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

Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 478 posts

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#261

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

observationist wrote: post #16
Insanity wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity. Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.

I don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more. Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels. It's not lik…

> Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level

As do thousands of people say this point. You think the head of deepseek doesn't?

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#262

Post by nrds »

p1necone wrote: post #166
rhipitr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point is it even pay that’s tempting or is it more about what they get to do? I would assume Google could easily pay them what openAI can, unless as an older company it’s harder for Google to match something really out there

Yeah my current feeling is that once I had double digit millions earning further money would be pretty meaningless to me, and the difference between 'large salary' and 'even larger salary' would be even more meaningless, but who knows maybe it really would change me. I kind of assume people like this are primarily chasing the most interesting/impactful work though.

The problem with this belief is that it implies that all of bigtech is massively overpaying for top talent who would happily stay on for pennies. While bigtech overpaying talent is more plausible than any other bigcorp doing so, it's still rather unlikely.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#263

Post by Rumudiez »

UltraSane wrote: post #251
statuslover9000 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shazeer is an aggressive Zionist, and while Altman is better at reading the room, he has previously aligned himself with Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/openais-sam-altman-says-israel...

What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.

I'm confused, is 78 years a long time? even the US is considered a toddler by empirical terms. zionism wasn't a thing until a minority group had the loudest voice in the room when the allies were discussing what to do with all the european refugees after ww2, and it happened to align well with the brits abandoning their failed colony in the region due to disputes with the locals

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#264

Post by Rumudiez »

Rumudiez wrote: post #263
UltraSane wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.

I'm confused, is 78 years a long time? even the US is considered a toddler by empirical terms. zionism wasn't a thing until a minority group had the loudest voice in the room when the allies were discussing what to do with all the european refugees after ww2, and it happened to align well with the brits abandoning their failed colony in the region due to disputes with the locals

here's a quote from wikipedia. it was an utter land grab and an easy way out of responsibility for those in power

> The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine in 1922. British rule and Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration led to growing violence between Arabs and Jews, causing the British to announce its intention to terminate the Mandate in 1947. The UN General Assembly recommended partitioning Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. However, the situation deteriorated into a civil war. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, the Jews ostensibly accepted it, declaring the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948 upon the end of the British mandate. Nearby Arab countries invaded Palestine, Israel not only prevailed, but conquered more territory than envisioned by the Partition Plan. During the war, 700,000, or about 80% of all Palestinians fled or were driven out of territory Israel conquered and were not allowed to return, an event known as the Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe') to Palestinians. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing for decades, about 850,000 Jews from the Arab world immigrated ("made Aliyah") to Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#265

Post by drevil-v2 »

deadbabe wrote: post #222
mikeyouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI pays for the earn out he would’ve otherwise received at Google + a new comp package. Made up numbers, if Google still owed him $10M for lasting the full two years, OpenAI can just pay him market rate +$10M.

Yes, but what about the audacity of it? Get paid a lot to join a company but then decide to get up and leave again 2 years later? He just wants to be passed around?

Oh my goodness think of the poor multi-trillion dollar company!! No honour among thieves these days...

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#266

Post by dansquizsoft »

xnx wrote: post #5

This does suck for Google. Noam will take a lot of Google trade secrets with him to OpenAi. Google's bench is deeper than this one guy though.

Trade secrets? Like how to invent a trillion dollar technology and then sit on it for years while others eat your lunch with it? Like how to consistenly release inferior quality models to others despite infinite compute and engineering talent and insane profitability in your legacy businesses?

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#268

Post by ahmadyan »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #154
mlmonkey wrote: post #138

For those interested, Wired ran a backstory about the Attention is All You Need paper 2 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-... It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors. About Shazeer, from the article: Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often…

> Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.

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 of our questions one day.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#269

Post by frollogaston »

Rumudiez wrote: post #264
Rumudiez wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, is 78 years a long time? even the US is considered a toddler by empirical terms. zionism wasn't a thing until a minority group had the loudest voice in the room when the allies were discussing what to do with all the european refugees after ww2, and it happened to align well with the brits abandoning their failed colony in the region due to disputes with the locals

here's a quote from wikipedia. it was an utter land grab and an easy way out of responsibility for those in power > The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine in 1922. British rule and Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration led to growing violence between Arabs and Jews, causing the British to announce its intention to terminate the Mandate in 1947. The UN General Assembly recommended partiti…

Yes, this is the important thing to know. I've heard way too many conversations that go back and forth about every act of vengeance in either direction after this, it's all noise. Partition plan started this. But I wouldn't call it an easy way out of responsibility; UK's leaders took a clear and binding position in favor of Zionism.

Also, it was Ottoman territory for hundreds of years up to WWI. I've had friends tell me for some reason about how Palestine was an independent country before... literally wasn't.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#270

Post by overfeed »

dboreham wrote: post #49
tcp_handshaker wrote: post #46

I guess this means Google is nowhere close, to even discern a hint of an AGI? So when Demis Hassabis says AGI...could arrive in just 3 years he has learned the best from Larry Ellison?

I would guess it means Sam Altman gave him more money.

And threw in a sweetener when he seemed hesitant: he can say whatever he likes about trans people in the workplace and not worry about being PC.
Post reply on HN