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What I wish someone had told me
- mianos 3y ago> Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks. This makes no sense in the domain they are on. Very few. significant things they do takes weeks. Even planning for a learning run takes months. There are a lot if things that can be split into just a few weeks for some contrite sprint plan. There are others that take longer before realising intermediate results.
- aeternum 3y agoOne of the key things OpenAI does is very small scale model experiments. You can iterate a lot faster if your training run takes on the order of minutes. So vet ideas there, only allow proven ideas to be part of the longer training run. ML model training has become the new "my code's compiling" except now it takes weeks in many cases. The train then chill mindset that some ML engineers have is not they way to make rapid progress.
- bvan 3y agoShould have used ChatGPT to generate this. A bit of a word salad.
- zubairq 3y agoSam altman always has good advice for me
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway0665 3y agoAnyone have any examples of the business equivalent of the laws of physics?
- silexia 3y agoFocus.
- andy99 3y ago"Good, fast, or cheap, pick two"
- swyx 3y agomy version of this for the dev tools market https://www.latent.space/i/137474557/the-foundation-model-ops-landscape https://www.latent.space/i/137474557/the-foundation-model-op... > Most experienced devtool investors know that devtool markets usually come in threes: three parts of a stool that individually make sense, but collectively start jostling for the limited budget (and funding) available in their larger category (and will eventually be guided by their market to build or buy each others’ features in the process) > For frontend/JAMstack devs, this was a three way battle between startups building metaframeworks, cloud infra, and content management systems, and various combinations of each. Arguably round 1 won by Nextjs/Vercel and Contentful. In data engineering, a similar battle ensued between data catalogs, semantic layers, and business intelligence, though we are still in very early days of category collapse. Even in fintech, you see Deel/Rippling/Ramp/Brex building each other’s features as fast as they can between the trio of contractor, payroll, and corporate spending products.
- malfist 3y agoI took it to mean, don't fight beurocratic battles that you won't win. For example, fighting RTO at Amazon. Jassy has made it one of his top priorities, and no matter how much I disagree with it, I'm not going to shift the needle
- saulpw 3y agoInertia: the energy required to change direction is proportional to the size of the organization.
- legitster 3y agoThe Mythical Man Month comes to mind as one example. There are also lots of business plans that promise outrageous returns on investment... sometime down the line. But at the end of the day your business is never going to be more valuable than the amount of money your customers give you minus operating costs.
- darkteflon 3y ago> “Scale often has surprising emergent properties” Hard to read that without smiling.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago"Nobody is laughing now." —SamA from early 2023 interview, when asked about being the laughing-stock of AI circa 2018.
- DaveFr 3y agoThis is closer to a subtweet than meaningful writing, but I bet it's cathartic.
- herval 3y agoI love when winners turn random chance into a narrative where they totally knew what they were doing
- whynotminot 3y agoWhat about this makes you say that?
- htk 3y agoI bet on jealousy.
- herval 3y agothanks for projecting, but nah
- herval 3y agoThis post is a list of common sense advice (I heard them all before), and there’s probably no correlation between them and success (except for “the right connections”, in the first item). You can follow this advice top to bottom and still fail spectacularly every time. But when people succeed, they retell the story - almost always random, like the sudden success of chatgpt - into an act of sheer will, where their intellect played a central role on beating the odds. As history shows us again and again, it’s usually revisionism (Or maybe I’m just bitter, having shut down my startup today)
- whynotminot 3y ago> (Or maybe I’m just bitter, having shut down my startup today) This was actually the exact vibe I was feeling from your post. And it’s ok, I get it. Take a while to be upset and then get back out there. I wish you the best of luck in your next venture.
- SunghoYahng 3y agoThen, how about creating 1000 startups and operating them in parallel? Since success is mostly luck, it doesn't matter how well each one is operated. Therefore, by operating 1000 startups, the probability of success can be increased to 1000 squared.
- muglug 3y ago18. Be wary of pithy truisms. Success mostly follows from a combination good ideas, the right people, and lucky timing.
- impendia 3y ago> Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. I am curious about others' track record doing this. My employer (a university) recently started enforcing a certain rule making us fill out more paperwork. I emailed the person responsible, and did my best to be polite, but basically asked "Is this really necessary?" This provoked a very negative response. All I accomplished was to generate ill will, to piss off everyone involved (including myself), and to take everyone's attention away from their jobs. I felt like a fool. I'm reminded of PG's quote that "rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience". To fight bullshit is to focus my mental energy on bullshit, and I wonder if it would have been better to make the minimum effort needed to comply, and move on. Perhaps others fared better?
