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Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

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Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#61

Post by breppp »

ginko wrote: post #41
eikenberry wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.

Wasn't that what the whole Alphabet re-org was supposed to do?

Alphabet has Google with 99% of the profit through Ads, Search, Cloud, Gmail, Youtube etc

and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#63

Post by Nebasuke »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #27

Its getting pretty lame that we talk about the these guys like they're football players transferring teams.

Have you seen the Krazam fantasy FAANGball sketch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo

It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#64

Post by rvnx »

maxdo wrote: post #34
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.

yeah, sure, look at anthropic revenue, what is it if not the moat? you can argue for how long but for them good model = the fastest growing company ever.

Revenue is not a metric of success at all.

Grabbing market-share if you have investors that are ready to burn cash infinetely. Find a hot niche, buy a banana 1 USD, sell it for 0.10 USD.

Example: Cursor, they became popular because they were selling ChatGPT unlimited for 20 USD / month.

When they launched, just a reskinned VS Code, "fastest growing AI company"

No coincidence they were bought by SpaceX, who wants to consolidate revenue even if non-sense as long it helps other investors to exit. It shows rapid growth.

Profit is the real moat.

One example: Nvidia. Proprietary tooling, proprietary IP, proprietary hardware, no alternative, expensive.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#66

Post by tomalbrc »

gzer0 wrote: post #48

Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.” He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead. Now he’s…

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Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#67

Post by ur-whale »

Looks like Google is leaking both AI talent and know-how something fierce ... and since the very day the transformer paper was written.

As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle:

- huge, quasi unmatched data war chest

- huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure

- native AI chip design and production (TPU)

- the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there

- deepmind, enough said

- pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT

- a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...)

- supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley

Why do the best people leave ?

Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ?

Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance?

The only answer I can think of is:

- culture is completely broken

- management sucks something fierce

- company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#68

Post by nsbk »

kxxx wrote: post #45

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_l... Seems like there are some insights here! edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable. 1 liner summary: To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.

Alright. OpenAI feels like a better fit for him after all

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#69

Post by rvnx »

tomalbrc wrote: post #66
gzer0 wrote: post #48

Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.” He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead. Now he’s…

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Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#70

Post by quentindanjou »

electriclove wrote: post #30
thewebguyd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture. Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy'…

Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.

I disagree. It's not about the culling, it has never been, and actually, it makes things worse. You spend countless hours and tons of money recruiting talented people not to lay them off because you don't want a bureaucratic org.

If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.

(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)

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