10 hours ago [-]
Israel actually LEFT Gaza. You seem biased to the point of just plain lying.
8 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
tovej 8 hours ago [-]
They did not. They're still occupying a buffer zone, have broken the ceasefire countless times, and are blocking people from crossing.
Israel razed Gaza to the ground. It was a genocide.
UltraSane 2 hours ago [-]
Israel left Gaza in 2005.stop telling obvious lies. Hamas attacked Israel on Oct 7 2023 killing at least 800 civilians in an act of incredibly bloodthirsty barbarism, including children, the elderly, and 364 victims attending the Nova music festival. Remember when Hamas paraded the body of that young German woman Shani Louk they killed like a hunting trophy?
cindyllm 11 hours ago [-]
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wk_end 14 hours ago [-]
IMO people just use the term to mean “pro-Israel” rather than in any reference to the original meaning ("supporter of the idea of a Jewish state"). Which could mean any combination of “pro-American financial support for Israel”, “moral support for Israel in their various military actions”, “opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state”, “a belief that Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state”, and so on. It's more about the broad political alignment than the specific meaning of the word.
UltraSane 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you for actually answering my question. That is very vague and explains why I find the word so annoying.
tovej 8 hours ago [-]
Zionist does have a specific meaning. It means you think the Jewish people have a god-given right to the Palestinian land, and that other creeds and ethnicities should be second class within the Jewish state in Palestine.
A non-zionist Israel would be one where all peoples had the same right, e.g.
UltraSane 1 hours ago [-]
"It means you think the Jewish people have a god-given right to the Palestinian land"
It was never actually Palastinian land. It was Jewish land, then Roman land, then Ottoman land, then British land, then Jewish land after Palastinians attacked Israel and lost. At no point were the Palastinians ever a sovereign country and in fact they incredibly foolishly rejected the UN offer for one.
"other creeds and ethnicities should be second class "
Approximately 2.5 to 2.6 million non-Jews live in Israel, comprising about 25% to 26% of the country's total population. This is compared to less than 1% of the population of Gaza being non-muslim.
nsbk 17 hours ago [-]
Alright. OpenAI feels like a better fit for him after all
17 hours ago [-]
bbeonx 17 hours ago [-]
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nhinck2 15 hours ago [-]
People who have intellectually based skills think it makes them an intellectual.
They fail to understand that their skill doesn't generalise.
That and the hyperglazing and platforming they get for having said skill makes them a prime candidate for exposing how average they are.
adamsb6 13 hours ago [-]
What a brave new world where only machines possess general intelligence.
slashdave 15 hours ago [-]
It is possible to rationalize all sorts of irrational ideas. It's a trap many fall into.
frollogaston 16 hours ago [-]
Referring to this or what? Reddit post is gone, but Yahoo has something.
> "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender," Shazeer wrote, news site the Information reported Friday. "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them."
It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this. But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic, which clearly crosses the line into disrupting work.
manwithopinions 15 hours ago [-]
Accusing coworkers of being antisemitic crosses the line, but accusing coworkers of sterilizing children and denying the existence of gender is ok? Surely both are bad, neither is acceptable in a workplace. Do you mean it’s not dumb because you share his views?
frollogaston 15 hours ago [-]
The first one doesn't accuse coworkers of sterilizing children. As for saying there's no gender attribute, I disagree, but it's just his belief and not a dumb one either.
wk_end 13 hours ago [-]
The "sterilizing children" is how anti-trans activists talk about giving trans children gender-affirming care. Framing it this way makes it sound monstrous rather than an unfortunate side-effect of a medically necessary procedure, in the same way that characterizing a surgeon who performs hysterectomies for women with ovarian cancer as "a doctor who goes around sterilizing women" would be painting them in an unfair light.
And of course he's not directly accusing his coworkers of "sterilizing children", but he's 1) using language that compares politically sensitive health services that many of his coworkers or their families may have used and/or may feel defensive about to atrocities and 2) accusing his coworkers of supporting atrocities. That feels quite disruptive and inappropriate in the work environment IMO.
frollogaston 13 hours ago [-]
That all assumes it's a medically necessary procedure, which is exactly what people disagree about. And again, no mention of coworkers in that quote at least, not said in a work setting either.
wk_end 13 hours ago [-]
What's medically necessary is for a person and their own doctors to decide on, not for you or some AI engineer or anyone else to disagree about.
frollogaston 12 hours ago [-]
Not when public money is involved, which pro-trans voices absolutely want it to be. And even without it, society does have reasons to concern itself with how parents treat their children. There's no side that separates the responsibilities, it's just a matter of who thinks this is socially right.
wk_end 12 hours ago [-]
I actually don't know how much of that's especially true where doctors are involved. We as a society strictly regulate who can call themselves a doctor and the credentials that are required to do so, and then in doing so entrust them as a class to be reliable arbiters of what constitutes what's medically necessary, how public medical funds should be spent (which, even if that's something activists agitate for, is still a separate issue), and so on. We also entrust them to help monitor how parents are treating their children.
Anyway, to double back once, it actually doesn't really "assume it's a medically necessary procedure"; we can soften it to something like a "medically desired procedure" and the point in fact still stands that Shazeer's wording - which really should be the point here, not re-enacting the tired trans healthcare debate - is deliberately incendiary and manipulative. Broadly, no one is advocating for parents to be sterilizing their children as an end to itself, so it shouldn't be characterized as such.
frollogaston 12 hours ago [-]
Doctors are allowed to make judgement calls within whatever rules the insurance providers and laws give. The status quo before all this was that gender-affirming care was never covered, which changed to always covered in discrete steps across the 2000s and 2010s. Doctors didn't get to decide that on their own. Before that even, medical schools instill rules and values that come mostly from the outside, while the medical knowledge and experience is from the inside.
Another controversy is physician-assisted s–... euthanasia. Some doctors would consider it medically necessary, but they can't legally perform or even recommend it, as it's considered murder. They can in Canada. Abortion of a viable fetus not threatening the mother is illegal in all 50 US states, but legal in many states in earlier stages, again based on what the states consider murder (but the doctor judges what is viable or a threat to the mother).
Anyway if gender-affirming care is just medically desired but not medically necessary, the sterilization is accepted but not necessary. I agree with the spirit of the wording, even though it's imprecise, because it highlights that children are taking on an irreversible side effect. It's a short quote and not a whole essay where he gets to clarify.
gen220 8 hours ago [-]
I’m curious, do you personally know anybody who’s gone through gender-affirming-care?
For me it was a really confusing issue until I became close friends with someone whose childhood best friend is trans.
If he was born a decade earlier, he probably would have killed himself (this was the path he was on, which is incredibly tragic and all too common); the gender dysphoria invoked depression was unbearable.
Instead, he was able to work through therapy and medical care to understand his gender dysphoria and receive gender affirming care in his late teens.
Now (over a decade post treatment) he’s among the most cheerful people I’ve ever met. He inspires joy as a band teacher, is inspiringly happily married, and is raising a beautiful baby girl.
