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Greg Brockman interview [video]
- portly 5mo agoDoes everyone at OpenAI vocal fry like that?
- bmitc 5mo agoSo firing a grifter means it would kill the company? Doesn't that mean the company is grifting? If no one else can possibly lead the supposedly the most important company, with billions/trillions (?) of so called value, do you have a good company and product? Or do I forget that this guy sleeps with an Ayn Rand doll tucked under his arms?
- okr 5mo agoChatGPT or CoPilot were awesome products at the time. I do not use them anymore these days. But to me it felt never like i was abused. And Investment into companies is what it is, a risk. But the results remain forever, whoever wins.
- zemvpferreira 5mo agoNot a fan of Altman but the devil you know is a powerful argument. If you believe a CEO/Founder to be a grifter-position at its core (fake it till you make it etc etc), retaining the best grifter you can find is the optimal play.
- H8crilA 5mo agoAs far as Brockman account of the past goes, there's also his personal diary which was made public as a part of that lawsuit by Musk. Includes for example the line: "Financially what will take me to $1B?". BTW, if you don't know, Musk lost it because he filed too late, lol.
- nba456_ 5mo agoIf his entire personal diary got exposed and that's the worst that's in it, good for him.
- Kinrany 5mo agoHow did the diary end up in the court files in the first place?
- secondcoming 5mo agolegal discovery process?
- arvid-lind 5mo agothere's even an episode of The Office where this happens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3GbCByGltU&t=214s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3GbCByGltU&t=214s
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- layer8 5mo agoOpenAI themselves submitted the diary as evidence back in October.
- Kinrany 4mo agoSo surely they volunteered it?
- applfanboysbgon 5mo agoI'm curious what you're writing in your diary that's worse than blatantly admitting to fraud of this scale. He publicly misled people about OpenAI's "mission" as a nonprofit, while seeking to enrich himself to the tune of $1 billion(!!!) dollars. Also, his entire diary was not in fact made public. The attorneys only quoted the parts that were relevant to the case, which pertained to OpenAI's transition from non-profit.
- thenthenthen 4mo agoTres Comas!
- embedding-shape 5mo agoNot feeling like 1 hour of my Sunday is worth listening to this, do anyone have the non-clickbait answers to the two "previews" mentioned in the description? > Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason OpenAI had to abandon its pure nonprofit structure What was the technical plan and what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?
- bblb 5mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JoUcQ1qmAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JoUcQ1qmAc 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:49 Meeting Sam Altman and Starting OpenAI 00:02:40 Building the Founding Team 00:04:25 DeepMind's Lead Over OpenAI 00:04:54 The Change from a Pure Non-Profit 00:06:05 Breakthrough Moments at OpenAI 00:08:22 What Dota 2 Meant for OpenAI 00:10:04 Reasoning Versus Prediction 00:11:59 Tensions Grow at OpenAI 00:15:44 Sam Altman's Firing 00:17:49 Greg Quits OpenAI 00:19:56 Sam Explores Deal with Microsoft's Satya 00:20:28 OpenAI Employees Sign Petition for Altman's Return 00:23:43 Ilya Sutskever Leaves OpenAI 00:24:59 Lessons Learned in Leadership after Sam Ousting 00:28:22 The Thing Ilya Said that Greg Can't Forget 00:32:22 Is AI Going Parabolic? 00:33:24 How Much of OpenAI's Code is Written by AI? 00:36:21 Are AI Chatbots Just Telling Us What We Want to Hear? 00:38:06 The Global AI Race to Reach AGI 00:38:40 What Happens if US Doesn't Reach AGI First? 00:39:49 Are Competing Countries Stealing AI Advancements from U.S? 00:40:38 Why ChatGPT No Longer Shows Reasoning 00:41:47 The Finite Constraints of Compute 00:43:38 On Investing Early in Data Centers 00:46:31 The Future of Data Center Specialization 00:47:52 How OpenAI Will Decide Whose Queries to Serve 00:49:08 OpenAI on Consumer vs Enterprise Models 00:53:05 Data Centers in Space? 01:00:56 What Should AI Regulation Look Like? 01:04:33 The Future of AI-Powered Entrepreneurship 01:04:44 AI and Job Loss 01:07:15 The Skills Young People Should Invest In 01:11:30 What Does Success Look Like For You?
