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Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

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Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#271

Post by wk_end »

UltraSane wrote: post #251
statuslover9000 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shazeer is an aggressive Zionist, and while Altman is better at reading the room, he has previously aligned himself with Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/openais-sam-altman-says-israel...

What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.

IMO people just use the term to mean “pro-Israel” rather than in any reference to the original meaning ("supporter of the idea of a Jewish state"). Which could mean any combination of “pro-American financial support for Israel”, “moral support for Israel in their various military actions”, “opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state”, “a belief that Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state”, and so on. It's more about the broad political alignment than the specific meaning of the word.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#273

Post by UltraSane »

Rumudiez wrote: post #263
UltraSane wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.

I'm confused, is 78 years a long time? even the US is considered a toddler by empirical terms. zionism wasn't a thing until a minority group had the loudest voice in the room when the allies were discussing what to do with all the european refugees after ww2, and it happened to align well with the brits abandoning their failed colony in the region due to disputes with the locals

You didn't actually answer my question. How does using the word for people who want to create a Jewish state make sense when a Jewish state has existed for 78 years?

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#274

Post by UltraSane »

wk_end wrote: post #271
UltraSane wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.

IMO people just use the term to mean “pro-Israel” rather than in any reference to the original meaning ("supporter of the idea of a Jewish state"). Which could mean any combination of “pro-American financial support for Israel”, “moral support for Israel in their various military actions”, “opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state”, “a belief that Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state”, and so on. I…

Thank you for actually answering my question. That is very vague and explains why I find the word so annoying.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#275

Post by speed_spread »

ur-whale wrote: post #67

Looks like Google is leaking both AI talent and know-how something fierce ... and since the very day the transformer paper was written. As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle: - huge, quasi unmatched data war chest - huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure - native AI chip design and production (TPU) - the core ideas for what we n…

Sounds like Noam just wanted to serve 5 terabytes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#276

Post by frollogaston »

UltraSane wrote: post #273
Rumudiez wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, is 78 years a long time? even the US is considered a toddler by empirical terms. zionism wasn't a thing until a minority group had the loudest voice in the room when the allies were discussing what to do with all the european refugees after ww2, and it happened to align well with the brits abandoning their failed colony in the region due to disputes with the locals

You didn't actually answer my question. How does using the word for people who want to create a Jewish state make sense when a Jewish state has existed for 78 years?

One reasonable possibility is they're referring to people like Ben-Gvir who have themselves claimed that Zionism means fighting for Israeli control over more territory like the West Bank. They're the ones calling the shots right now. I don't know whether Zionists 78 years ago would've agreed, it's possible.

To some it still means favoring any existence of a Jewish state. The inertia isn't there because aside from the original partition plan being pushed by the UK, other countries have attacked Israel several times later in ways they would've have withstood without outside support.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#277

Post by mlmonkey »

deadbabe wrote: post #222
mikeyouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI pays for the earn out he would’ve otherwise received at Google + a new comp package. Made up numbers, if Google still owed him $10M for lasting the full two years, OpenAI can just pay him market rate +$10M.

Yes, but what about the audacity of it? Get paid a lot to join a company but then decide to get up and leave again 2 years later? He just wants to be passed around?

There's a possibility that he lost out in internal political battles, and things weren't going his way. Google is full of battle-hardened political warriors who will do anything (subterfuge, sabotage, etc.) to win battles. It is possible that a guy who just wants to build cool shit would feel like a misfit in such an environment.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#278

Post by epihelix »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #154
mlmonkey wrote: post #138

For those interested, Wired ran a backstory about the Attention is All You Need paper 2 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-... It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors. About Shazeer, from the article: Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often…

> Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.

The "bells and whistles" label sounds more dismissive / perjorative to me. An odd, and not a particularly nice, thing to say. Makes me wonder how the "magic" and "alchemy" terms were intended in this case, also.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#279

Post by eli_gottlieb »

ahmadyan wrote: post #268
SiempreViernes wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.

As a hacker, I kinda like naom's code. I was had to implement a TC MoE kernel, and stumbled upon his code from [tensor2tensor]( https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor/blob/master/tens... ) and i think "alchemy" is justified. Dude writes some beautiful kernels. He also saw LLM would replace search before anyone else, and that is something to look at the Lamda or GPT-1's output and think: yeah this will answer all…

Also, evaluating complicated functions with numerical stability and automatic differentiation is hard.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#280

Post by bigyabai »

dansquizsoft wrote: post #266
xnx wrote: post #5

This does suck for Google. Noam will take a lot of Google trade secrets with him to OpenAi. Google's bench is deeper than this one guy though.

Trade secrets? Like how to invent a trillion dollar technology and then sit on it for years while others eat your lunch with it? Like how to consistenly release inferior quality models to others despite infinite compute and engineering talent and insane profitability in your legacy businesses?

Not really sure what you're talking about. Apple just licensed Gemini for Siri, Google and their TPU hardware is starting to hit primetime audiences that OpenAI can only dream of.
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