I often think about him when people talk about the issue in the abstract. The hundreds of children whose lives he’s impacted for the better, let alone the lives of his friends and family. Removing gender affirming care is implicitly saying you don’t want any of that to happen, because the logical conclusion of removing is people like him in a pit of depression and despair that often ends in suicide, all over an affliction that they did not choose.
This is where the “medically necessary” part of gender affirming care comes from.
I didn’t understand it before I knew him and his story so I don’t begrudge people who are in shows I used to walk in. But I’d encourage people to try to understand and lead with empathy and meet people where they are.
frollogaston 7 hours ago [-]
Since you ask, I know three. One guy I knew in high school transitioned to female around 2013, and requested I say "she." She was bullied a bit for it, not too much thankfully, but it was clear she was never comfortable with being male before. Another was similar but later.
It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates. So I can't support it. I still think people should have the right to do it on their own dime, and won't judge them for it either way. I can't trust any studies on this anymore because it's become politicized and weirdly speech-policed. This isn't a unique or nuanced opinion, it's probably the majority one and I sound like the rest.
zozozk 4 hours ago [-]
That's analogous to how frontal lobotomies were justified as a medical procedure. But it still caused significant, lifelong harm to tens of thousands of people, most of them children and young women.
bbeonx 12 hours ago [-]
yeah, the argument is ridiculous; like, formally, it is ridiculous. i also disagree with the sentiment and conclusions of the argument, but the actual form of the argument is garbage: "i introduce an axiom that says there is no gender and therefore the distinction between sex and gender doesn't exist".
frollogaston 12 hours ago [-]
He thinks there's no gender. I could give reasons why I disagree, but not proof, same with the religion he kinda mentions.
ignoramous 15 hours ago [-]
> It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this.
Google knows Shazeer's value & paid $2bn to c.ai for it: Its undesirable for anyone (regardless of their seniority) to engage in a discussion without being invited to it. Flaring up discord isn't how someone in a leadership position at a huge company is supposed to operate. It is another thing if they've got the "fuck you" money & a few feathers to rattle; then they do whatever without care.
> But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic
Per reports, Sergey Brin said something similar in the internal forums, too. Don't think its the only problem. After all, Shazeer can literally pick & choose where they want to work, and probably has more leverage over GDM than GDM does over him.
frollogaston 15 hours ago [-]
I know about the Sergey Brin thing too, same issue but tbh less important of a person
chubs 15 hours ago [-]
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bigyabai 17 hours ago [-]
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Avicebron 17 hours ago [-]
the g-slur? I won't say it in case it is a slur, is that the word the jews call non-jews?
sebzim4500 17 hours ago [-]
That makes way more sense, I thought he meant gypsy. In either case he should just say the word, this site isn't for children.
bigyabai 16 hours ago [-]
Avicebron is correct. I avoided being specific because I didn't want to derail the thread with responses from people that fulminate over specific keywords.
woodruffw 13 hours ago [-]
Whether or not “goy” is a slur is pretty complicated. It has pejorative uses, and outside of a strictly religious context any non-Jew is almost certainly only going to see those pejorative uses. But strictly speaking it’s a Hebrew word that means “nation,” and isn’t any more or less offensive in the abstract than Jew, Arab, Brit, etc.
(To my understanding, the closest equivalent is “ummah” in Arabic, where the connotation is flipped: goy can refer to a Jewish person but typically does not, whereas the ummah typically refers to Muslim peoples as a collective but can also be a general stand-in for “nation” or “world.”)
throw368833 13 hours ago [-]
It’s not literally a slur, but because it has developed negative connotations Jewish people tend to avoid it nowadays. Online, you are more likely to see it used by antisemites.
Which is why I think that story is very likely bullshit. It’s from an account that very frequently posts pro-IRGC content, and has previously used “the G word” itself.
I think “goybucks” is straightforwardly pejorative. You maybe didn’t mean it so, but that’s the straight line read of it given the white nationalist template of “goy$x” for some x.
17 hours ago [-]
madspindel 17 hours ago [-]
I think he ment Gypsy and not Gentile.
ses1984 16 hours ago [-]
Goyum?
16 hours ago [-]
throw368833 13 hours ago [-]
Your contribution to a story about a Jewish person is that you once worked for a Jew and you didn’t like him.
bigyabai 13 hours ago [-]
Thank you for your input, six-number throwaway. I am answering the parent's question while humanizing a complex, intelligent person that I worked for.
bbeonx 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 13 hours ago [-]
Please don't comment like this here. The HN guidelines ask us not to engage in political or ideological battle or use swipes like "comically stupid take". Same goes for your other comment in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48590901) – "sigh how are so many brilliant people this stupid?" adds nothing but venom to the discussion.
the first post was a swipe, i'll grant you. probably shouldn't have said it. it was a knee-jerk reaction to a structurally fallacious argument that leaves no room for discussion: "i reject your stance not based on reason, evidence, or anything that you can interact with, but based on an new presupposition i've just now decided is true". though i'll admit the severity of my knee jerking was probably amplified by some of the other opinions he holds.
the second post is actually about (a) me having understanding for a position of someone i disagree with harshly, and (b) the logical structure of an argument, not the underlying topic itself. it was in reference to the content of the link that was posted.
anyway, mods can take it down, i get why the rules are there. you're also right to ask folks to keep it clean. but i stand by it; dude just seems to have a trifecta of awful traits and i'm so so so tired of super rich tech dudes ruining the world.
tomhow 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks. We don't take anything down (except in rare cases when a user explicitly asks us to remove one of their posts for privacy reasons). We just need everyone to make the effort to observe the guidelines at all times when participating here, no matter the topic or how they feel about it.
15 hours ago [-]
altmanaltman 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dekhn 15 hours ago [-]
What you're describing about gender is.... not really scientific. It was basically declared by fiat by researchers. It's not an authoritative definition and many people disagree with the concept, at least when it gets conflated with scientific topics.
bbeonx 12 hours ago [-]
there are some things that clearly exist that are really hard to nail down with definitions; once we get into anything social, we are kinda playing with that territory. everything is so fuzzy that our normal way of defining things breaks down. so saying precisely what gender _is_ is going to be almost impossible. but there are definitely roles and traits that are highly correlated with a person's birth sex that are distinct from their birth sex. there can even be genetic reasons why those correlations emerged. but they are still distinct.
as evidence, what it _means_ to be a man, woman, etc, differs from society to society. if you ask me to quantify this precisely, i will struggle. but it's plain for all to see.
p1necone 15 hours ago [-]
I think you need to read their comment again - they are clearly talking about sex and gender as two different concepts.
bbeonx 12 hours ago [-]
sorry, is this in response to my post? in which case, this is exactly the distinction i'm making. the entire argument is whether or not there _is_ a distinction; my point is that this guy just, a priori, decides gender doesn't exist. but there is plenty of evidence that it does. there are plenty of social traits associated with sex that differ across different cultures: pink used to be a manly color, now it's a feminine color; "be a man" doesn't literally mean "make sure your sex is male"; etc. there are traits that are heavily correlated with a person's sex that are culturally reinforced, and this is distinct from their sex.
wincy 16 hours ago [-]
This is a motte and bailey though. A regular person on the street has never seen a distinction between these two words, and common sense prevailed after years of Silicon Valley policing of speech to try to make an unpopular position seem tenable and widely agreed upon to get the average person to step in line.
p1necone 15 hours ago [-]
Are you seriously trying to claim that e.g. wearing dresses or liking the color pink is somehow fundamentally tied the the genitals in your pants or the chromosomes you have?