- dave1010uk 5mo ago1. Solve reinforcement learning. 2. solve unsupervised learning. 3. gradually tackle more complicated things. > what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals? I assume this is referring to why they gave up being a non-profit. The answer is that they needed more money.
- optimalsolver 5mo ago>So many people were trying to sign the petition at once that it actually crashed Google Docs I still wonder how much peer pressure was behind that. Like, what if you think Sam is a scumbag and you're glad he's gone, but people are waving this petition in your face. What would you do? It would be really bad for you if the emperor returned and you were one of the few who didn't sign it. Also, going by this video, the first order of business for an AGI should be finding a cure for hair loss.
- fragmede 5mo agoNioxin shampoo generally works.
- cold_harbor 5mo agowhat's wild is they accidentally solved it — pretraining IS unsupervised learning at scale, RLHF IS reinforcement learning. they just didnt know the recipe yet
- jmalicki 5mo agopretraining isn't unsupervised, it is self-supervised - meaning it is moderately more scale limited.
- sigbottle 5mo agoWhat would unsupervised mean, would unsupervised be something like alphago playing against itself trillions of times? Whereas self-supervised, allows learning without explicit annotation of data ; but it doesn't matter if the models already trained on the entire Internet, and it's not like a game where it can come up with effectively new training data for itself?
- jmalicki 5mo agoUnsupervised is basically clustering. Alphago is RL - winning or losing a game is a form of supervision. Unsupervised is something where there is no intrinsic reward signal. In pre training, predicting the next token and seeing that it matches is a reward signal, hence it is self supervised.
- cold_harbor 5mo agofair point — OpenAI's original plan literally said "solve unsupervised learning". the self-supervised distinction wasnt really standard til after BERT/GPT popularized it
- jmalicki 5mo agoI think it's an extremely important distinction because self supervised learning has real inherent reward signals. Something like clustering does not.
- pjmlp 5mo agoUnfortunately they survived, not going to spend time with this. From my point of view they are yet another big tech bros company.
- YetAnotherNick 5mo agoWhy can't someone ask what happened in Ilya's mind. Firing Sam and then signing the solidarity letter of Sam to leave OpenAI if was fired. Other than that, all other information seems kind of just going over the surface.
- tasuki 5mo agoYes, that, please! I also never understood why the board resigned after ousting Sam...
- tyre 5mo agoBecause they lost and crumbled. They were unbelievably outmatched by Sam (a world-class manipulator) and Satya (the money behind OpenAI and himself a political genius.) They were outmaneuvered, panicked, and folded. Did they have to? No. But in the moment they thought they were on the precipice of nuking a deca-billion dollar company, their life’s greatest work, and a generational company. It’s hard to stand against what they did. Unsurprising they couldn’t.
- YetAnotherNick 5mo agoThen they should have made the position clear to the public, or at the very least have some communication with the employees. It's not hard to say that they were against Sam for some particular reason, if they are firing him. At least if the reason is good that might have given them some credibility. And why did Ilya become Sam lover after 2 days?
- rfv6723 5mo agoThe employees are on Sam's side. Employees works for money and Sam brought money in.
- YetAnotherNick 5mo agoThis is so obviously wrong I don't know how this theory got popular. OpenAI had everything from compute to brand name to contracts. Sam wasn't the reason the money was coming, employees and OpenAI were. Even if Sam bought them money, board could still tell the reason of firing Sam rather than keeping it a secret. And why did Ilya flip? He doesn't have much to gain by being in non profit when he could get more money elsewhere.
