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Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

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211–220 of 478 posts

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These AI 'relationship' type bots are everything wrong with tech. >> Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a "bright and beautiful boy", had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai app in late spring 2023. People become obsessed with them. The builders have to know that their 'customers' are explicitly people with mental issues. Nobody sane or normal…

None of this pertains to the legal case whatsoever. If you think chatbots should be legislated out of existence, you are welcome to your opinion, but while they exist, trying to hold a particular company legally liable for a chatbot saying "come home to me" is beyond absurd. --- Edit replying to below post, as I am rate limited: > Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I wa…

>> trying to hold a particular company legally liable for a chatbot saying "come home to me" is beyond absurd

Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#212
post #78

Its getting pretty lame that we talk about the these guys like they're football players transferring teams.

In this case, it's not a new thing ... back in 2005 (yes 21 years ago), people talked about the achievements of Noam Shazeer at Google (and Jeff Dean and Sanjay, etc) I always appreciated Jeff having a level head ... which this article seems to confirm: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts...

I wonder if the ideological censorship described in your link is part of why Noam decided to leave.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#213
post #53
post #45

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_l... Seems like there are some insights here! edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable. 1 liner summary: To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.

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People who have intellectually based skills think it makes them an intellectual.

They fail to understand that their skill doesn't generalise.

That and the hyperglazing and platforming they get for having said skill makes them a prime candidate for exposing how average they are.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#214
post #48

Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.” He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead. Now he’s…

At this point is it even pay that’s tempting or is it more about what they get to do? I would assume Google could easily pay them what openAI can, unless as an older company it’s harder for Google to match something really out there

It gets to the point where what you do is the main question while payment is barely a minor concern way earlier than that point, at least in my experience. You don't need to be in the top AI research tier for that.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#215
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source for this? The notion of attention dates to a content-addressable lookup during sequence alignment (as well as, concurrently, memory lookups in neural Turing machines). Attention had been used in other models, like GRUs and LSTMs with attention. The Vaswani et. al. paper did not introduce attention, just removed everything _but_ attention (and FFW) from the network. Are you claiming the "critical idea" of remov…

At some point in late 2017 the paper was updated with this additional detail: Equal contribution. Listing order is random. Jakob proposed replacing RNNs with self-attention and started the effort to evaluate this idea. Ashish, with Illia, designed and implemented the first Transformer models and has been crucially involved in every aspect of this work. Noam proposed scaled dot-product attention, multi-head attention…

Thanks - wanted to point to this, and indeed should have worded my claim more precisely. And yes, am aware of prior work on attention. (I need to look it up, but I recall Noam saying publicly that he wouldn’t have agreed to random ordering of contributions if he knew this was going to be this big).

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? If I call someone a thief, I should be able to point to something they stole.

There is a big difference how one acts in a court and in real life. The original statement could either be a slandering (hard to know what they get to gain from it) or its their bitter experience/perception that they feel strongly about, are are sharing on a platform like this.

sandeepkd is an idea thief. Also, he is short guy but walks with high shoes so people will think he is tall.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#218
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This understates his criticality. The author list was randomized, but the critical idea was truly his. Wonder what this says about GDM …

Is this a generally well known thing?

Nope, but it’s not particularly unknown either. It shouldn’t be a surprise; he had remarkable research contributions before and after (separately, he was also an IMO gold medalist).

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#220
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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What you're describing about gender is.... not really scientific. It was basically declared by fiat by researchers. It's not an authoritative definition and many people disagree with the concept, at least when it gets conflated with scientific topics.
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