The idea that gender is a social concept is so blindingly obvious that, like bbeonx I kind of assume that anyone making comments like yours about "common sense" is either blindly parroting talking points without thinking about them, or arguing in bad faith.
tentlewick 15 hours ago [-]
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p1necone 15 hours ago [-]
> Basically saying that women and men should present and behave within a narrow set of parameters.
I think you're putting words into peoples mouths there.
Acknowledging that there is a social construct we generally know of as "gender" and acknowledging that certain stereotypes and common understandings of that concept exist is not at all the same thing as demanding that people should fit into the narrowest stereotypes that you can think of.
Also worth noting that you acknowledging the existence of sexist stereotyping is an acknowledgement of the existence of gender as a social construct.
AlotOfReading 15 hours ago [-]
There are both descriptive and normative uses of gender. To use a less charged example, it's not prescriptive to identify as American. It's not prescriptive to say other people identify you that way, even if your passport says Canadian.
An example of using the category normatively would be saying someone isn't American because they burn the flag. My experience is that most of the people using "gender" normatively don't differentiate it from sex.
Computer0 16 hours ago [-]
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Uhhrrr 16 hours ago [-]
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frollogaston 15 hours ago [-]
This isn't an either-or thing. Google is an American company, neither of those entities is American. The people who care about this foreign war so much can donate their own money or go fight it themselves.
What's even worse is Google refused to work with the American military in the past, but as soon as it was Israel, #1 priority for them. So it's pretty clear where their loyalty is.
Computer0 15 hours ago [-]
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Uhhrrr 15 hours ago [-]
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biffles 1 days ago [-]
Surprised to not see more comments on this, especially given the popularity of the Anthropic/Karpathy article. What a win for OpenAI - and what a loss for Google, just 2 years after paying $2.7bn to bring Noam back into the fold. Does not bode well for Gemini long-term... Or could be a signal for how deeply they are leaning into world models.
pixelp3 1 days ago [-]
I think nobody they acquired from Character.AI is at Google anymore.
1 days ago [-]
starchild3001 4 hours ago [-]
For those who missed: Gemini coding and agentic capabilities have been lagging the sota models (Opus mostly) since Dec 2026. If you're a co-lead and your model is underperforming there has to be some consequences. I don't know as a fact if this has anything to do with Noam's departure, but work performance is never about past successes.
xnx 1 days ago [-]
This does suck for Google. Noam will take a lot of Google trade secrets with him to OpenAi. Google's bench is deeper than this one guy though.
dansquizsoft 14 hours ago [-]
Trade secrets? Like how to invent a trillion dollar technology and then sit on it for years while others eat your lunch with it? Like how to consistenly release inferior quality models to others despite infinite compute and engineering talent and insane profitability in your legacy businesses?
bigyabai 13 hours ago [-]
Not really sure what you're talking about. Apple just licensed Gemini for Siri, Google and their TPU hardware is starting to hit primetime audiences that OpenAI can only dream of.
dansquizsoft 8 hours ago [-]
My favourite part of their strategy here is its profitability
reasonableklout 1 days ago [-]
Very bad news for Gemini - the brief comeback with 2.5 Pro last year looked to be driven by Noam
Insanity 18 hours ago [-]
Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity.
Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.
fourseventy 18 hours ago [-]
I think the 'models have no moat' thing is overblown. Only like 3-4 companies in the entire world have cutting edge models, that means there is some kind of moat...
sho 6 hours ago [-]
I think when you follow this stuff every day it's easy to lose perspective of the rate of change and these leads seem more profound than they really are when you zoom out a bit.
I'm no super-insider, I only hear industry scuttlebutt like everyone else, but I have about a 95% confidence that the last 18 months has just been about more and better, without any kind of real leap or breakthrough. More hardware, more data, better technique. Well, technique diffuses as people change companies, hardware can be built, and data can be gathered (or stolen!).
From my admittedly outsider perspective, the only years-long moat there is who has the most hardware. If you have the hardware, you can give away the compute to get the data (hello, subsidized subscriptions!). Technique can simply be hired. The only durable, multi-year advantage is the hardware.
So is that a moat? Sure, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the leading model companies of the moment. ASML is the real moat, and so it's ASML China is besieging, correctly (IMO) identifying that everything else can be caught up easily enough.
Check back in a few years...
seydor 17 hours ago [-]
money. but it eventually runs out
TiredOfLife 9 hours ago [-]
Grok and Meta. Both have money and compute, both have shit models. Also Google. Has money, models not so good.
rvnx 17 hours ago [-]
A little IPO is the solution.
Don't we all want to (automatically) and passively invest in a company losing billions of dollars ?
At least we can diversify our portfolio from SpaceX.
tcp_handshaker 17 hours ago [-]
Pre-Quote: "We are all going to lose, hundreds of billions"
rvnx 17 hours ago [-]
Money.
That's their moat.
Maybe also stolen copyrighted content that cannot be found anywhere else now, so they are the only ones who can train on it.
gordonhart 15 hours ago [-]
Meta has tons of that, but no frontier contender. Clearly there’s _something_ more to the equation than money
17 hours ago [-]
dabbz 17 hours ago [-]
I feel like the models have no moat paradigm died when a single model expanded past the memory of single GPU slices. The moat is hosting the model. Even paying a server host to run a rack of GPUs has immense upstart cost, and then you're still struggling to compete on the add-ons of the things on top of the model (prompts, validation loops, etc). You can only throw so much money at a problem.
xyzsparetimexyz 14 hours ago [-]
Many different companies host the open source models. Where's the moat there?
maxdo 18 hours ago [-]
yeah, sure, look at anthropic revenue, what is it if not the moat? you can argue for how long but for them good model = the fastest growing company ever.
rvnx 17 hours ago [-]
Revenue is not a metric of success at all.
Grabbing market-share if you have investors that are ready to burn cash infinetely. Find a hot niche, buy a banana 1 USD, sell it for 0.10 USD.
Example: Cursor, they became popular because they were selling ChatGPT unlimited for 20 USD / month.
When they launched, just a reskinned VS Code, "fastest growing AI company"
No coincidence they were bought by SpaceX, who wants to consolidate revenue even if non-sense as long it helps other investors to exit. It shows rapid growth.
Profit is the real moat.
