Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 678 posts

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#321

Post by amluto »

jrflowers wrote: post #270
ben_w wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? Yes, frequently and loudly. When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors . > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much l…

> protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk I’m going to guess that GP does not consider random protestors to be in Sam Altman’s ‘sphere’ > The product market fit is fantastic. This is true insomuch that you define “product market fit” as “somebody mentioning it in an Indian restaurant in Berlin” > every definition of "very smart" Every definition you say? https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lclo77…

That’s an odd way to define “smart”. The current crop of LLMs have absolutely no ability to query the raw input or output. I can look at the words I’m typing and think about them. Transformers don’t even get the raw characters, and they also don’t have any feedback from later layers into the queries generated at earlier layers. So the fact that they have any ability at all to reflect on their own input is IMO both impressive and somewhat surprising.

I occasionally wonder whether one could get better results by allowing later layers to query against the K/V data from earlier layers. This might make inference, and possibly even training, of models that don’t fit in a single node’s memory rather more complicated.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#322

Post by threeseed »

bee_rider wrote: post #281
threeseed wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> v13 is way better and safer than a great Uber driver, let alone average. Will need to see a source for this. Especially since NHTSA crash reporting data is not made public.

I’m sure soon enough we won’t have to worry about NHTSA keeping that sort of data private (because that agency will simply be found inefficient and eliminated).

Already happening:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/elon-musk-doesnt-want-...

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#323

Post by CamperBob2 »

delusional wrote: post #275
lsy wrote: post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

I agree with your analysis. The nice thing I've realized is that this means I can just stop paying attention to it. The product sucks, and is useless. The people are all idiots with god complexes. All the money are fake funny money they get from their rich friends in silicon valley. It will literally have no impact on anything. It will be like NFT's however long ago that was. Everybody will talk about how important i…

User name checks out

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#324

Post by swatcoder »

pj_mukh wrote: post #202
jkaptur wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on your spreadsheet analogy? I think Joel Spolsky explained the main Office moat well here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros... > ... it might take you weeks to change your page layout algorithm to accommodate it. If you don’t, customers will open their Word files in your clone and all the pages will be messed up. Basically, people who use Office have extremely specific expe…

"Basically, people who use Office have extremely specific expectations." Interesting point, but to OP's point- This wasn't true when Office was first introduced and Office still created a domineering market share. In fact, I'd argue these moat-by-idiosyncracy features are a result of that market share. There is nothing stopping OpenAI from developing their own over time.

> This wasn't true when Office was first introduced and Office still created a domineering market share

It was absolutely true at that time, but Microsoft was already a behemoth monopoly with deep customer connections throughout enterprise and was uniquely positioned to overcome the moats of their otherwise fairly secure competitors, whose users were just as loyal then as the GP is describing about users now.

Even if OpenAI could establish some kind of moat, office applications make for very poor analogy as to how they might or whether they need to.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#325

Post by pinewurst »

elif wrote: post #138
pinewurst wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody seems to remember how the Segway was going to change our world, backed by many of the VC power figures at the time + Steve Jobs.

You mean Steve Wozniak. Close but no LSD

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/04/engineering.hi...

"Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder, predicted that in future cities would be designed around the device, while Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, also backed the project publicly and financially."

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#327

Post by behnamoh »

ben_w wrote: post #253
manquer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public. Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others . 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri a…

> 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on . I never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-dri…

> ... and that "singularities" are a sign something is wrong with the model.

Einstein thought that way too because his model predicted singularities in space-time fabric. Turns out he was wrong. Nowadays we call them blackholes and have images of them too.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#328

Post by vasco »

AlanYx wrote: post #34

Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting: "On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."

One of the best things I've ever read. I'm going to use this in my next salary negotiation.

Oh you know I don't really care about the number, it's just that I'm working on this plan to desalinate all the water in the oceans.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#329

Post by dang »

akira2501 wrote: post #238
dang wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but please don't fulminate on HN*. Comments like this degrade the community for everyone. You may not owe people who you feel are spoiled rich kids better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. * this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ok, but I think it's clear that what I wrote does not convey violence or vehemence but simple disrespect. A disrespect not born out of their early life and personal history but out of their actions here _today_. Which I think I'm entitled to convey as these are two CEOs attempting to try a case in public while playing fast and loose with the truth to bolster their cases. You may feel that I, as a simple anonymous com…

Vehement name-calling amounts to fulmination in the sense that we use the word in the guidelines; especially when a comment lacks any other content, as yours did. It's basically just angry yelling, and that is the opposite of what we're looking for.

This isn't a borderline call; if you were under the impression that a comment like that is ok on HN, it would be good to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate.

Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines badly in other places too, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42393698. We eventually have to ban accounts that do that repeatedly, so please don't.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#330

Post by xyzzy123 »

hn1986 wrote: post #233
vineyardmike wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s certainly in response to Elon getting more involved in the government. Recently the CFO basically challenged him to try and use his influence against competition “I trust that Elon would act completely appropriately… and not un-American [by abusing his influence for personal gain]”. The best thing they can do is shine as much light on his behavior in the hope that he backs down to avoid further scrutiny. Now tha…

It's naive for anyone to think that Elon won't use his influence in government to empower his companies and weaken his competitors.

I think he is less worried about competitors than the government itself. Specifically, unelected bureaucrats with lots of power and few responsibilities.
Post reply on HN