- sponaugle 3y agoBureaucracy is very very difficult to fight if you are not in charge, and conversely wasteful bureaucracy is almost entirely in the domain of fault of the person in charge ( the CEO, the President, etc of a company). If you are in charge, you can stop it. I do it all the time, and I rather enjoy when someone tells me I need to fill out a useless outdated form to do something, and I say 'So, if I don't, do I get fired?'. The answer is either 'yes, you will', or 'no... um.. I guess this might not really be needed.' The message to eliminated wasted time and wasted process has to come from the very top, with such authority and clarity that it leaves no room for 'that is how we have always done it'.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoYeah, it's good advice if you're CEO, if you're not you better have nothing to lose and be willing to leave the job even if you think you are a good diplomat. I think your last sentence is often the only play, do just exactly what you need to do to appear to be all in and a model supporter of the "initiative" without putting any real effort in to it. But it's also a skill to know when you can, and when you can't change a course of action. Sometimes something silly is happening that no one cares about and you can just change it by speaking up and taking ownership of it.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoI've personally decided to minimally comply. Sometimes I'll just skip steps and if no one calls me out on it then great. If they do... Well, I guess I have to waste more time. Easier to ask forgiveness and all that.
- smegsicle 3y ago[flagged]
- PandaRider 3y ago> No.6 Communicate clearly and concisely I have mixed feelings about this quote because I do not like when life writers write high-level statements such as this. Personally, I prefer very very specific suggestions on preventing very very specific problems. For example: How to prevent broken-telephone problem when communicating technical topics to an un-initiated audience? 1. Recognize ambiguous pronouns [1] 2. Distinguish active voice from passive voice 3. Create helpful lists. Maybe this is a one-off incident of lack of proof-reading? I noticed this SamAltman article didn't have the usual proof reading rigor [1]: https://developers.google.com/tech-writing/one https://developers.google.com/tech-writing/one
- mafuyu 3y agoA list of unactionable aphorisms without context?
- swyx 3y ago> Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think. i struggle with this. anyone can macroexpand with tips?
- nequo 3y agoSell the house and buy bitcoin I guess. This advice seems to assume that high conviction cannot be the result of cognitive biases.
- arathis 3y agoMacroexpand
- loa_in_ 3y agoJust lok at the openai: they not only provide ML models, but also a chat experience, a way to save your preious interactions, an easy way to pay, fine-tunes, and that's all from day one
- notzane 3y agoSteve Jobs was the same—here’s a clip of Ive talking about it https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1545415644425752576?s=46 https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1545415644425752576?s=...
- feydaykyn 3y agoInstead of doing a lot small things, work on a few high value ones. The definition of "high value" is context dependent of course, for instance if the ones buying a software are not the ones who will using it, the value of UX efficiency when doing bulk operations will not be the same.
- teleforce 3y agoThe last one is golden "Working with great people is one of the best parts of life". It's unthinkable nowadays to work in the old AT&T/Bell lab environment during the invention and early works of transistor, Unix/C, fiber/laser, CCD, DSP, etc. For the glimpse of the wonderful environment working there check out Richard Hamming's book "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" since he was working there when most of the inventions happened.
- JCharante 3y agoWhy is it flagged? It's a new post
- bananapub 3y agocan someone please enumerate what so many people like and admire about Sam Altman? as far as I can tell, his career was: 1. get VC funding for his silly startup, which goes nowhere and is shut down 1. get a job at Y Combinator handing out other people's money 1. get sacked from Y Combinator for unclear reasons 1. get a job at OpenAI as the CEO, not a product or engineering person what particular things has he, personally, done that make him so popular and admired on this site?
- sponaugle 3y agoAs far as this particular post from Sam, who cares? Judge something by that something, not by who said it. If it is advice that is good, it is good. It isn't good because it comes from someone you like. It is good because it is good. Content is what matters, not the credentials of the author. Lots of people with great credentials say stupid things... and smart things...
- SunghoYahng 3y agoActually, even if you understand the last item literally, it is impressive enough to gain reputation. Why did you put it as the last item, thinking it was nothing special?