- batu1509 5mo agobuilding products on top of their api makes these drama weekends terrifying. really makes you realize how fragile your whole stack is when a board decides to act up.
- jeffrallen 5mo agoOr when sociopaths are in charge, and the board tries to fix that, but other sociopaths work together to overrule the board. (And wtf is that anyway, overriding the board? Why do we even have boards of directors if rich, powerful assholes can just do whatever they want?)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- sumedh 5mo ago> and the board tries to fix that The board didnt have the maturity to fix that.
- jonstewart 5mo agoPoint of order: Anthropic is the most important AI company now.
- outside1234 5mo agoIt really does feel like OpenAI has lost their leadership. I haven’t used a model of theirs, let alone an app, in months.
- tim333 5mo agoPeople discount Google/Deepmind but a lot of the original research was done there including inventing transformers which form the basis of the other AI companies.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- tyre 5mo agoIf anything, the amount of original and foundational research at Google is a black mark against their position now. They blew a hell of a lead. I’m willing to discount what they did almost a decade ago (“Attention is All You Need” was 2017) in an industry that moves this quickly. The execution of an Anthropic matters more now.
- borski 5mo agoShort term, that’s definitely true. Long term, I’m not so sure.
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoAnthropic is the most hyped AI company now. Their models aren't the best, but their marketing sure is.
- sumedh 5mo ago> Their models aren't the best the market has spoken, for coding they are the best.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- stuaxo 5mo agoThankful for the mention of "AGI" in the first lines as I can bail out from reading the rest. Whatever AGI is, it "AGI" is not glueing a load of text prediction machines together.
- dboreham 5mo agoHow do you know that?
- dannersy 5mo agoBecause then we already have it, and if we do, it is pretty underwhelming.
- ImPostingOnHN 5mo agoso are most humans
- dannersy 5mo agoOkay?
- emp17344 5mo agoSome folks are absolutely giddy about using AI as a cudgel to dehumanize others. Those people are idiots.
- ImPostingOnHN 4mo agoAnd?
- kaashif 4mo agoSo maybe we do have it, and it is underwhelming? Or it's not underwhelming and we just got used to it. Using that as an argument to say we don't have AGI doesn't really make sense. Regardless of whether we do or don't have AGI, until I actually see the economy-ending job losses, I won't believe it.
- throw6999 5mo agoSky net from future protected itself.
- mikkkee 5mo agonot sure why but this episode feels v boring perhaps because he didn't share anything unexpected / unknown
- tim333 5mo agoI found it more interesting than I thought because I thought it'd all be stuff I knew but a lot was new to me.
- throwaway_2494 5mo agoI remember when computer magazines were aimed at programmers and had code listings in them. Then there seemed to come a time when all they talked about was the IBM vs. Microsoft lawsuit. From then on they must have felt that they had discovered a formula, because all they ever yapped about after was insider baseball of computer companies. I find this sort of corp. vs. corp. coverage boring, sort of like techie reality TV. Who will be voted out tonight, Debra, or Deborah...?
- cmrdporcupine 5mo agoI dunno man, there are two "tech" industry worlds and the one you and I -- hacker types -- think of as "tech" is not what the rest of the world means. They mean the other one, which has almost nothing to do with the actual technology and instead everything to do with the absolutely apeshit amount of money, power, influence and intrigue that the technology enabled. This was a very large apeshit $$ amount back in IBM vs Microsoft but the scale of it now in the era of e.g. OpenAI etc is beyond imagination. There's a whole generation of people whose association with the engineering/technology side of things only happened because of their interest in the other side of things. I too miss old Byte magazine days.
- ethbr1 5mo agoThis happened when business types realized technology could be enormously profitable (~PC era). Then inevitably, tech news turned into business news.
- myst 5mo agoWhat do you get if you drop a teaspoon of business into a barrel of X? A barrel of business.