One example: Nvidia. Proprietary tooling, proprietary IP, proprietary hardware, no alternative, expensive.
signatoremo 15 hours ago [-]
Revenue is moat. Ask Amazon. Or Alibaba. Or Temu.
You don't know what Cursor's game plan was. Maybe acquisition was their plan.
Buying at $1 and selling for $0.1 is still viable as long as they have money in the bank, until they achieve their goals. Most startups start out that way. Even giving away their services for free.
Obviously there will be failures. Doesn't mean they have no moat. Can you say a business with 100 customers and $1000 debt is less viable than one with a single customer and no debt?
root_axis 18 hours ago [-]
And they've had some initial success with TPUs which could be a major differentiator in the future.
Insanity 18 hours ago [-]
Yup, and they have the Apple partnership for now as well. Much better position generally than OpenAI in my opinion.
xnx 18 hours ago [-]
> models have no moat
Possibly true. Any smart innovations developed by one organization will be smuggled into others.
Training, inferring, and data collection, infrastructures are definitely moats. High-volume usage feedback is also hard to come by for new entrants.
thewebguyd 18 hours ago [-]
And Google has all of those. Custom silicon, more data than anyone else and probably the most comprehensive data collection system, and phones in the hands of 73% of the global smartphone using population to push gemini into to get high volume usage feedback and even more telemetry and data.
observationist 18 hours ago [-]
I don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more.
Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels.
It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
xyzsparetimexyz 14 hours ago [-]
> Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level
As do thousands of people say this point. You think the head of deepseek doesn't?
Insanity 18 hours ago [-]
I honestly don't think that matters for multiple reasons:
1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).
2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.
adonese 9 hours ago [-]
I'm curious to know the hype behind the hiring for Karpathy and Noam. In the sense that did oai and anthropic do that for sort of long term and potential new directions (investing in them so they come up with the new transformer). Because it definitely cannot be just a regular filling vacant roles.
Because I think as far as running the existing models and handling whatever nuances, it must be well understood by oai and ANT -- but you don't what you don't know.
fsuts 6 hours ago [-]
He was one of the leaders and not the leader
And Deepminds Demis Hassabis was the single other? Or were there more?
So didn’t they get on? The latter is in London so time difference to put up with too
fancyfredbot 17 hours ago [-]
Question one: How much did this cost OpenAI?
Question two: Why are OpenAI spending that money taking talent from Google, who can definitely outspend them for talent, and not Anthropic, who are leading the market and are at least somewhat financially constrained.
supern0va 17 hours ago [-]
Reporting on this seems to indicate that people at Anthropic are significantly more loyal, and that attempts to poach by OpenAI and Meta have been largely unsuccessful.
bootsmann 16 hours ago [-]
Their options are probably insane sunk cost, hard to steal an engineer who has Xm in potential gains if they choose to stay.
supern0va 16 hours ago [-]
People seem to have turned down offers that would have netted out more upside for them, so it doesn't seem to just be that. Anthropic seems to lure in the true believers, whereas people are highly skeptical of Sam's motivations these days (particularly after how much safety/alignment has been reportedly cut).
But I'm sure for at least some folks, this is true, given recent valuations.
alecco 8 hours ago [-]
Allegedly OpenAI is struggling to jump to bigger models and had serious issues in the past (4.5) and also allegedly Shazeer is just the right guy for that. OpenAI is having issues hiring talent as most SF-style people want to go to Anthropic. Shazeer seems more politically aligned with OpenAI. But it's all speculation.
TiredOfLife 9 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is a cult making a god.
aykutseker 15 hours ago [-]
AI hiring starting to look like sports free agency.
I hope this doesn't impact Google's progress on open models.
CamperBob2 18 hours ago [-]
Is Shazeer known to be opposed to open-weight releases?
Catloafdev 17 hours ago [-]
OpenAI hasn't released open weights since GPT-OSS-20/120B. Google has the Gemma line.
I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.
irishcoffee 17 hours ago [-]
Their models are the only moat they think they have left, which at this point is more of filled-in wet circle of dirt.
trolleski 2 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't ai create ai research at this point?
ur-whale 17 hours ago [-]
Looks like Google is leaking both AI talent and know-how something fierce ... and since the very day the transformer paper was written.
As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle:
- huge, quasi unmatched data war chest
- huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure
- native AI chip design and production (TPU)
- the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there
- deepmind, enough said
- pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT
- a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...)
- supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley
Why do the best people leave ?
Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ?
Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance?
The only answer I can think of is:
- culture is completely broken
- management sucks something fierce
- company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore
dwrodri 15 hours ago [-]
Google has muddied the waters on their Gemini usage statistics as it now powers a big chunk of Search. Depending on how you cut it, Gemini (and Gemini powered products) are probably producing the most output tokens seen by the most human eyeballs by a large margin.
Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1].
The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission.
Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is.
I guess this means Google is nowhere close, to even discern
a hint of an AGI? So when Demis Hassabis says AGI...could arrive in just 3 years he has learned the best from Larry Ellison?
Laurel1234 56 minutes ago [-]
Nobody in the space has seen a hint of AGI.
Although I can't fathom why we'd want to? Like what is the advantage of giving tools sentience?
dboreham 17 hours ago [-]
I would guess it means Sam Altman gave him more money.
overfeed 14 hours ago [-]
And threw in a sweetener when he seemed hesitant: he can say whatever he likes about trans people in the workplace and not worry about being PC.
ai_fry_ur_brain 18 hours ago [-]
Its getting pretty lame that we talk about the these guys like they're football players transferring teams.
chubot 17 hours ago [-]
In this case, it's not a new thing ... back in 2005 (yes 21 years ago), people talked about the achievements of Noam Shazeer at Google (and Jeff Dean and Sanjay, etc)
I always appreciated Jeff having a level head ... which this article seems to confirm:
It could be the opposite. Those are really useful people, they deserve this more than football players
ai_fry_ur_brain 17 hours ago [-]
Idk, football players actually make a bunch of people happy and entertained. 80% of the United States wishes this tech never existed.
What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.
ttoinou 17 hours ago [-]
Very few people interpret football so much that the actual frontier work of the best players matter. Out of 30 friends I know who like football only 1 of them could explain what’s going on in the field technically. For most people, pro players are replaceable.
Popular entertainment and unique progress of human civilization can’t be really compared either
DrScientist 4 hours ago [-]
> For most people, pro players are replaceable.
I'd argue that professional sport is the closest thing to a true meritocracy - doesn't matter who your Dad knows - you ability is there for all to see on the pitch.
And at the team level - if cosy cliques form, again - team performance doesn't lie - hard work, team work and talent is ultimately what delivers results on the pitch.
The other interesting part of professional sport is that the 'workers' have managed to capture more of the value than is traditionally the case - this is precisely because they are so hard to replace.
If you think professional footballers earn too much and are interchangable - feel free to try and get in the team.
ttoinou 4 hours ago [-]
I only said top scientists and top engineers deserve as much fame / respect / gossip as top football players yeah
DrScientist 3 hours ago [-]
Sadly most science and engineering is very capital intensive.
