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Why I Joined OpenAI
- rvz 8mo ago[flagged]
- patrickaljord 8mo agoUnless OpenAI goes with a very liberal definition of AGI, he's going to wait decades for AGI.
- Insanity 8mo agoThey’re already trying to redefine the AGI playing field by doing so.
- thefounder 8mo agoI think OpenAI will IPO at 1T. I don’t want to say bubble but it could be one of these stocks super hyped that never goes anywhere after the IPO(I.e airbnb during Covid)
- Kina 8mo agoI believe that OpenAI wants to IPO at that valuation. I don’t think it can IPO.
- thinkingkong 8mo agoBrendan can do whatever he wants. Hes that good. If anybody seriously needed to interview him 20+ times to figure it out, then the burden is now on them to not fuck it up.
- ojbyrne 8mo agoThe article says "I ended up having 26 interviews and meetings (of course I kept a log) with various AI tech giants." I don't think that indicates that any one company interviewed him 20+ times.
- 7e 8mo agoHe's summing interviews across all AI giants. But the ones about to IPO can interview someone almost infinitely many times, because everyone wants on the bandwagon.
- sgarland 8mo agoSeriously. I would expect him to be more of an offer-only scenario.
- Banditoz 8mo ago> ...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet There's something that doesn't sit right with me about this statement, and I'm not sure what it is. Are you sure you didn't just join for the money? (edit: cool problems, too)
- mewpmewp2 8mo ago[flagged]
- dang 8mo ago"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wheelerwj 8mo agoI stopped reading just after that. “I joined PhilipsMorris to make smoking cigarette smoking safer…” The problems are interesting and the pay is exceptional. Just fucking own it.
- selectodude 8mo agoHe interviewed everywhere and took the biggest offer. Good! Don’t piss on my face and tell me it’s raining.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 8mo agoIt's raining anyway. If I piss on your face, I can at least try to make the experience as positive as possible for you.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 8mo agoI apologize for the obscenity. I hope it's clear that I was trying to make a point in relation to the article.
- dforsythe 8mo ago[flagged]
- zombiwoof 8mo ago[dead]
- I_am_tiberius 8mo agoIf it's in your power, make sure user prompts and llm responses are never read, never analyzed and never used for training - not anonymized, not derived, not at all.
- surajrmal 8mo agoNo single person other than Sam Altman can stop them from using anonymized interactions for training and metrics. At least in the consumer tiers.
- satvikpendem 8mo agoIt's a little too late for that, all the models train on prompts and responses.
- amluto 8mo ago> She was worried about a friend who was travelling in a far-away city, with little timezone overlap when they could chat, but she could talk to ChatGPT anytime about what the city was like and what tourist activities her friend might be doing, which helped her feel connected. She liked the memory feature too, saying it was like talking to a person who was living there. This seems rather sad. Is this really what AI is for? And we do not need gigawatts and gigawatts for this use case anyway. A small local model or batched inference of a small model should do just fine.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- junofan 8mo agoIt’s super dope, and you can have it talk to people for you in the local language when you go there. I’ve busted it out to explain what I’m thinking for me. Watching travel shows on TV or reading travel magazines is sadder.
- UltraSane 8mo agoI use it as something to talk to about incredibly nerdy and/or obscure things no one else would be willing to talk about.
- manuelmoreale 8mo agoThat’s honestly just sad. Not the fact you doing it, but rather the fact you have nobody to talk to about those things.
- rkomorn 8mo agoI feel like this kind of response is a good example of why someone wouldn't talk to others about things.
- UltraSane 8mo agoWhen I say nerdy and/or obscure, I mean things like "are quantum fluctuations ergodic and how does this affect affect the probability of a quantum fluctuation triggering a new big bang?"
- brendangregg 8mo agoTo answer a few people at once: I did mention compensation as a factor in the post, but I didn't elaborate details, so easy to miss. Comp is important of course, but so are the other factors. It feels like I can't go for a day without reading about the cost of AI datacenters in the news, and I can do something about it.
- DeepYogurt 8mo agoYou gonna open source it?