- FeteCommuniste 5mo agoMaybe a little extreme but I love it.
- PunchTornado 5mo agoisn't this the friend of scam altman? who cares of what he has to say?
- jordemort 5mo agotoo bad, eh
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- quantum_state 5mo agoIt’s a matter of fact that OpenAI betrayed its origin.
- wrsh07 5mo agoI think of it more as a parable about how effective 'tying yourself to the mast' actually is The founders of OpenAI naively^ thought "this will make sure that we don't have too much power if we succeed" But it didn't work. What lesson should we learn?^^ ^ please grant this for the sake of argument ^^ I have other models that I prefer to explain what happened, but I think this one is the most interesting
- booleandilemma 5mo agoIf only we should have been so lucky.
- wolvoleo 5mo agoI don't think it would have killed openai. It would have fixed it.
- outside1234 5mo agoThe winners get to write history.
- bix6 5mo agoI just don’t understand why a non-profit was allowed to do this. Does this not set a precedent that non-profit doesn’t actually mean anything? You can just use a favorable structure until it’s time to enrich yourself.
- siliconc0w 5mo agoMost startups don't actually make profits and nonprofits can't give equity so it's not really a favorable structure.
- Gud 5mo agoIt’s a favourable structure in many cases. Not everything is a business. OpenAI wasn’t, until it was.
- pessimizer 5mo agoNonprofit doesn't mean anything, since people can just route the profits into salaries. It's just another legacy regulation that may have once once had a societally-constructive purpose that wealthy people just use as one of the array of financial tools to help implement their latest scams. IMO, here are no legitimate nonprofits. Western countries have been utterly strangled by nonprofits. Governments fund them with tax money in order to lobby themselves for legislation that financially benefits individuals in government and their donors. Obama even expanded the rules in the US to allow the government to unconstitutionally fund religious groups to accomplish functions that belong in government. They should all be either reformed so that their internal bylaws and compensation are strictly regulated or probably preferably, they should simply be destroyed. If you only pay taxes on your profits (and we get rid of legal vehicles to hide profits) and your employees are obligated to pay taxes on their incomes, there's no need for a nonprofit status. If nonprofits want to engage in business (religions included), let them pay taxes. If they engage in charity, they won't have anything to tax.
- gottorf 5mo ago> Western countries have been utterly strangled by nonprofits To expand, there are two major problems with nonprofits in Western nations these days: 1. Governments use them as a way to do things that they themselves are not allowed to do ("it's private charities that do this!", ignoring the fact that the charities get >90% of their revenue from government grants) 2. Like you mentioned, the government grants to nonprofit back to politicians' campaign funds pipeline. Utterly egregious. > Obama even expanded the rules in the US to allow the government to unconstitutionally fund religious groups to accomplish functions that belong in government I wasn't aware of this being a big concern; more the other way around, like in my point 1.
- photochemsyn 5mo agoObviously OpenAI betrayed their stated mandate by going to the largely closed-source API-access business model, which is the one that Anthropic, Google, and xAI also adopted, i.e. the high-margin hosted model businesses, while DeepSeek, Alibaba/Qwen, Baidu/ERNIE, and Tencent/Hunyuan are breaking that model by releasing various open weight models. I think the Chinese labs have a fundamentally different viewpoint: they’re building infrastructure, and looking at it more like how a US corporation might like having some of its employees making core contributions to compiler ecosystems like LLVM/clang and so on. The payoff is down the road, partially reputational, but also having a great compiler is good for everyone in the computational business world. The rentier-finance capitalist instead wants to privatize the compiler and extract rents for access. The thing about infrastructure is this: you don’t get a direct financial return on investment in infrastructure (think roads, which make other economic activity possible) unless you have some ridiculously corrupt system controlled by rent-collectors (which is how the US electricity grid and fiber optic backbone works). That’s all the major US LLM providers are doing: trying to collect rents on systems that were built using the global human knowledge base as inputs. At the very least OpenAI should be releasing their older models on a steady timetable. Sure it might reduce some revenue streams but it would be good for their reputation.
