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Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

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Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#391

Post by gen220 »

frollogaston wrote: post #360
gen220 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious, do you personally know anybody who’s gone through gender-affirming-care? For me it was a really confusing issue until I became close friends with someone whose childhood best friend is trans. If he was born a decade earlier, he probably would have killed himself (this was the path he was on, which is incredibly tragic and all too common); the gender dysphoria invoked depression was unbearable. Instead, h…

Since you ask, I know three. One guy I knew in high school transitioned to female around 2013, and requested I say "she." She was bullied a bit for it, not too much thankfully, but it was clear she was never comfortable with being male before. Another was similar but later. It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender…

> It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates

The range of human (mis-)behavior is extremely wide, so I wouldn’t doubt that some doctors and patients are doing what you fear here. I don’t think we should form opinions on such a broad situation on the basis of a few extreme people and situations.

The question I would ask is would you rather have more people suffer from not having care, than some people suffer from receiving care that they later regret? The latter is something that’s incredibly sad, no doubt, but it’s an intractable and tragic side effect of offering major medical treatments and interventions in general; the “false positive” aspect is not unique to gender affirming care, either in its existence or its magnitude. (The politicizing of the false positive is, though, because gender in general is incredibly politicized).

Gender dysphoria solved by one-way-door gender affirming care is quite rare (there are many intermediary steps people can try and ultimately be helped with), but education about the issue and the availability of treatment helps people like my friend. I think it’s pretty unambiguously positive to universalize the availability of that care in the same way as any other form of healthcare and education, because it’s genuinely the only way some people can feel comfortable in their skin. And although there may be problems with the standard of care, the standard for care can only improve with time and experience.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#392

Post by nrds »

ViktorRay wrote: post #377
nrds wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> snark and indignation These are preference-based but you're pretending they're objective. I find _your_ comments to be full of snark and indignation more than any you respond to, but of course you won't agree. (But because you don't agree, that makes me objectively wrong, I know.) "Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences." - someone…

I’ve never seen any of the moderators here be snarky or indignant to anyone. Do you have any specific examples of where dang or another moderator posted in that way?

Literally every sentence dang has ever written on this site, that I've seen, is snarky.

> Yes, in the sense that if there's nothing interesting to say about a quote then there's no reason to copy it into the thread.

This one was both snarky and indignant. Indignant that anyone would post something dang doesn't like on his site, and snarky that the the original commenter hadn't conformed to norms of what positions are acceptable to utter here.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#393

Post by nkg »

afavour wrote: post #42
gniv wrote: post #10

Wow. What could possibly have caused him to quit so soon after coming back? I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273

https://nitter.net/signulll/status/2067446889956430273 for those who don't want to click the above

That was hilarious and sad.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#394

Post by mvkel »

jvican wrote: post #281
ahmadyan wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's no doubt about Noam's abilities. But I read through that code, and struggle to see its 'magic' or 'alchemy'. Can you elaborate what you find especially good about that code? (You may assume GPU kernel programming knowledge on my end.)

Are you saying that with today's hindsight, or would you be saying that at the time of its creation?

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#395

Post by sbochins »

gniv wrote: post #10

Wow. What could possibly have caused him to quit so soon after coming back? I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273

I’m convinced this is 90% of the way this actually played out.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#396

Post by VirusNewbie »

efficax wrote: post #288
VirusNewbie wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money do you have? or are you just commenting from the peanut gallery?

i’ve got 300k in a 401k, 50k in cash and i earn 230k pretax. i’m not sure what the point of the question is tho

My point is you and I are still working for money because we want things/security etc.. I really don't get the sense that people who have tens or hundres of millions of dollars are doing it cause they need more money. It's other things that motivate people. I run into people in my workplace that just enjoy it, even though they're sitting on 20M.

All those engineers making 20M a year at Anthropic and OpenAI are going to back down to normal super high comp of 700k a year after their starter grants run out, and yes many will quit but the people who stay aren't moving the needle on their finances that much.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#397

Post by mlmonkey »

fsuts wrote: post #364
mlmonkey wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But he worked there previously and is Intelligent so knew all that before rejoining?

True. But earlier he had the ear of people like @jeff ; but now even Jeff has been sidelined a little (Google Brain is no longer under Jeff, AFAIK). The MBA types can be brutal and since they're not technical, they don't have the same level of respect and deference for Noam.

Google is a different place today than even 5 years ago.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#398

Post by frollogaston »

UltraSane wrote: post #333
frollogaston wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's what matters. The original Zionists aren't alive to ask what they think. Self-proclaimed Zionists are taking the West Bank and Gaza. In fact they've been kinda doing it for decades under previous governments, but more slowly. If there's some other kind of Zionism around, the most it's doing is complaining, and it's been outvoted. I have doubts about their ability to self-defend because otherwise we wou…

Israel actually LEFT Gaza. You seem biased to the point of just plain lying.

West Bank and Gaza are different situations. West Bank settlements have been popping up continuously. Settlers were in Gaza until they exited in 2005, but now that Israel's military occupies it again, Zionists believe it should be resettled. Sorry for CNN link, but it has direct quotes https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/middleeast/israel-far-right-g... To be clear they haven't done it yet, aside from some illegal (by Israeli law) attempts, but they're trying.

It's pretty obvious from the emotional response that you've got some kind of horse in the Israel-Hamas war that I don't, which is fine, but I'm not gonna get called a liar too. So bye.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#399

Post by eikenberry »

pstuart wrote: post #324
eikenberry wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.

Or maybe just have your R&D teams focused on doing R&D with zero corporate interference. Staff it with personal assistants whose only job is to ensure the researchers have whatever they need and are never bothered with meetings or other corporate shenanigans. The assistants could then be the proxies to management to provide feedback to management, but only on best effort and still staying the fuck out of the way of t…

Easy peasy yet still impossible for them to do as R&D doesn't add to the bottom line, it is a cost center.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#400

Post by frollogaston »

gen220 wrote: post #391
frollogaston wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you ask, I know three. One guy I knew in high school transitioned to female around 2013, and requested I say "she." She was bullied a bit for it, not too much thankfully, but it was clear she was never comfortable with being male before. Another was similar but later. It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender…

> It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates The range of human (mis-)behavior is extremely wide, so I wouldn’t doubt that some doctors and patients are doing what you fear here.…

I would rather have some people suffer from not having care, than have way more people suffer from regretting the care, or more likely having no care but just mental anguish from being pushed into internal conflict about this at an early age. Bad as it sounds, we've already had to make plenty of calls like this.

Maybe 15 years ago there was an option to have neither, maybe we can go back to that. As it already is in some other countries.

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