- politelemon 8mo agoIt would be good if the performance improvements made can be applicable across the industry so everyone benefits. But it doesn't sound unbelievable that OpenAi may want to keep some of it secret to keep an advantage over others?
- yunohn 8mo agoUnbelievable? It’s unfathomable - out of all existing AI companies, OpenAI is the least open of them all. They have stopped contributing any useful research into the public domain. Even infamous “villains” like Meta and China are doing leaps and bounds more compared to /Open/AI and the like.
- bahmboo 8mo agoThanks for taking the risk in this environment and posting about your experience from a personal standpoint. [environment: people will come at you from all angles with very passionate opinions]
- kgraves 8mo ago> I stood on the street after my haircut and let sink in how big this was, how this technology has become an essential aide for so many, how I could lead performance efforts and help save the planet. Brendan. First of all congratulations on your new job. However, It is easier to just say to everyone it is about the money, compensation and the stock options. You're not joining a charity, or to save the planet, this company is about to unload on the public markets at an unfathomable $1TN valuation. Don't insult your readers.
- matt_daemon 8mo ago> Mia the hairstylist got to work, and casually asked what I do for a living. "I'm an Intel fellow, I work on datacenter performance." Silence. How could she not know?
- Insanity 8mo agoFor people who’s main computing devices are phones, this isn’t hard to believe at all. Interacting outside of the tech bubble is eye opening. Conversely, the hair stylist might have mentioned the brand of a super popular scissor supplier/other equipment you’d have never heard of.
- Upvoter33 8mo agoThis part of the article was cringe for me. Like he wanted to impress Mia and once she didn’t react he realized he needed to change jobs. BG and eBPF are awesome but this article read like a midlife crisis to me.
- SanjayMehta 8mo ago[flagged]
- indigodaddy 8mo agoThis article is so full of itself I can hardly stand to read it. I had to just sort of skim it instead. Sorry! This style just doesn't do it for me.
- notepad0x90 8mo agoIt's a blog post, not an article. A narrative of events, not an interesting write-up on a topic.
- indigodaddy 8mo agoVital clarification in this context, thank you so much
- biggggtalkguy 8mo agoNot the first time either. See this person's previous blog when leaving his earlier company. Lots of Kim kardashian vibe of self inflated self worth.
- pstuart 8mo agoThe guy is pretty much god-tier in performance engineering -- I'm not seeing the kardashian vibe at all. There's an element of "dear diary" but it reads (to me) as just trying to catalog what he thinks is important to note.
- yagizdegirmenci 8mo agoBrendan known to be an exact opposite person by the way. A quite funny post from his blog on this topic: https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2021-06-04/an-unbelievable-demo.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2021-06-04/an-unbelievable...
- mi_lk 8mo ago“Known to be” then proceed to write the exact opposite type of article on his personal blog. Maybe he wants to be recognized another way
- light_triad 8mo agoMia was right. Listen to Mia
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- brendangreggg 8mo ago[dead]
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 8mo agoApparently, there's this guy who's really good at optimizing computer performance and makes a lot of money doing it. At the same time, he writes mediocre school essays that are actually a bit embarrassing. Guys, if you have the opportunity to land a very well-paid job, then do it. Take the money. Live your life. But please spare us the public self-castration.
- tominous 8mo agoPerformance and efficiency are important, but we need you to invent the monitoring tools and visualisations that will underpin alignment!
- perf99999999999 8mo agoBrendan, I'm a big fan of your book, and work. I don't have a problem with you joining OpenAI; best of luck there! However, I'm not sure your analysis is quite correct, in this case. If OpenAI can mobilize X (giga)dollars to buy Y amounts of energy, your work there will not reduce X or Y, it will simply help them produce more "tokens" (or whatever "unit of AI") for a given amount of energy. So in a sense you're helping make OpenAI tools better, more effective, but it's not helping reduce resource usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- pillefitz 8mo agoAnd the consequence of burning more tokens, of course, is more widespread adoption, weaving AI more deeply into the fabric of our reality.