- nekosama 5mo ago[flagged]
- cmrdporcupine 5mo agoDo you have any sources for this?
- dang 5mo agoThis person has been regularly posting complete falsehoods for 15 years.
- intev 5mo agoIf anyone else doesn't want to listen to the whole thing: https://apecast.app/podcast/the-knowledge-project/episode/openai-co-founder-ai-goes-parabolic-here-s-what-s-next-greg-brockman https://apecast.app/podcast/the-knowledge-project/episode/op...
- avazhi 5mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 5mo agoPlease don’t post snarky, shallow dismissals on HN. It only serves to make the place seem miserable.
- avazhi 5mo agoThat quote of his is relevant for everything Brockman says. That’s the lens through which he views the world. Also, this is not the first time I’ve seen HN staff inexplicably rush to defend Altman or Brockman - I wonder why that is. Maybe stick to being objective moderators instead of displaying blatant bias in favour of people previously associated with YC (or perhaps current YC investments). It’s actually laughable how hands off you guys are when it comes to outrageous or flippant comments about Trump or Jews, for example, but I’m getting an @ for literally quoting somebody. Hands off is good, but at least be consistent. Do better.
- tomhow 5mo agoAs anyone can see, there are plenty of criticisms of Brockman and OpenAI in this very thread (some of them even reference the very thing you referenced), as there are in many other HN threads all the time. We have no problem with that. The problem with your particular comment is the caricatured/mocking portrayal of it and the mike-drop/this-explains-everything energy to it, which you explicitly invoked in your reply to me. Any time you assert that a single quote from a long time ago explains everything about a person or event, you’re on weak ground on HN. The truth is never that simple, no matter who it’s about, and the guidelines explicitly ask us to avoid snark and shallow dismissals, because HN’s entire purpose is to host discussions that are better than that.
- avazhi 5mo ago> Any time you assert that a single quote from a long time ago Not my main point, but his quote was timely enough that it was used as an exhibit in a major trial only a few weeks ago. Suggesting that it reflects unfairly or inaccurately on his current views has no evidentiary basis. My main point: I routinely see 'snarky' one liners on this website. Go find literally any thread involving Israel or something deemed 'fascist' by the hivemind and you'll find them by the dozens, many of which are heavily upvoted given that they appear at the top; meanwhile, legitimate (in the sense that they have clearly been thought-out at length and present a position that is at least prima facie logically defensible) comments that go against the groupthink are invariably flagged. I mean honestly - you guys do know you have a major problem with the way flagging comments works, right? If you earnestly want to deal with snarky comments and foment deeper conversation, that's a laudable goal but what you have currently is a particular demographic of left-leaning social democrat types that dominate this website that flags every comment they disagree with, whether it's 'snarky' or not. I've seen it with my own comments and I've done it to others because hey, I'll play the game if you guys set it up that way (and no doubt if the website had predominantly far right users it would be the obverse of the same problem). I'm not saying left-wing people are the only problem, just that on this site that's the way the demographics are. So, this comment is partly irrelevant (about Brockman), and partly a whataboutism, but my point about flagging stands and if you are serious about the level of discourse here you guys really (truly) ought to think seriously about how to deal with it, because I've had plenty of comments that took genuine time and effort to think about and write, considered and acknowledged and addressed opposing viewpoints, and were nevertheless flagged and removed because I wasn't on the anti-Israel bandwagon or whatever the topic was. So why bother investing time into writing a comment that is just going to get flagged anyway? I may as well be snarky given that it takes .01% of the effort and time if it's going to be flagged anyway. The site's flagging system in its current iteration incentivises being snarky.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jocelyner 5mo ago[dead]
- greazy 4mo agoIts really telling the example of personal AI/AGI given was booking tickets to a show.