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Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

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Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#221

Post by wat10000 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #191
wat10000 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline makes it sound like he's angry that Meta is poaching his talent. That's a bad look that makes it seem like you consider your employees to be your property. But he didn't actually say anything like that. I wouldn't consider any of what he said to be "slams," just pretty reasonable discussion of why he thinks they won't do well. I'd say this is yet another example of bad headlines having negative informati…

With no dogs in the fight, the very fact he's talking to his employees about a competitor's hiring practices is noteworthy. The delivery of the message can be milder and better than how it sounds in the chosen bits, but the overall picture kinda stays the same.

To me, there’s an enormous difference between “they pay well but we’re going to win the race” and “my employees belong to me and they’re stealing my property.”

Notably, I don’t see him condemning Meta’s “poaching” here, just commenting on it. Compare this with, for example, Steve Jobs getting into a fight with Adobe’s CEO about whether they’d recruit each other’s employees or consider them to be off limits.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#222

Post by vram22 »

ponector wrote: post #190
sitkack wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anytime someone tells you to be in it for the mission, you are expendable and underpaid.

That could be genuine words. Mission is to be expendable and make them rich. Don't forget about the mission during next round of layoffs and record high quarterly profits.

Totally agree.

Well said.

Man, you are on a mission, to enable manumission!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manumission

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#224

Post by eli_gottlieb »

pj_mukh wrote: post #114
neilv wrote: post #29

Can someone make an honest argument for how OpenAI staff are missionaries, after the coup? I'd be very happy to be convinced that supporting the coup was the right move for true-believer missionaries. (Edit: It's an honest and obvious question, and I think that the joke responses risk burying or discouraging honest answers.)

Honest answer*: I think building super intelligence for the company that owns and will deploy the super intelligence in service of tech's original sin (the algorithmic feed) is a 100x worse than whatever OpenAI is doing, save maybe OpenAI's defense contract, which I have no details about. Meta will try to buoy this by open-sourcing it, which, good for them, but I don't think it's enough. If Meta wants to save itself,…

If you have "superintelligence" and it's used to fine-tune a corporate product that preexisted it, you don't have superintelligence.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#225

Post by eli_gottlieb »

zeryx wrote: post #155
darth_avocado wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI’s only goal isn’t building AGI. It is to build it first and make money off it.

Is there even a point to money post AGI?

Not the real thing, no.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#226

Post by _aavaa_ »

echelon wrote: post #118
jrm4 wrote: post #76

Big picture, I'll always believe we dodged a huge bullet in that "AI" got big in a nearly fully "open-source," maybe even "post open-source" world. The fact that Meta is, for now, one of the good guys in this space (purely strategically and unintentionally) is fortunate and almost funny.

Most of Meta's models have not been released as open source. Llama was a fluke, and it helps to commoditize your compliment when you're not the market leader. There is no good or open AI company of scale yet, and there may never be. A few that contribute to the commons are Deep Seek and Black Forest Labs. But they don't have the same breadth and budget as the hyperscalers.

Llama is not open source. It is at best weights available. The license explicitly limits what kind of things you are allowed to use the outputs of the models for.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#227

Post by furyofantares »

jlebar wrote: post #113

I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public. I work at OAI, but I'm speaking for myself here. Sam talks to the company, sometimes via slack, more often in company-wide meetings, all the time. Way more than any other CEO I have worked for. This leaked message is one part of a long, continuing conversation within the company. The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked.…

I've experienced that. Absolutely.

But I've also experienced that the outside perspective, wrong as it may be on nearly all details, can give a dose of realism that's easy to brush aside internally.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#228

Post by moralestapia »

pydry wrote: post #102
jrm4 wrote: post #76

Big picture, I'll always believe we dodged a huge bullet in that "AI" got big in a nearly fully "open-source," maybe even "post open-source" world. The fact that Meta is, for now, one of the good guys in this space (purely strategically and unintentionally) is fortunate and almost funny.

Dont make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Mark Zuckerberg. He didnt open source anything because he's a "good guy", he's just commoditizing the complement. The "good guy" is a competitive environment that would render Meta's AI offerings to be irrelevant right now if it didnt open source.

>he's just commoditizing the complement

That's a cool smaht phrase but help me understand, for which Meta products are LLMs a complement?

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#229

Post by ethbr1 »

moralestapia wrote: post #228
pydry wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Mark Zuckerberg. He didnt open source anything because he's a "good guy", he's just commoditizing the complement. The "good guy" is a competitive environment that would render Meta's AI offerings to be irrelevant right now if it didnt open source.

>he's just commoditizing the complement That's a cool smaht phrase but help me understand, for which Meta products are LLMs a complement?

A continuous stream of monetizable live user data?

The entire point of Meta owning everything is that it wants as much of your data stream as it can get, so it can then sell more ad products derived from that.

If much of that data begins going off-Meta, because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products, that's a huge loss to Meta.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#230

Post by moralestapia »

ethbr1 wrote: post #229
moralestapia wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>he's just commoditizing the complement That's a cool smaht phrase but help me understand, for which Meta products are LLMs a complement?

A continuous stream of monetizable live user data? The entire point of Meta owning everything is that it wants as much of your data stream as it can get, so it can then sell more ad products derived from that. If much of that data begins going off-Meta, because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products, that's a huge loss to Meta.

Sorry, I don't follow.

>because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products

If that were true they wouldn't be trying to create the best LLM and give it for free.

(Disclaimer: I don't think Zuck is doing this out of the good of his heart, obv. but I don't see the connection with the complements and whatnot)

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