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GPT5 pre-training just ended I believe. Brock, Pachocki, Szymon Sidor, would have likely all been involved. These are huge losses. Pachocki led pre-training
by aidaman 3y ago
GPT5 pre-training just ended I believe. Brock, Pachocki, Szymon Sidor, would have likely all been involved.
These are huge losses. Pachocki led pre-training for GPT-4, and probably GPT-5. Brockman is the major engineer responsible for the efficiency improvements that enabled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to be even remotely cost-effective. That is a piece that is often overlooked, but OpenAI's advantage over the competition in compute efficiency is probably even larger than the model itself.
- convexstrictly 3y ago"Greg Brockman works 60 to 100 hours per week, and spends around 80% of the time coding. Former colleagues have described him as the hardest-working person at OpenAI." https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman/ https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...
- schleck8 3y agoThis is like a supervillain origin story, Greg and Sam are 100 % going to start something new now, even if it's just out of spite with how much both seem to have liked their work at OpenAI
- karmasimida 3y agoGreg seems to be much loved by OpenAI employees, and generally inspiring person.
- saberience 3y agoIf they were popular at OpenAI, I would say they have a good chance of succeeding too. They could offer excellent equity packages to all the best engineers and researchers and due to the non-profit nature of OpenAI (and hence no equity), these people might be very tempted to leave.
- rlt 3y agoOpenAI is supposedly “capped profit” so employees do get equity with limited upside. But yeah, since Sam and Greg were apparently pushed out because they were building too good of a business any OpenAI employees that were aligned with them are likely to jump ship and join them, and OpenAI will revert to the non-profit research lab it started out as.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoWould they even be able to compete with OpenAI at this point? Even without Greg and Sam they have Ilya, the models they've trained so far, institutional knowledge, datasets and billions from Microsoft. Could OpenAI be at escape velocity anyway to AGI just continuing on the track it's been on?
- akokanka 3y agoThere are plenty of investors who would pour billions into these 2. MSFT got it's worth others want too.
- siva7 3y agoMicrosoft got the models. And their compute infrastructure. They’re powerful enough to bleed openai out if it’s in their interest. I’m not sure if there is much trust between the new leadership and microsoft.
- mkl95 3y ago> Could OpenAI be at escape velocity anyway to AGI just continuing on the track it's been on? Could a nuclear energy company be at escape velocity to fusion because they are the best at fission? I wouldn't think so
- cherryteastain 3y agoOpenAI are not on the track to AGI
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoI don't think its possible, at least for the foreseable future, they were heavily over indexed on Azure offering them discounted compute, not like they're gonna buy that amount of GPU elsewhere
- sanxiyn 3y agoOn the other hand, Anthropic exists, so I am not sure.
- exitb 3y agoI can imagine both Apple and Google happily positioning themselves in the same type of relationship as OpenAI-Microsoft.
- vineyardmike 3y agoGoogle had internal efforts, and Anthropic already. They definitely don’t have the compute to spare to split with another organization. Apple surely doesn’t have a cluster that at all compares with the big cloud giants. Oracle and AWS are really the only cloud left, and oracle is already renting to Microsoft for GPU compute.
- nirav72 3y ago>Apple surely doesn’t have a cluster that at all compares with the big cloud giants. Apple has a lot of cash to throw at it. Question would be if Apple is even interested in it.
- vineyardmike 3y agoThe problem is that a significant amount of the already-made GPUs are in use. Even if they can afford to throw money at it, where is that money going to go? The best they can do is out-bid their competitors, for the competitors hardware. I'm sure apple doesn't want to pay Google for GCP resource to train an AI. Again, there may not be enough companies renting out GPUs at all.
- lwhi 3y agoALDI vs. LIDL
- martijnvds 3y agoALDI Nord vs Aldi Süd; Adidas vs Puma?
- lwhi 3y agoYes you're correct, thanks! Edit: apparently ALDI VS LIDL is an urban myth. It's ALDI that was split in two ..
- schleck8 3y agoAldi and Lidl are each other's biggest competitors. Aldi Süd and Nord don't really clash because there is only two markets where both are present: Germany, where they aren't competing though (split in North and South) and the US (Aldi vs. Trader Joe's). Every other country only has one of the two Aldis. Lidl on the other hand is present in most large markets alongside one of the Aldis.
