Related: "Andrej Karpathy Departs OpenAI"[0] (159 points, 2 hours ago, 71 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365288
We'll merge those comments hither since that article is hardwalled. One moment please.
Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
71–80 of 472 posts
Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
#72Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
#73To dedicate himself fully to his YouTube channel? I am looking forward! His content is amazing
I imagine doing so is leaving millions on the table. I’m sure he is well off and can retire early, but even so, millions are a lot of money.
Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
#74"I told them Xerox has got to get itself together, because there's no way a big company can take advantage of things moving this fast. People will get frustrated and start their own companies." —Carver Mead, 1979 (employee at Xerox PARC), discussing why Xerox needed to focus more on adopting integrated circuits into the computers they had already developed, instead of continuing to just make increasingly-obsolete cop…
I don't mean to detract from your point (if anything, I suppose I'm obliquely supporting it), but I feel compelled to say that it's really weird to see Carver Mead cited in the context of "employee at Xerox PARC", because I mostly know him as one half of "Mead/Conway", i.e. the duo who arguably supplied the computational (dare I say "algorithmic"?) rocket fuel for the unbelievably wild progress of chips in the 1990s…
The textbook they wrote together was while both were collaborating at PARC (Mead was at CalTech, then, too); they wrote it to add credibility to their VLSI theories, which at the time most experts believed would lead to thermal runaway (i.e. not stable, long-term, to pack transistors densely).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead
Learning about the interconnectedness of all this historic intellectual "brain theft," keeps me excited for an AGI-future, post-copyright/IP. What are we going to accomplish [globally] when you can't just own brilliant ideas?!
Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
#75Unpopular opinion… but IMO almost all of Karpathy’s fame an influence come from being an incredible educator and communicator. Relative to his level of fame, his actual level of contribution as far as pushing forward AI, I’m not so sure about. I deeply appreciate his educational content and I’m glad that it has led to a way for him to gain influence and sustain a career. Hopefully he’s rich enough from that that he c…
A hackernews comment section is one of the least legitimate forums imaginable for the public reading of somebody's resume. Congress, maybe.
Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
#76Let me say, he's a great teacher! I took a CV class with him. He should teach more, and take it seriously. Being a popular AI influencer is not necessarily correlated with being a good researcher though. And I would argue there is a strong indication that it is negatively correlated with being a good business leader / founder. Here's to hoping he chills out and goes back to the sorely needed lost art of explaining co…
b-lined?
Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
#77Looking at the thread, it is quite amusing to see some founders hopelessly begging Karpathy to work at their tiny startup to realize that they can't afford him as he is exceptionally brilliant in the AI industry. If OpenAI, Tesla and Google cannot retain him, then probably nobody can. Probably he'll be doing YouTube videos all day long.
I think money is the least of the reasons why those founders wouldn't attract him.
To attract someone at Karpathy's level you would need a project that is both wildly challenging (and yet not the typical startup "challenging" because it's a poorly thought out idea) and requires the kind of resources (compute, data, human brains in vats, etc) that would make your place look far more interesting than OpenAI.
But, hardest of all, you would need startup founders that could tame their egos enough to let someone like Karpathy shine. I haven't talked to a Bay area startup founder in a while who wouldn't completely squander that kind of talent by attempting to force their own half-baked ideas on him, and then try to force him out months later when he couldn't ship those poorly thought out products citing lack of "leadership".
Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
#78Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
#79Every time Karpathy quits his job, the field takes a leap forward because he makes some fantastic educational resource in his free time.
Examples? (I'm not that familiar with field.)
Andrej Karpathy is badmephisto, a name you might have heard of if you're into cubing.
Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investors will line-up to fund a lack of return on their investment? I'd absolutely donate, but that's not what investors want for their money, unfortunately :(
These two individuals can probably raise a billion dollars within a month if they wanted to start their own AI company.
The end result would be the same, with only difference that the training/weights might be open-sourced (which is not a great business differentiator, cost/performance is)