- bigyabai 8mo agoThat's a possible second-order effect, but not guaranteed.
- ulnarkressty 8mo agoWas going to say the same thing, but I'm pretty sure he already knows that. Smart people can convince themselves of everything.
- MonkeyClub 8mo agoAnyone can convince themselves of anything, the only thing that varies is the complexity of the rationalization.
- bagacrap 8mo agoOne day if openai becomes a real company (and public), like the kind that takes money from customers and employe accountants and turns a profit, etc, there may be downward pressure on the "costs" side of the equation. Also while the thirst for training may be insatiable, I could see the energy cost of "hey chat can you check the basketball score" coming down.
- pyrale 8mo agoStrong LinkedIn vibes in this entry.
- r33b33 8mo ago[flagged]
- puttycat 8mo ago> it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet. You're in for a surprise buddy.
- zeroonetwothree 8mo ago[flagged]
- jhhh 8mo agoDid the article intentionally start with a LLM cliche to filter out all the people who hate reading obviously generated content? I would say it worked.
- jofzar 8mo ago[flagged]
- laluser 8mo agoI have been attempting to write a lot more with AI, but it's so gimmicky. It's always spitting lines like this: " it's not just about x – it's about y." like in this post. I find it so frustrating that no matter the prompt I throw at it, it eventually repeats itself again after some time. Good technical and succinct writing is almost impossible to iterate on with AI for me.
- xnxnxkx 8mo ago[flagged]
- estearum 8mo agoI spend a lot of time on LinkedIn due to job and I have an actual physical gag reflex at this point now from the "it's not X, it's Y" pattern. I didn't know it was possible for a sentence structure to cause such a thing.
- icepush 8mo agoIt's not the sentence structure—it's the lack of sincerity
- mawadev 8mo agoI like how my eyes went over the first sentence, barely parsing it and already discarding the information, because its obviously ai generated. Its like the circumstances we live in added a new layer of perception to my brain to guard itself against the flood of useless information!
- kopollo 8mo agoCould you please provide information about the efficiency optimization you plan to implement?
- llmslop 8mo ago[flagged]
- LittlePeter 8mo ago[flagged]
- fulafel 8mo agoSaving the planet and the Trump alliance (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/openai-president-greg-brockman-trump-super-pac https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...) don't seem to relaly jive.
- selfawareMammal 8mo ago> it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet. I have joined OpenAI to work on this challenge directly. I couldn't go on reading.
- throwa356262 8mo agoReminds me of the TechCrunch episode of Silicon Valley TV show. Everyone was there to make the big buck but all collectively pretended they were doing their work for the good of humankind. This guy and Rob Pike should have a talk.
- heeton 8mo agoThat episode, and this Gavin quote, encapsulate the attitude perfectly. “I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place, better than we do.”
- pelagicAustral 8mo ago"Making the world a better place by constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility" Beautiful satire in that show. I'm still throwing my own version of this quote every now and again at the office.
- everybodyknows 8mo agoWhy Rob Pike in particular? Most stuff I've read from him was nuts-and-bolts technical.
- georgemcbay 8mo agoI assume the Rob Pike mention was in reference to this: https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Frobpike.io%2Fpost%2F3matwg6w3ic2s&viewtype=tree https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile... He apparently isn't the biggest fan of AI.
- allovertheworld 8mo ago[flagged]
- yomismoaqui 8mo ago[flagged]
- padolsey 8mo agoThe AI industry, and SV tech generally, has a pattern of recruiting talent by flattering people's self-image as builders and discoverers, which makes it psychologically very difficult for those people to reckon honestly with downstream harm.
- moltar 8mo ago[flagged]
- dgoxow 8mo ago[flagged]
- throwawee 8mo ago[flagged]
- falloutx 8mo ago[flagged]
- jasonvorhe 8mo ago[flagged]
- import 8mo agoAs a big fan of you; There are a lot of things feels off in the post, and as others mentioned it feels like you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re going to save the world but everyone knows it’s something else.
