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At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

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Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#61

Post by Slartie »

nickysielicki wrote: post #51
lenerdenator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley is not about having specialists or knowledge. It's about having connections and charisma. Is this causing massive problems for us as a society? Of course, but no one seems to want to do anything about it, so here we are.

I mean, what are you suggesting “someone” should do about it? The companies can spend their money however they want, and if they want to hire a bunch of product people from YC startups nobody can stop them. I’m just surprised they need this many of them. What do they do all day? And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?

> What do they do all day?

Same as they were doing in their startups: burn mon..., eh, tokens.

> And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?

AI, of course.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#62

Post by nickysielicki »

classified wrote: post #58
nickysielicki wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, what are you suggesting “someone” should do about it? The companies can spend their money however they want, and if they want to hire a bunch of product people from YC startups nobody can stop them. I’m just surprised they need this many of them. What do they do all day? And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?

> What do they do all day? Breeding product ideas? ChatGPT, but for dogs? > And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers? They learned from Elon how to get by with a skeleton crew?

I’m just surprised that the people actually keeping the business operating and the tokens flowing don’t resent these product people for sitting around all day coming up with ideas for the same TC package as the people putting out ops fires and bringing new capacity online all day every day. I feel like the actual engineers are probably getting shortchanged.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#64

Post by pixl97 »

nickysielicki wrote: post #62
classified wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do they do all day? Breeding product ideas? ChatGPT, but for dogs? > And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers? They learned from Elon how to get by with a skeleton crew?

I’m just surprised that the people actually keeping the business operating and the tokens flowing don’t resent these product people for sitting around all day coming up with ideas for the same TC package as the people putting out ops fires and bringing new capacity online all day every day. I feel like the actual engineers are probably getting shortchanged.

As with anything else, they may resent, but the check still cashes at the end of the week.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#65

Post by dist-epoch »

consumer451 wrote: post #34
scottydelta wrote: post #19

Based on YC's directory, there are approximately 13,000 YC founders since YC started. 105/13000 is a very small number to focus on. This data doesn't really mean anything.

What I find more interesting is how many people have left big orgs where they had major leadership roles, to become ICs at Anthropic.

Participating in the creation of the Singleton is going down in the history books. Major leadership role at BigOrg is not.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#66

Post by andy99 »

nickysielicki wrote: post #45

The question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending? It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance…

People ask the same question of why YC funds yet another Uber for dogs or a button on the Touch Bar that cost $10/mo to help join a meeting faster.

They invest in people more than ideas, so you’ve got, at least in many cases, people with good pedigree and skills (age adjusted anyway) building on stupid ideas, but that are eminently employable.

Obviously there are other factors, I’m not really trying to defend anything but just point out that there are legit reasons why someone impressive enough to get into YC would also be impressive enough to get a good job. It’s not like it’s random founders off the street.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#67

Post by buckhx »

lokimedes wrote: post #56
nickysielicki wrote: post #45

The question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending? It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance…

I actually have experience with that stuff, “old school” deep learning and ML as well. Is that something worth joining the fray with I wonder? Or is it as you point out really only the richly connected “locals” that are recruited?

Not to try to grab any pity, but I have pretty deep experience in the GPU optimization space and have not been able to even get an engineering screen even with referrals.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#68

Post by dgellow »

Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs all the other business, research opportunities aren’t being explored and invested in

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#69

Post by fidotron »

consumer451 wrote: post #47
amazingamazing wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it interesting? They want to be rich.

Well yeah, but being a CTO at a major org isn't exactly a low-paying gig. The interesting thing to me is that the belief that Anthropic is going achieve something like AGI appears to have really spread through SV. If not AGI, at least greatly disturb their old cushy SaaS jobs. Also, I still do believe some people just want to work on "cool" stuff. edit: not just CTOs and CPOs, I mean John freakin Jumper, who got the…

> If not AGI, at least greatly disturb their old cushy SaaS jobs.

I mean, this is happening right now.

I doubt there are few people talking to customers and potential customers that haven't run into the "look what I rolled last week with Claude" only for it to be legitimately impressive. The idea of technical moats is evaporating in front of our eyes.

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