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

OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 960 posts

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#391

Post by wiseowise »

ryandvm wrote: post #71
rashidujang wrote: post #11

> There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development. It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed. Throw in a knee-jerk solution of "daily call" (sound familiar?) for those involved while they are wading knee-deep through work and you have a perfect storm of terrib…

Don't forget the bleak subtext of all this. All these engineers working 70 hour weeks for world class sociopaths in some sort of fucked up space race to create a technology that is supposed to make all of them unemployed .

> technology that is supposed to make all of them unemployed.

To make all of us (other poor fuckers) unemployed.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#392

Post by kilroy123 »

alwa wrote: post #348
giancarlostoro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had ideas for how to improve all the different chatbots for like 3 years, nobodys has implemented any of them (usually my ideas get implemented in software somehow the devs read my mind, but AI seems to be stuck with the same UI for LLMs), none of these AI shops are ran by people with vision it feels like. Everyone's just remaking a slightly better version of SmarterChild.

Oh man, I hadn’t thought of SmarterChild in dog’s years! It was an early AIM chatbot, and felt like magic at the time. Looking back it feels like there’s a clear through-line from it (and the rest of ActiveBuddy’s menagerie) to the ChatGPTs of the world today… For today’s lucky 10,000, here’s a Vice retrospective from 2016: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-history-of-smarterchild/

https://smarterchild.chat/

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#393

Post by manmal »

findjashua wrote: post #384
p1necone wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every so often I try out a GPT model for coding again, and manage to get tricked by the very sparse conversation style into thinking it's great for a couple of days (when it says nothing and then finishes producing code with a 'I did x, y and z' with no stupid 'you're absolutely' right sucking up and it works, it feels very good). But I always realize it's just smoke and mirrors - the actual quality of the code and t…

NME at all - 5.1 codex has been the best by far.

How can you stand the excruciating slowness? Claude Code is running circles around codex. The most mundane tasks make it think for a minute before doing anything.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#395

Post by machomaster »

BeetleB wrote: post #287
q3k wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get: > It is absolutely not too late to bonsai your Cryptomeria japonica. In fact, a 1-meter tall, ground-grown tree is often considered ideal starting material by bonsai enthusiasts. [...] And when followed up with 'I have been told cutting back to brown wood will prevent back budding' I get: > That is a very common piece of advice in bonsai, but for Cryptomeria (Japanese Cedar), it is a half-truth that requires c…

I tried it with Gemini 2.5 Pro. I got: "Excellent question!" and "That is an excellent and very important question." I primarily use Gemini 2.5 Pro for AI coding, and it does this to me with virtually every prompt. "That's an insightful point!" "Excellent question!" And on and on. I'm not exaggerating when I say it does this almost every time. Easily over 90% of the responses.

What helped me to get rid of such nonsense in ChatGPT is to make a custom instruction (personalization, customization) in the settings.

>Be efficient and blunt. Tell it like it is; don't sugar-coat responses. Get right to the point. Be innovative and think outside the box. Give options, explain reasoning. Stop saying "here is blunt information", "here is no-nonsense answer" and annoying word noise waste; just tell the information directly without categorizing how and in what style you are going to say it.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#396

Post by mr_00ff00 »

jdoliner wrote: post #274

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 m…

What is a pre-training run?

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#397

Post by abixb »

an0malous wrote: post #176
cmiles8 wrote: post #136

The real code red here is less that Google just one-upped OpenAI but that they demonstrated there’s no moat to be had here. Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time. Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.

> for these companies They’re absolutely going to get bailed out and socialize the losses somehow. They might just get a huge government contract instead of an explicit bailout, but they’ll weasel out of this one way or another and these huge circular deals are to ensure that.

>They’re absolutely going to get bailed out and socialize the losses somehow.

I've had that uneasy feeling for a while now. Just look at Jensen and Nvidia -- they're trying to get their hooks into every major critical sector as they're able to (Nokia last month, Synopsys just recently). When chickens come home to roost, my guess is that they'll pull out the "we're too big to fail, so bailout pls" card.

Crazy times. If only we had regulators with more spine.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#398

Post by NewEntryHN »

twothreeone wrote: post #174

The way I've experienced "Code Red" is mostly as a euphemism for "on-going company-wide lack of focus" and a band-aid for mid-level management having absolutely no clue how to meaningfully make progress, upper management panicking, and ultimately putting engineers and ICs on the spot to bear the brunt of that organizational mess. Interestingly enough, apart from Google, I've never seen an organization take the actual…

"Software engineer complains bearing the burden of everything and concludes everything would be fixed by firing everybody except themselves."

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#399

Post by manmal »

Is anyone actually getting good results out of GPT Pro? For coding problems, GPT Thinking seems faster and more accurate. Pro has given me some very dumb answers actually, totally misunderstanding the question. Once I asked it do design a reverse osmosis system for our home, and it suggested a 7k system that can produce 400 liters per minute. Even though I explicitly told it that a couple liters per minute suffice.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#400

Post by riffraff »

littlestymaar wrote: post #360
bloppe wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I would get a ton of value out of someone selling dollars for 20 cents apiece. But ya, OAI is clearly making a ton of revenue. That doesn't mean it's a good business, though. Giving them a 20 year horizon, shareholders will be very upset unless the firm can deliver about a trillion in profit , not revenue, to justify the 100B (so far) in investment, and that would barely beat the long term s&p 500 average…

I'd be a little bit more nuanced: I think there's something off with their plans right now: it's pretty clear at this point that they can't own the technological frontier, Google is just too close already and from a purely technological PoV they are much better suited to have the best tech in the medium term. (There's no moat and Google has way more data and compute available, and also tons of cash to burn without de…

> But ChatGPT is an insane brand

I mean, so was netscape.

Post reply on HN