- bilekas 8mo ago[flagged]
- testfrequency 8mo agoIf OpenAI is responsible for “saving the planet” we are so fucked. We are currently fucked as well to be clear as people genuinely have this disconnected mindset of reality.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- stonecharioteer 8mo agoI want to be as good as you at performance engineering. It's the direction I want for my career. Something tells me that in a year we'll see a post about why you left OpenAI. Sama won't listen to anyone. That's why. None of these CEOs are going to listen.
- FattiMei 8mo agoI found funny the hairstylist did provide a pretty distopic reason to use ChatGPT... it seems that you are trying to please your new employer... Nevertheless I respect performance work and I'm studying for something similar. I hope to land a job in HPC
- lxrogers 8mo agoaccording to most in the industry, the cheaper AI is the more we will need of it. So to actually reduce the energy used by AI, you should try to make it as inefficient as possible.
- zomglings 8mo agoHonestly have never heard of this person. Why does HN care so much that he joined OpenAI?
- blibble 8mo agothat is a very long attempt at backwards rationalisation just say it's for the money, people understand that but this sort of post is simply gross
- foltik 8mo agoIt’s so jarring to hear this reality-detached writing style coming from someone who’s otherwise a great systems thinker. This is like my worst nightmare as a systems engineer: that years of navigating bureaucracy at a place like Intel slowly brainrots me into prioritizing politics and self-promotion over the technical truth. I hope this is just PR reflex and not an actual loss of grounding.
- webdevver 8mo agoimo the engineers who stay in their nuts-and-bolts lane - those are the ones who are at a real risk of 'brainrot', who sometimes at the ripe age of 50+ continue to misunderstand what motivates management, the executives, seemingly unable to model anyones minds other than their own (or that of a very predictable entity, like a computer.) infact, you could argue that politics is in some sense the biggest, most complex dynamic system of them all, and thus poses the greatest 'engineering' challenge. and it invariably involves promotion of oneself, or an idea, or a certain direction, with real trade-offs that have positive impact on some people, and negative on others.
- foltik 8mo agoSure, some PR and self-promotion are usually required to move things forward. That doesn’t make it a grand or particularly deep problem, and certainly not the primary thing to optimize for.
- watwut 8mo agoNone of what you wrote is contradiction to what OP wrote. They found self delusion, emptiness of claims and outrught lies of certain class of people to not be worth of respect. Just explained it can be fun and involves trade offs. Well ok, but these claims of saving world are still empty bullshit. It is perfectlt fine to be aware of that fact. We dont have to pretend grandiose claims of Musks and Altmans and Bezos and whatever management trues to please them are reflections of their search of positive impact.
- rednafi 8mo agoCould have just said he joined for the money, which wouldn’t be the worst thing. Instead, we got this high-and-mighty mumbo-jumbo larp.
- the_kLeZ 8mo agoMoney. Thanks for reading. Please subscribe to my newsletter to keep up to date with my works and the latest news about AI.
- inchargeoncall 8mo ago[flagged]
- burroisolator 8mo ago"it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet." Jevon's paradox probably will mean that lower costs will lead to more use.
- dh2022 8mo agoRe: "it's about saving the planet" - according to Jevons paradox [0] if the cost of AI will decrease its total usage will increase. Definitely not saving the planet in this scenario. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- ikidd 8mo agoI want to save the planet by getting the most amount of heat out of the tire fire we are currently tossing tires on.
- popcorncowboy 8mo agoYour improving efficiency is their improving margin. It only saves the world if they stop selling more tokens.
- specialist 8mo agoHi Brendan. Thanks for the update. Ignore the haters. WRT "AI saving the planet", obviously. We need ungodly amounts of machine learning. Weather modeling, forecasting, resilience planning, risk mgmt, planning, etc. To implement virtual power plants (aka P2P distributed grid), everything needs to get smart. Just this transformation alone is a generational project. There's dozens more of "must have" stacks we need to tackle climate crisis. Replace industrial heat. Decarbonize agriculture. Build out geothermal. Find and stop methane leaks. Pretty much everything needs a makeover, really. OpenAI is as good a place (for you) to start as any. Happy hunting.