So take this scenario - I'd argue that if you want to make progress in the field of these particular ML models, then you are going to need resources ( compute/data etc ) that is beyond most individuals capability to muster. ie you have to join a company with resources ( or persuade somebody to give you them ).
Right now there is one of those scenarios where capital is chasing talent - and so talent, if they are so inclined, is able to make the most of that.
But in normal times that's typically not the case - most of the time scientists are chasing the capital ( directly or indirectly in the form of a job in a well resourced company ) in order to be able to science, rather than the other way around.
iooi 17 hours ago [-]
This "guy" is worth on the order of all football players put together.
ai_fry_ur_brain 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah because hes a zionist Jew whos into kabaala and is obsessed with wealth. Many such cases.
It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.
bookofjoe 17 hours ago [-]
What's the AI equivalent of NIL?
mrandish 16 hours ago [-]
This situation is kind of like backend NIL value. His value to OAI isn't just the work he'll do "on the playing field", it's the perceptual value of "OAI just hired the guy Google paid >$2B to get back" right before their IPO.
tayo42 15 hours ago [-]
I think it's more about how the products that impact our lives might change and what might flow down to us becasue of that.
krembo 18 hours ago [-]
We're a community of geeks. We admire Tesla, Feynman, Linus and such. For me they are far greater than football players
bbeonx 17 hours ago [-]
wait this is kinda brilliant tho
mosfets 15 hours ago [-]
How to be a legend like him?
15 hours ago [-]
nothrowaways 16 hours ago [-]
Good luck Noam, Gemini is a great piece of work.
xyst 16 hours ago [-]
This is what you call a PR hire.
HardCodedBias 16 hours ago [-]
Huge blow to Google.
I doubt that the money had anything to do with it.
I also doubt that the state of the technology at OAI vs. Google had much to do with it, Google is behind no doubt, but the gap is not as far as we know, insurmountable.
I suspect that this is a leadership clash. Noam was working in GDM. GDM somehow went away from coding and RSI into "world models" and that has played out very poorly. Who made that call? Who was still playing politics?
Given this is Noam the list of people that could be pissing him off is very small: Demis, Sergey (?!), a couple of VPs in GDM.
What the hell happened?
dekhn 14 hours ago [-]
It's entirely possible he got in a flame war over political issues with other Googlers and Google asked him to leave.
ReptileMan 17 hours ago [-]
Tell me open ai are in emergency mode without telling me they are in emergency mode
18 hours ago [-]
starchild3001 18 hours ago [-]
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AiNexus 14 hours ago [-]
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bschmidt100 17 hours ago [-]
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mkw5053 18 hours ago [-]
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ath3nd 15 hours ago [-]
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aplthrowaway67 18 hours ago [-]
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tomhow 17 hours ago [-]
We've banned this account.
bschmidt100 17 hours ago [-]
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aplthrowaway67 17 hours ago [-]
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yigalirani 17 hours ago [-]
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mrcwinn 14 hours ago [-]
I would just love to hear your definition of that word.
uejfiweun 16 hours ago [-]
Any sources on this?
hiddencost 12 hours ago [-]
Defining opposition to genocide as antisemitic is a really bad idea.
ripped_britches 15 hours ago [-]
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ctdinjeu7 17 hours ago [-]
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highfrequency 16 hours ago [-]
> idea thief. Takes credit for others’ work.
Based on what?
dang 15 hours ago [-]
GP is a serial troll whom we've banned hundreds of times, so the answer to your question is almost certainly nothing.
sandeepkd 16 hours ago [-]
I think this is a hard question if you ask people to start providing proof for things like this. A lot of such opinions are usually baked into individuals personal experience and perception. Nevertheless one has to feel very strongly to share such a take here in this manner unless they are gaining something from it.
johntb86 15 hours ago [-]
> Nevertheless one has to feel very strongly to share such a take here in this manner unless they are gaining something from it.
Do they really? What does it cost them if they're wrong?
JumpCrisscross 16 hours ago [-]
What? If I call someone a thief, I should be able to point to something they stole.
sandeepkd 16 hours ago [-]
There is a big difference how one acts in a court and in real life. The original statement could either be a slandering (hard to know what they get to gain from it) or its their bitter experience/perception that they feel strongly about, are are sharing on a platform like this.
zaat 15 hours ago [-]
sandeepkd is an idea thief. Also, he is short guy but walks with high shoes so people will think he is tall.
ipaddr 16 hours ago [-]
In a court of law sometimes. In the real world some facts have verifiable proof but the majority have little if anything that can be shared publicly or exists.
JumpCrisscross 16 hours ago [-]
If someone called my friend a thief and couldn’t even point to what they stole, I’d mercilessly judge them even outside a court of law. That’s a serious accusation. Going off vibes is totally inappropriate.
SecretDreams 16 hours ago [-]
This perspective is only relevant if we assume nobody on HN ever posts maliciously. Some of the circles here are small, incestuous, and probably have some resentment. Other times, there's clear botting - very hard to talk against Elon or his companies without a load of down votes.
Needless to say, the OP could be right but they could be right without proof. Or proof would out them. Or it's malicious posting. Don't take anything on the internet too seriously, even in such sanctimonious spaces as HN.
projektfu 15 hours ago [-]
I always thought it was people who were married to their book, or just fanboys. Some of these accounts that jump in to defend are quite old.
golem14 16 hours ago [-]
Maybe he's preparing the next aquihire for Google ?
C'mon people, if you don't know Noam personally, who are you to fling such accusations?
I really hate the low bar of HN discussions lately. It's late-Slashdot-level. Brrr.
pixelneon 16 hours ago [-]
Niceee
ur-whale 17 hours ago [-]
Silver lining: given the leaked financials of OpenAI, he might very well be joining a sinking ship.
Also, why didn't they nail him down contractually when they bought character.ai ... isn't that pretty standard with these type of superstar (re)hires?
mrandish 17 hours ago [-]
You can't force someone to keep taking your money (that's indentured servitude), you can only incentivize them to stay with increasing amounts of money. Google almost certainly did do that. Probably by vesting his hiring bonus over 2-3 years.
OpenAI is in a unique position right now to grant pre-IPO options (probably in the form of RSUs). And they wanted him badly enough to grant the extra options necessary to effectively 'buy out' whatever unvested Google bonus he's walking away from.
ur-whale 16 hours ago [-]
Yah, I guess Cali doesn't allow non-competes or something like that.
It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors. About Shazeer, from the article:
Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often by a small number of experienced ‘magicians,’ to even show any signs of life,” says Uszkoreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery right away. He decided to write his own version of the transformer team’s code. “I took the basic idea and made the thing up myself,” he says. Occasionally he asked Kaiser questions, but mostly, he says, he “just acted on it for a while and came back and said, ‘Look, it works.’” Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” he had taken the system to a new level.
Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.
