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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

#211

Post by sdht0 »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #191
jmilloy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives

I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even commu…

> And the LLMs never try to

Not yet.

I expect once the initial exploration and development is over, all those sharp minds will turn to monetization and everything else that follow.

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

#212

Post by BobbyJo »

hodgesrm wrote: post #151
BobbyJo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000000% this. I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported. Now its AI. Maybe AI doesn't materialize the way we want, but I'll take that bet over business as usual before every time.

> I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported. That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported. (Edit: typo)

Those jobs are much more niche, and require much more specialized knowledge. Google alone probably has more software employees than all of the high paying trading firms combined. It's a possible career path, sure, but its like comparing taxi driver opportunities with stretch limo driver opportunities IMO. Totally different scales.

AI is much more similar to classic cloud/infra with a lot more OSS than finance afaik, and probably already employs more devs than prop firms.

(I'm not counting big bank jobs because those are definitely not high paying)

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

#213

Post by bodiekane »

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…

>who got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left his VP role at DeepMind to have no reports, and be an IC

That seems like an obvious choice to make. Managing people, looking at Gantt charts, meeting with compliance & legal and all the other organizational work of management is tedious, boring and miserable. But it pays well and signals high-status, so people do it.

If you've won the Nobel Prize, you don't need any other signal of high-status and he's surely making plenty of money at Anthropic. Of course he'd choose to spend his time doing interesting work for lots of money instead of boring work.

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

#214

Post by warshinder »

terribleperson wrote: post #125
warshinder wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are. Edit: a…

You can, right now, find out how to synthesize VX or sarin, or how to weaponize anthrax. You can and have been able to acquire this knowledge without the use of AI. Knowledge is not the obstacle to proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. It's hard to set up the infrastructure. See Aum Shinrikyo.

Well, you’ve convinced me. Ai changes nothing, so then we should be terrified of the capital being poured into and the opportunity costs lost to the current thing(tm).

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

#215

Post by wglb »

doc_ick wrote: post #178
tptacek wrote: post #63

The word "mostly" doesn't belong in this title, because YC has funded over 5,000 companies, and this page accounts for 100 founders.

Do you have a source link for the >5000 companies?

Not hard to find: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies

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

#216

Post by terribleperson »

warshinder wrote: post #214
terribleperson wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, right now, find out how to synthesize VX or sarin, or how to weaponize anthrax. You can and have been able to acquire this knowledge without the use of AI. Knowledge is not the obstacle to proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. It's hard to set up the infrastructure. See Aum Shinrikyo.

Well, you’ve convinced me. Ai changes nothing, so then we should be terrified of the capital being poured into and the opportunity costs lost to the current thing(tm).

AI changes lots of things, and many for the worse. The idea that it's going to enable terrorists to perform biological warfare isn't credible.

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

#217

Post by terribleperson »

slg wrote: post #189
terribleperson wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, right now, find out how to synthesize VX or sarin, or how to weaponize anthrax. You can and have been able to acquire this knowledge without the use of AI. Knowledge is not the obstacle to proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. It's hard to set up the infrastructure. See Aum Shinrikyo.

If you believe that AI is powerful enough to help the good people (however you define that), why isn't that also coupled with the belief that it is powerful enough to help the bad people (ditto)? Either the capability of this tech is completely overblown or it can help a wide swath of people including those with conflicting ideologies.

I absolutely believe that AI can be used by bad people in harmful ways. I don't think that's going to take the form of mass murder. I don't think knowledge is the missing component there.

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

#218

Post by asdff »

dieselgate wrote: post #138
cliglot wrote: post #120

I’ve been in a bit of creative/intellectual rut the last few years, but before that there were a handful of things that intrigued me in the last 5-10 years. Most recently, I became interested in the field of photonics/optics, particularly in the field of novel optical communications research. I’ve had mild interests in things like Biology and History since I was a child. The latter particularly hooked me a few years…

Don't forget the study of neuroscience is much larger than just the human brain. Many other target organisms are studied e.g. fruit fly and are much more thoroughly understood on a fundamental level. Respectfully, when people want to understand the human brain they usually intend to study sociology or psychology rather than neuroscience. Although, of course, neuroscience is applicable to human brains as well.

Every neuron in the fly brain has been mapped recently. It is an amazing model system to work with. A couple weeks generation time (imagine implications for crossing and growing up mutants). Not just in neuro either. Better than working on mice too. IRB doesn't care about how you decapitate your flies.

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

#219

Post by ryandrake »

Aurornis wrote: post #87
PaulRobinson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I'd immediately have a ton of questions for most ex-OpenAI and ex-Anthropic people as my default position would be "poor business/economics judgement in role, chose to ride a hype cycle, now sat in front of me for a reason". I'm not saying it's toxic to have it on your work history, but it's far from gold plated. They'd have work to do for me, and for many, many people in the industry, to prove that I'd w…

You are not in a position to hire them, let alone at a big interesting company. Forgive my bluntness, but your opinion doesn’t matter to their situation. When I say their resumes are gold-plated I mean at the companies they want to work at.

I'm always skeptical about claims that working at any particular company "gold plates" your resume. They once said that about top FAANG companies, too, but today there are a lot of laid off FAANG employees today still underemployed or unable to find work.

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

#220

Post by danenania »

vanuatu wrote: post #133
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…

The top % of YC founders are legitimately quite talented, and high agency/entrepreneurial talent goes a long way in these companies, even if its not in deep infra or research

Being one of the people on this list... yes I would personally say it's mainly about agency and determination, and being obsessive/perfectionist about details. I think YC selects for these traits much more than domain expertise or raw intelligence.

Now that I'm working at a large org (before this my career was purely in startups), I see the importance of this all the time. When you work on a significant project in a bigger org, you get blocked by all kinds of things. Most have very reasonable explanations, but you are blocked nonetheless. Many people just accept this and allow things to proceed pretty slowly, or they accept tradeoffs that make the product worse because it's the path of least resistance. If you want to go faster and not compromise on details, you often have to be persistent and willing to follow up on things to the point of being annoying, which feels similar to being a founder.

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