- wavewrangler 3y agoUsed to have a LIDL now we have an ALDI
- boltzmann_brain 3y ago[dead]
- sgt101 3y agoSeems to me that most of that is spent on twitter.
- sasaf5 3y agoI am either skeptical or envious of such claims. Someone coding so much would quickly be launched into meetings to communicate one's results and to coordinate with others. It would be my life's dream to spend 80 hours per week coding without having to communicate with others... but no one is an island...
- nvarsj 3y agoIt's possible, but harder than almost any other role. There are people at Google/Meta like this. Usually E7/E8 levels, "coding machines". It's much easier to go into a pseudo PM/TL/Director role though to hit those levels and income, so it's uncommon. You really have to have a passion for coding to put in the hours and be very good at it. Incredibly rare, believe it or not. Lots of people think they are good coders but this is another level. Proof is in your commit/code review count/async comms being 10x-100x of everyone else in your org, and it's clear you're single-handedly enabling delivery of major projects earlier than anyone else could. Think of the pressure of doing this continuously.
- potatopatch 3y ago> and it's clear you're single-handedly enabling delivery of major projects earlier than anyone else could. You have to watch out with that.. I've seen whole projects pushed through by management where no one else was involved enough to review normally, but everyone had an interaction that implied they had only seen the top of the iceberg of problems with it.
- sasaf5 3y agoMaybe Google and Meta are different than my company, or maybe I am not in the league of such star coder, but in my experience as soon as a demo of my code is delivered I am immediately launched into managerial mode coordinating other devs working on my code. I came to just accept it.
- NhanH 3y agoIt's not about being rockstar or 10x. He was the chairman of the board (and President of the LLC). Practically speaking, he can work however he wishes within the company. Seeing that he went from CTO role to President role, it's fairly obvious that he got the opportunity to structure the role and the work to best fit him (and probably the company, too).
- silviot 3y agoI'm trying to read and reread this over and over again to make sense of this but to me it sounds like in the comments people speak as if Greg brockman resigned while in the article he is not amongst the three names who resigned. What am I missing here?
- aidaman 3y agohe resigned earlier. google it. or bing it. or chatgpt it.
- frabcus 3y agoHe was fired from being Chair of the Board, but the rest of the board left him in his position as an engineer (?) in the company. Then an hour or two later he resigned as an engineer. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312704
- romafirst3 3y agoSeriously, do we honestly believe 80 hours a week coding is a good thing. What, is he this bad at coding. What about he spends 4 hours a week coding cause he’s so good at coding. Way more impressive.
- andirk 3y agoMight as well add LOC as a metric. Both can mean the person is extremely inefficient, over-engineering everything, and their eyes are begging for a break. However! The best engineers I've been around do work a lot and they like it.
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoI’m not sure why it’s seen as ok to work 100 hours per week, or even glorified. If instead of work it was something else it would be seen as a problem. 100 hours per week doesn’t leave room for anything else other than basic human needs. “They like it”, well all addicts like what they’re addicted to, it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
- andirk 3y agoI think a lot of addicts despise their addiction. Exceptions are the few highly acceptable addictions in society such as coffee. Nonetheless, doing anything in excess can be detrimental to one's health and livelihood and should be kept in checked, monitored. OK now back to my 12 hour day. Not burnt out yet so I'm going to keep going. And yes, I LIKE IT!
- infecto 3y agoWhen you are a founder and working in a company doing bleeding edge it’s easy to work lots of hours. Maybe it’s not the kind of environment for you but others thrive in it. Lots of high demand type roles out unrelated to engineering that also have large hour workloads and compensate exceptionally well.
- Xenoamorphous 3y ago
- tsurba 3y agoWhat Brockman tweets is from technical standpoint the most mundane, boring, and obvious stuff I’ve read from a programmer. My reads of this guy have been he’s not working on any problems that are technically difficult (or interesting). It’s much easier to work long hours on easy problems. He also has a managerial vibe in all communications which supports my feeling. Most programming work in any project and company is mundane, so I do agree someone taking care of all that without whining is actually extremely valuable. I couldn’t do it. Still doesn’t really make sense to put him on such a pedestal like many in this thread. It seems like a cultural thing in the US to overvalue individuals, and downplay the importance of good teams.
- basisword 3y agoI know nothing about the guy but judging his work and assuming you can guess the type of problems he works on based off his tweets is ludicrous.
- lawn 3y agoAh, the reverse of the old "he uses difficult terms so he must be super smart".
