Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Greg Brockman interview [video]

fs.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 276 posts

Re: Greg Brockman interview [video]

#181

Post by borski »

tyre wrote: post #150
tim333 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People discount Google/Deepmind but a lot of the original research was done there including inventing transformers which form the basis of the other AI companies.

If anything, the amount of original and foundational research at Google is a black mark against their position now. They blew a hell of a lead. I’m willing to discount what they did almost a decade ago (“Attention is All You Need” was 2017) in an industry that moves this quickly. The execution of an Anthropic matters more now.

Short term, that’s definitely true. Long term, I’m not so sure.

Re: Greg Brockman interview [video]

#182

Post by overgard »

temp8830 wrote: post #107
tcp_handshaker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about stealing 12 million books of copyrighted human culture, at massive scale, and then enclosing the value created inside proprietary, investor-backed systems? Something wrong with that? What happens if you go tomorrow, downtown San Francisco, and leave a bookstore with one book without paying? "Behind every great fortune there is a crime" - Honoré de Balzac

Even though the founders of OpenAI are not exactly someone you'd root for, comparisons to theft are silly. By that token it would be illegal to go into a library, read a book, and actually remember what was in it. Except in this case the reader is a robot. LLMs are such a fundamentally different thing that existing laws don't really make sense. Wait! Put the pitchfork down! I know, I know, stealing is stealing, and O…

There are a lot of things that are fine individually that are extremely problematic at scale. Like "reading a book" vs "ingesting all the books and art that ever existed into a plagiarism machine"

Re: Greg Brockman interview [video]

#183

Post by achierius »

tyre wrote: post #146
93po wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

worse than that is the $60 million sale price, which was comically and absurdly low. Elon himself said he was willing to buy it for significantly more than that and the fact that it wasn't able to go to the highest bidder just shows that it was bullshit

Wait, no, not at all. A non-profit shouldn’t have to take the highest bidder regardless. The whole _point_ of a non-profit is to act beyond purely short-term financial gains. “Elon buying this doesn’t align with the mission” is a completely normal, reasonable, and healthy response for most non-profits. What’s great is that we don’t need to speculate about a counter factual. He did end up building a chatbot! Whose def…

But the decision is still subject to heavy scrutiny; in fact, more than with normal for profit corporations. It does not seem like the board acted in the best interests of the nonprofit here, they acted in their own.

Re: Greg Brockman interview [video]

#185

Post by throwaway_2494 »

myst wrote: post #151
ethbr1 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened when business types realized technology could be enormously profitable (~PC era). Then inevitably, tech news turned into business news.

What do you get if you drop a teaspoon of business into a barrel of X? A barrel of business.

And anytime programmers start to discuss anything in detail, you know just when it's getting interesting: "Can we take this 'offline'..."

See also this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMVuRGw_a5A

Re: Greg Brockman interview [video]

#186

Post by p1esk »

jesterson wrote: post #40
_zoltan_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse? There is nothing wrong with wanting 1B. Anybody who said they wouldn't want it is lying.

I wouldn’t want. I have enough. Not everyone is wanting money. But it is not the point. The point is, when you take high moral ground and talk about bug problems to help humanity, and then your own diary exposes you as avaricious simpleton, the whole high moral ground crumbles. And you expose yourself as another grifter. That’s what happened to Brockman. Although smart people could see these qualities in altman, broc…

Why can't I want both earning 1B and do good things for the world? Unless his diary directly contradicts what he has said in public (like "I don't care about money"), I see zero moral issues here.

Re: Greg Brockman interview [video]

#187

Post by krackers »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #21

Why can't someone ask what happened in Ilya's mind. Firing Sam and then signing the solidarity letter of Sam to leave OpenAI if was fired. Other than that, all other information seems kind of just going over the surface.

>what happened in Ilya's mind

I thought Ronan Farrow's investigate essay answered that pretty satisfactorily? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...

Re: Greg Brockman interview [video]

#188

Post by overgard »

granzymes wrote: post #117
bix6 wrote: post #75

I just don’t understand why a non-profit was allowed to do this. Does this not set a precedent that non-profit doesn’t actually mean anything? You can just use a favorable structure until it’s time to enrich yourself.

I think it would be helpful for you to clarify which part of the chain you found objectionable: - in 2015, OpenAI was founded as a Delaware nonprofit - in 2017, OpenAI discovered the scaling laws and realized they needed far more compute (and thus money) than they had initially anticipated - that discovery precipitated a series of negotiations between the founders on how to restructure OpenAI to raise more money for…

I find it unsettling that a company who wants to eradicate the middle class's ability to make a living, possibly bring about the singularity (I don't think they'll accomplish it, but they want to), and are actively creating one of the most massive bubbles we've ever seen is somehow a "public benefit" company. Absolutely nothing they're doing is to the public's benefit.

Re: Greg Brockman interview [video]

#190

Post by avazhi »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #33
nba456_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If his entire personal diary got exposed and that's the worst that's in it, good for him.

Worse? There is nothing wrong with wanting 1B. Anybody who said they wouldn't want it is lying.

There’s nothing wrong or strange about aspiring to be a billionaire but writing about it in your diary like a hormonal teen girl reading fairy tales is a bad look.

It’s also difficult to take people seriously if they only care about money or, in Altman’s case, power. Single minded obsessiveness about these sorts of things tends to render people intellectually dishonest by definition.

Post reply on HN