He also saw LLM would replace search before anyone else, and that is something to look at the Lamda or GPT-1's output and think: yeah this will answer all of our questions one day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HN is certainly curated - I've been "admitting" that since the day I got outed as a mod here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621 (March 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507229 (April 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962942 (June 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569117 (Nov 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15556105 (Oct 2017)
But we try hard to do the curation by principle, not by personal whim. What principles? Really there's just one: intellectual curiosity—we try to feature what enhances that and dampen what degrades it [1]. From that starting point, though, you can derive lots of other principles. Probably the most important is that snark and indignation are bad for HN (especially in combination!) because they drown out curious conversation. That's all that you need to see why I posted that reply to the GP; no personal preference required.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
These are preference-based but you're pretending they're objective. I find _your_ comments to be full of snark and indignation more than any you respond to, but of course you won't agree. (But because you don't agree, that makes me objectively wrong, I know.)
"Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences." - someone smarter than the average HN commenter.
Do you have any specific examples of where dang or another moderator posted in that way?
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
Someone should write a bot to do this automatically. What is the HN policy on bots?
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
Easy peasy!
and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)
What percentage of Google employees are engineers...
Has been in more of a maintenance mode with a multiple of those people. If anything, the pace of the product has improved. Regardless of what you think about Musk, the company he bought was a bloated mess.
You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.
(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)
You mean fire the very smart people who designed the core systems AND insult them so that anyone with options would never want to work there?
We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.
Maybe Noam measures status differently.
Sadly the gap between reality and satire has shrunk.
But yes. I also wish that show would come back.
Noam shazeer would be google head dreamer
Uszkoreit wanted to build a more efficient/scalable language/seq2seq model that could take advantage of GPU parallelism (replacing RNNs which were the main approach to sequence modelling at that time).
Uszkoreit's insight was that although language appears sequential, it is in fact really part parallel part hierarchical, as can be seen by linguist's sentence parse trees where at each level there is parallelism/independence between the branches of the tree, with them getting combined at the next level up. This is what gave rise to the idea of a model that consisted of a stack of of parallel processing layers (transformer layers). I believe that attention was also part of the plan from day one, as this had already been proven to be valuable (Bahdanau) with RNN seq2seq modelling.
So, this is what Uszkoreit wanted to build, but by his own account he failed to come up with an implementation that matched or outperformed the prevailing RNN approach that he wanted to replace. At this point, Uszkoreit mentioned the idea to Shazeer, who got on board and eventually arrived at a performant architecture which was then pared back by an ablation process resulting in the initial encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Shazeer later came up with the mixture-of-experts architecture, and also other optimizations after he left to found character.ai
I'm talking from plenty of group project experience here.
The research history leading up to this was interesting - there had been a bunch of work, in various domains, on "autoencoder" architectures used to learn compact representations for things like dimensionality reduction and sequence representation. The idea was to have an encoder-decoder pair, connected by a limited bottleneck representation, with the training goal of the decoder reconstructing the encoder input from the bottleneck representation.
One example of this was to learn a fixed size(!) sequence (e.g. sentence) representation using an LSTM-based autoencoder (LSTM->embedding->LSTM), which at the time seemed rather shocking - the ability to represent a variable length sequence with a fixed size embedding. Equally shocking was that you could use this for machine translation simply by connecting an LSTM encoder for one language to an LSTM decoder for another language.
This type of LSTM->LSTM seq2seq encode-decode architecture for machine translation was then improved by Bahdanau by replacing the fixed size representation with an attention mechanism so the decoder could learn to be more specific about input-output relationships.
This type of LSTM-based seq2seq encode-decode architecture, using attention, is what Uszkoreit et al set out to improve - to make more efficient by using a parallel vs sequential (RNN) architecture. The Transformer was never conceived of as purely for language modelling, or as an "AI" architecture. Later when the usage focused on language modelling (generation, not translation), the encoder was dropped since input and output are the same thing.
He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead.
Now he’s leaving Google again for OpenAI.
Exciting times!
Google bought him back (with lots of money) and made him one of the leads of Gemini.
https://youtu.be/v0gjI__RyCY?is=nz77XP4KiJy7L1AX
What is exiting about this?
>> Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a "bright and beautiful boy", had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai app in late spring 2023.
People become obsessed with them. The builders have to know that their 'customers' are explicitly people with mental issues. Nobody sane or normal is talking to these things.
If you want to see how bad it is go checkout the reddit discourse when OpenAI deprecated one of their older models. Thousands of people acting like OpenAI had 'killed' their partners and best friends.
There are a lot of grey areas engineers work in when it comes to social stuff, privacy stuff, etc. There's no grey area with these. You're trying to hook people who are unwell and the people working on it should be ashamed.
---
Edit replying to below post, as I am rate limited:
> Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
You replied to my post, so I thought your post perhaps had some relevance to mine rather than being unrelated soapboxing.
I don't particularly agree with your soapboxing, at any rate. Character.AI was not a "relationship bot" company. Like any LLM, they could simply be prompted to respond as such, in the same way that ChatGPT can. As you pointed out yourself, ChatGPT has the same issue with people forming parasocial bonds, despite not attempting to cater to that market in any way at all. Should people who release chatbots be legally required to censor them heavily when users attempt to use them for anything other than technical questions? That seems excessive, and it seems that ascribing moral responsibility of that degree is akin to holding video game, music, or movie producers responsible for violence committed by someone who saw a piece of violent media. Moreover, how far does it go? Should distributing open-weight models be made illegal, because you're making available something that can't be censored?
Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
Google lost three critical years chasing AGI, and got acquired by SpaceX, now a Dyson Sphere startup whose pitch deck is just: "What if we put a paywall around the Sun?"
Not really.
Altman couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.
Noam is OTOH and IIUC the real deal.
Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.
- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.
You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.
- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.
It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.
It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?
Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)
also "empty handed" is just unnecesarily dramatic, he left all the knwoledge base he helped build, that's google's IP and is worth m(b?)illions
should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?
I have no dog in this race as I'm not fond of either OpenAI or Google.... but employees not being loyal to their big tech employers is a wild thing to be concerned about in 2026 when year after year many large tech companies (Google very prominently among them) continually post record profits and still lay people off by the thousands.
The Attention is all you need paper has Google logo, not character.ai
Noam is the real deal, he was pretty legendary within old-time ('00s) Google engineering. Paul Buchheit had a story about interviewing him with the "how to write a spellchecker" question and then him coming up with something better than the state-of-the-art, then basically delivering Google's spell corrector in his first 2-week Noogler project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilk-76W9rE&t=60
"Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides" - https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/google-character-ai-lawsuit...
Be aware...very disturbing: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac...
Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.
But money at that level isn't about being financially secure - to have a roof over your head and food to eat - it's about power.
Money at that level gives you the ability to shape the world in ways others can only dream of - whether that be starting your own company where you can set the values, funding a cure for Malaria, or political lobbying.
Depends on whether the person in question has strong views and a strong belief that they are in the right.