- wholien 3y agohe is on a pedestal because everyone who’s worked with him said he’s amazing and effective. But it is your right to assume what he works on from reading his tweets and leap from that to how this is an American cultural thing tho.
- amelius 3y agoThey said "senior researchers", and I would say a programmer is not a researcher if they spend all their time on programming.
- jebarker 3y agoThis type of research happens in teams
- 3y ago
- koonsolo 3y agoCoding for 50 to 80 hours a week? Well, I call bullshit on that. Never seen anyone do that consistently and with high quality and quantity output. Let's first define 'coding' before we jump into the details: 'coding' for me is sitting at your computer doing the work. It's not getting a coffee, chatting with a colleague, going to toilet or reading hacker news. So if you're reading this and claiming to do 100 hours per week of productive time, I call bullshit on that. Being at the office for 60 to 100 hours, sure, I believe that. When I was studying for exams at University, I did more than half of the work before noon. The rest was spread out over the afternoon and evening. At 20:00 my brain was dead. I could read a sentence, and nothing would stick. Read it again, impossible to process it. So I always wondered how these other students could study until 2am in the morning. Well, turned out they didn't do shit in the morning. That's how they studied "all the way into the night". Now back to my programming career: At my best I do 4 to 6 hours of concentrated coding per day. At my best, nobody seriously outperformed me. So if you claim to do more than x2 the work that I'm doing, I would love to see the output of that. People like Cal Newport basically confirm what I've seen over the years. So do habits of the most famous authors. Now, I can be convinced that it's actually possible. Take a look at Carmack, who claims to do 12 hours a day. He doesn't seem to be a bullshitter to me. So either he's counting time that I wouldn't count, like dungeon mastering a D&D game, or playtesting, or whatever. Or he's actually a super human work machine. Now he worked with Abrash, who seemed to do more sane hours. And in the end Carmack had high respect for the output of Abrash. So yeah, if you know people who can actually do 14 hours of high concentrated coding 7 days out of 7, I would love to hear it and get some kind of confirmation that they're not browsing reddit and HN 50% of that time. And if you're reading this and claim to do 14 hours a day of concentrated work, I call bullshit on that you HN addict!
- timthelion 3y agoWhile I'm sure 100 hours a week is impossible, my dad did 6x11 work days which were dominated by coding pre-internet. You wouldn't know him, he burned out. I have personally witnessed him do more than 60 hours in a week coding. That said, his coding work isn't necessarilly creative. He can do a 12 hour stint of step through debugging stopping only to microwave frozen food. Or 12 hours of data analytic work. Since it is said this man is into optimization I'd say it is possible he's like my dad, he gets into this numb zombie state "change something, run again, look at profiler output line by line." Some people doom scroll HN or tiktok 14 hours a day, other's doom scroll a flame graph.
- belter 3y agoThis is Time Magazine...Once wrote a piece about Gates and Warren Buffett spending the weekends on Math quizzes...
- mromanuk 3y agoCoding for 10/12hs daily isn’t healthy, is not sustainable and is not the way to live. I love coding and I being in front of a computer all my life, since I was 8. All the meaningful life moments in retrospective weren’t at the screen. Life occurs outside the screen. I understand that sometimes is worth it, to create a great product, solve something important or just for fun. But beware
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- OOPMan 3y agoThat sounds spectacularly unhealthy
- iLoveOncall 3y agoBrockman did not get fired from his job at the company, only from his position as chairman of the board. Did nobody read this damn article? It's 5 paragraphs long, take 1 minute.
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoHe quit bro: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559
- iLoveOncall 3y agoAh alright thanks, it was not one of the 3 names mentioned here so it confused me.
- ramraj07 3y agoIt’s so juicy statements like this become stale in hours. Exciting times.
- seanhunter 3y agoGreg Brockman hasn't quit OpenAI. He quit the board[1]. As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO. [1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition?s=09 https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transiti...
- jstummbillig 3y agohttps://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559
- matthalvorson 3y agohe tweeted he's leaving the company a few hours after the press release
- seanhunter 3y agoInteresting. Thanks.
- mi_lk 3y agohe sure did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312704
- ShamelessC 3y agoDo you have a source that they just finished GPT-5 pre training or is that just speculation.
- Anotheroneagain 3y agoWhat is the truth about OpenAI achieving some sort of "true" AGI?
- abenga 3y agoProbably almost guaranteed to be false.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]