Full disclaimer - I have no insight or knowledge about this particular person - just making the rather obvious and general case that joining OpenAI now at a senior level is likely to generate a serious windfall, and such a windfall is power.
As I said, no idea what motivates this particular person - don't know them at all - the money may be entirely coincidental and it's all about getting stuff done - but he did choose OpenAI rather than somebody like Anthropic....
Seems like there are some insights here!
edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable.
1 liner summary:
To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.
> The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine in 1922. British rule and Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration led to growing violence between Arabs and Jews, causing the British to announce its intention to terminate the Mandate in 1947. The UN General Assembly recommended partitioning Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. However, the situation deteriorated into a civil war. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, the Jews ostensibly accepted it, declaring the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948 upon the end of the British mandate. Nearby Arab countries invaded Palestine, Israel not only prevailed, but conquered more territory than envisioned by the Partition Plan. During the war, 700,000, or about 80% of all Palestinians fled or were driven out of territory Israel conquered and were not allowed to return, an event known as the Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe') to Palestinians. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing for decades, about 850,000 Jews from the Arab world immigrated ("made Aliyah") to Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine
Also, it was Ottoman territory for hundreds of years up to WWI. I've had friends tell me for some reason about how Palestine was an independent country before... literally wasn't.
To some it still means favoring any existence of a Jewish state. The inertia isn't there because aside from the original partition plan being pushed by the UK, other countries have attacked Israel several times later in ways they would've have withstood without outside support.
Now that is a valid use of the term. I think the problem it that Zionism means so many different things it is nearly useless as a description. It seems more useful as a slur which has become very common in some circles.
"The inertia isn't there"
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
> Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
US and UK, yes. Not just cause of the weapons and money to Israel. After them, the top recipients of US foreign aid in the area are the bordering countries Egypt and Jordan, so that they don't attack.
And how is that?
Israel has a population of 10 million people and a very modern military and nuclear weapons. If it's existence was ever truly threatened things would get VERY ugly.
I have doubts about their ability to self-defend because otherwise we wouldn't be giving so much money, the situation would be stable. Even if they can severely hurt the attackers, it doesn't really matter if the attackers stop at nothing. We just lost a war against Iran despite having full air superiority and killing their leader. And especially if you're considering the scenario where Israel never got Western support, and thus never got those advanced weapons.
Israel razed Gaza to the ground. It was a genocide.
A non-zionist Israel would be one where all peoples had the same right, e.g.
It was never actually Palastinian land. It was Jewish land, then Roman land, then Ottoman land, then British land, then Jewish land after Palastinians attacked Israel and lost. At no point were the Palastinians ever a sovereign country and in fact they incredibly foolishly rejected the UN offer for one.
"other creeds and ethnicities should be second class "
Approximately 2.5 to 2.6 million non-Jews live in Israel, comprising about 25% to 26% of the country's total population. This is compared to less than 1% of the population of Gaza being non-muslim.
They fail to understand that their skill doesn't generalise.
That and the hyperglazing and platforming they get for having said skill makes them a prime candidate for exposing how average they are.
> "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender," Shazeer wrote, news site the Information reported Friday. "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them."
It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this. But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic, which clearly crosses the line into disrupting work.
And of course he's not directly accusing his coworkers of "sterilizing children", but he's 1) using language that compares politically sensitive health services that many of his coworkers or their families may have used and/or may feel defensive about to atrocities and 2) accusing his coworkers of supporting atrocities. That feels quite disruptive and inappropriate in the work environment IMO.
Anyway, to double back once, it actually doesn't really "assume it's a medically necessary procedure"; we can soften it to something like a "medically desired procedure" and the point in fact still stands that Shazeer's wording - which really should be the point here, not re-enacting the tired trans healthcare debate - is deliberately incendiary and manipulative. Broadly, no one is advocating for parents to be sterilizing their children as an end to itself, so it shouldn't be characterized as such.
Another controversy is physician-assisted s–... euthanasia. Some doctors would consider it medically necessary, but they can't legally perform or even recommend it, as it's considered murder. They can in Canada. Abortion of a viable fetus not threatening the mother is illegal in all 50 US states, but legal in many states in earlier stages, again based on what the states consider murder (but the doctor judges what is viable or a threat to the mother).
Anyway if gender-affirming care is just medically desired but not medically necessary, the sterilization is accepted but not necessary. I agree with the spirit of the wording, even though it's imprecise, because it highlights that children are taking on an irreversible side effect. It's a short quote and not a whole essay where he gets to clarify.
For me it was a really confusing issue until I became close friends with someone whose childhood best friend is trans.
If he was born a decade earlier, he probably would have killed himself (this was the path he was on, which is incredibly tragic and all too common); the gender dysphoria invoked depression was unbearable.
Instead, he was able to work through therapy and medical care to understand his gender dysphoria and receive gender affirming care in his late teens.
Now (over a decade post treatment) he’s among the most cheerful people I’ve ever met. He inspires joy as a band teacher, is inspiringly happily married, and is raising a beautiful baby girl.
I often think about him when people talk about the issue in the abstract. The hundreds of children whose lives he’s impacted for the better, let alone the lives of his friends and family. Removing gender affirming care is implicitly saying you don’t want any of that to happen, because the logical conclusion of removing is people like him in a pit of depression and despair that often ends in suicide, all over an affliction that they did not choose.
This is where the “medically necessary” part of gender affirming care comes from.
I didn’t understand it before I knew him and his story so I don’t begrudge people who are in shows I used to walk in. But I’d encourage people to try to understand and lead with empathy and meet people where they are.
It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates. So I can't support it. I still think people should have the right to do it on their own dime, and won't judge them for it either way. I can't trust any studies on this anymore because it's become politicized and weirdly speech-policed. This isn't a unique or nuanced opinion, it's probably the majority one and I sound like the rest.
Google knows Shazeer's value & paid $2bn to c.ai for it: Its undesirable for anyone (regardless of their seniority) to engage in a discussion without being invited to it. Flaring up discord isn't how someone in a leadership position at a huge company is supposed to operate. It is another thing if they've got the "fuck you" money & a few feathers to rattle; then they do whatever without care.
> But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic
Per reports, Sergey Brin said something similar in the internal forums, too. Don't think its the only problem. After all, Shazeer can literally pick & choose where they want to work, and probably has more leverage over GDM than GDM does over him.
(To my understanding, the closest equivalent is “ummah” in Arabic, where the connotation is flipped: goy can refer to a Jewish person but typically does not, whereas the ummah typically refers to Muslim peoples as a collective but can also be a general stand-in for “nation” or “world.”)
Which is why I think that story is very likely bullshit. It’s from an account that very frequently posts pro-IRGC content, and has previously used “the G word” itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247908
I explained my reasoning for avoiding the word downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591986
Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the second post is actually about (a) me having understanding for a position of someone i disagree with harshly, and (b) the logical structure of an argument, not the underlying topic itself. it was in reference to the content of the link that was posted.
anyway, mods can take it down, i get why the rules are there. you're also right to ask folks to keep it clean. but i stand by it; dude just seems to have a trifecta of awful traits and i'm so so so tired of super rich tech dudes ruining the world.
as evidence, what it _means_ to be a man, woman, etc, differs from society to society. if you ask me to quantify this precisely, i will struggle. but it's plain for all to see.
The idea that gender is a social concept is so blindingly obvious that, like bbeonx I kind of assume that anyone making comments like yours about "common sense" is either blindly parroting talking points without thinking about them, or arguing in bad faith.
I think you're putting words into peoples mouths there.
Acknowledging that there is a social construct we generally know of as "gender" and acknowledging that certain stereotypes and common understandings of that concept exist is not at all the same thing as demanding that people should fit into the narrowest stereotypes that you can think of.
Also worth noting that you acknowledging the existence of sexist stereotyping is an acknowledgement of the existence of gender as a social construct.
An example of using the category normatively would be saying someone isn't American because they burn the flag. My experience is that most of the people using "gender" normatively don't differentiate it from sex.
What's even worse is Google refused to work with the American military in the past, but as soon as it was Israel, #1 priority for them. So it's pretty clear where their loyalty is.
Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.
I'm no super-insider, I only hear industry scuttlebutt like everyone else, but I have about a 95% confidence that the last 18 months has just been about more and better, without any kind of real leap or breakthrough. More hardware, more data, better technique. Well, technique diffuses as people change companies, hardware can be built, and data can be gathered (or stolen!).
From my admittedly outsider perspective, the only years-long moat there is who has the most hardware. If you have the hardware, you can give away the compute to get the data (hello, subsidized subscriptions!). Technique can simply be hired. The only durable, multi-year advantage is the hardware.
So is that a moat? Sure, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the leading model companies of the moment. ASML is the real moat, and so it's ASML China is besieging, correctly (IMO) identifying that everything else can be caught up easily enough.
Check back in a few years...
Don't we all want to (automatically) and passively invest in a company losing billions of dollars ?
At least we can diversify our portfolio from SpaceX.
That's their moat.
Maybe also stolen copyrighted content that cannot be found anywhere else now, so they are the only ones who can train on it.
Grabbing market-share if you have investors that are ready to burn cash infinetely. Find a hot niche, buy a banana 1 USD, sell it for 0.10 USD.
Example: Cursor, they became popular because they were selling ChatGPT unlimited for 20 USD / month.
When they launched, just a reskinned VS Code, "fastest growing AI company"
No coincidence they were bought by SpaceX, who wants to consolidate revenue even if non-sense as long it helps other investors to exit. It shows rapid growth.
Profit is the real moat.
One example: Nvidia. Proprietary tooling, proprietary IP, proprietary hardware, no alternative, expensive.
You don't know what Cursor's game plan was. Maybe acquisition was their plan.
Buying at $1 and selling for $0.1 is still viable as long as they have money in the bank, until they achieve their goals. Most startups start out that way. Even giving away their services for free.
Obviously there will be failures. Doesn't mean they have no moat. Can you say a business with 100 customers and $1000 debt is less viable than one with a single customer and no debt?
Possibly true. Any smart innovations developed by one organization will be smuggled into others.
Training, inferring, and data collection, infrastructures are definitely moats. High-volume usage feedback is also hard to come by for new entrants.
Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels.
It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
As do thousands of people say this point. You think the head of deepseek doesn't?
1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).
2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.
Because I think as far as running the existing models and handling whatever nuances, it must be well understood by oai and ANT -- but you don't what you don't know.
And Deepminds Demis Hassabis was the single other? Or were there more?
So didn’t they get on? The latter is in London so time difference to put up with too
Question two: Why are OpenAI spending that money taking talent from Google, who can definitely outspend them for talent, and not Anthropic, who are leading the market and are at least somewhat financially constrained.
But I'm sure for at least some folks, this is true, given recent valuations.
Karpathy to Anthropic, now Noam to OpenAI.
What is going on at Google?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo&ra=m
I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.
As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle:
- huge, quasi unmatched data war chest
- huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure
- native AI chip design and production (TPU)
- the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there
- deepmind, enough said
- pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT
- a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...)
- supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley
Why do the best people leave ?
Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ?
Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance?
The only answer I can think of is:
- culture is completely broken
- management sucks something fierce
- company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore
Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1].
The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission.
Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is.
1: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI
Although I can't fathom why we'd want to? Like what is the advantage of giving tools sentience?
I always appreciated Jeff having a level head ... which this article seems to confirm:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts...
I've seen engmisc and industryinfo, and I agree they are sometimes insufferable but having a level head would be ignoring them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo
What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.
Popular entertainment and unique progress of human civilization can’t be really compared either
I'd argue that professional sport is the closest thing to a true meritocracy - doesn't matter who your Dad knows - you ability is there for all to see on the pitch.
And at the team level - if cosy cliques form, again - team performance doesn't lie - hard work, team work and talent is ultimately what delivers results on the pitch.
The other interesting part of professional sport is that the 'workers' have managed to capture more of the value than is traditionally the case - this is precisely because they are so hard to replace.
If you think professional footballers earn too much and are interchangable - feel free to try and get in the team.
So take this scenario - I'd argue that if you want to make progress in the field of these particular ML models, then you are going to need resources ( compute/data etc ) that is beyond most individuals capability to muster. ie you have to join a company with resources ( or persuade somebody to give you them ).
Right now there is one of those scenarios where capital is chasing talent - and so talent, if they are so inclined, is able to make the most of that.
But in normal times that's typically not the case - most of the time scientists are chasing the capital ( directly or indirectly in the form of a job in a well resourced company ) in order to be able to science, rather than the other way around.
It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.
I doubt that the money had anything to do with it.
I also doubt that the state of the technology at OAI vs. Google had much to do with it, Google is behind no doubt, but the gap is not as far as we know, insurmountable.
I suspect that this is a leadership clash. Noam was working in GDM. GDM somehow went away from coding and RSI into "world models" and that has played out very poorly. Who made that call? Who was still playing politics?
Given this is Noam the list of people that could be pissing him off is very small: Demis, Sergey (?!), a couple of VPs in GDM.
What the hell happened?
Based on what?
Do they really? What does it cost them if they're wrong?
Needless to say, the OP could be right but they could be right without proof. Or proof would out them. Or it's malicious posting. Don't take anything on the internet too seriously, even in such sanctimonious spaces as HN.
C'mon people, if you don't know Noam personally, who are you to fling such accusations?
I really hate the low bar of HN discussions lately. It's late-Slashdot-level. Brrr.
Also, why didn't they nail him down contractually when they bought character.ai ... isn't that pretty standard with these type of superstar (re)hires?
OpenAI is in a unique position right now to grant pre-IPO options (probably in the form of RSUs). And they wanted him badly enough to grant the extra options necessary to effectively 'buy out' whatever unvested Google bonus he's walking away from.
LOL.