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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'

#721

Post by Zambyte »

bigiain wrote: post #702
Zambyte wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky, Kagi

In my head at least, Bluesky are way closer to "the bad guys'. I don't trust them at all, pretty sure that in spite of what they say, they're going to do the same sort of rug pull that Google did with their "do no evil" assurances.

Funnily enough, I would actually flip it to say this about Kagi. With Bluesky, everything they have built is available to continue to be useful for people completely independent of what the folks over at Bluesky decide to do. There is no vendor lock in at all.

Kagi, on the other hand, has released none of their technology publicly, meaning they have full power to boil the frog, with no actual assurance that their technology will be useful regardless of their future actions.

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

#722

Post by neves »

ysofunny wrote: post #618
anshumankmr wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only place you can say if you are an employee and a missionary is well if you are a missionary or working in a charity/ NGO etc trying to help people/animals etc. The rest of us are mercenaries only.

or if you own the company

It's also nice to work for the government.

At least if you work in a functional democracy where state bureaucrats can't be fired at a dictator's whim.

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

#723

Post by _aavaa_ »

Grimblewald wrote: post #272
jacquesm wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which, given what it was trained on, is utterly ridiculous.

Yup, but that being said, Llama is GPLv3 weather Meta likes it or not. Same as ChatGPT and all the others. ALL of them can perfectly reproduce GPLv3 licensed works and data, making them derivative work, and the license is quite clear on that matter. In fact up until recently you could get chatGPT to info dump all sorts of things with that argument, but now when you try you will hit a network error, and afterwards it…

I don't see how this follows at all. Github isn't GPL3 just because it stores and gives you back gpl3 code

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

#724

Post by 8note »

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.)

yeah... didnt the missionaries all leave after the coup? and the folks who remain are the mercenaries looking for the big stock win after sama figures out a way to be acquired or IPO?

all the chatter here at least was that the OpenAI folks were sticking around because they were looking for a big payout

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

#725

Post by 8note »

godelski wrote: post #319
angst wrote: post #274

“I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI.” - Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder, co-lead of Superalignment Team , Departed early 2024 - May 15, 2025, The Atlantic Anyway, I concur it's a hard choice as one other comment mentions.

Is this a button any one person should have their finger on?

its a button everyone should have finger on. if you can get it to do something good, go for it?

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

#726

Post by Fade_Dance »

hollerith wrote: post #714
Aeolun wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. The government just doesn’t fund it. Not directly anyway, but there’s a ton of Chinese companies that do.

>There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. If that is true and the software is any good, you should be able to name an open-source project that we've heard of started by people living in China. DeepSeek released some models as open weights and some software for running the models. That's the only example I can think of.

I've recently been exploring PKM/knowledge management programs, and the best open source one is a Chinese project - SiYuan.

I have a feeling that their collaborative hacker culture is more hardware oriented, which would be a natural extension from the tech zones where 500 companies are within a few miles of each other and engineers are rapidly popping in and out and prototyping parts sometimes within a day.

Anecdotally, I've dealt with Chinese collaborative community projects in the ThinkPad space, where they have come together to design custom motherboards to modernize old ThinkPads. Of course there was a lot of software work as well when it comes to BIOS code, Thunderbolt, etc. I remember thinking how watching that project develop was like peering into another world with a parallel hacker culture that just developed... differently.

Oh there's also a Chinese project that's going to modernize old Blackberries with 5G internals. Cool stuff!

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

#727

Post by comfysocks »

spenvo wrote: post #15

OpenAI's tight spot: 1) They are far from profitability. 2) Meta is aggressively making their top talent more expensive, and outright draining it. 3) Deepseek/Baidu/etc are dramatically undercutting them. 4) Anthropic and (to a lesser extent?) Google appear to be beating them (or, charitably, matching them) on AI's best use case so far: coding. 5) Altman is becoming less like-able with every unnecessary episode of dr…

The flip-flop on regulation sounds like: “please regulate us (in a way that builds a moat for incumbents out of fear of an imagined future doom scenario)” and “please Don’t regulate us (in a way that prevents us from stealing, and causing actual harm now).”

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

#728

Post by comfysocks »

simianwords wrote: post #289
comfysocks wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta has ad revenue. I think Meta’s play is to make it difficult for pure AI competitors to make revenue through LLMs.

That’s not commoditising the complement!

I’m not the poster that said it was that.

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

#729

Post by anshumankmr »

neves wrote: post #722
ysofunny wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or if you own the company

It's also nice to work for the government. At least if you work in a functional democracy where state bureaucrats can't be fired at a dictator's whim.

Be careful what you wish for... cause too far in the other way you get "babu" culture which I feel is one the things that has ruined India.

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

#730

Post by tuannx »

Meta AI Talent Jiahui Yu: $100M signing bonus, $10M+/year. Alexandr Wang: $100M+ bonus, salary undisclosed. Senior AI Talent: $18M–$100M bonus, $2M–$10M/year. Strategy: Huge bonuses to poach from OpenAI, Google.

Real Madrid Transfers Cristiano Ronaldo: $80M transfer (2009), $15M/year. Gareth Bale: $120M transfer (2013), $17M/year. Kylian Mbappé: $115M bonus (2024), $36M/year. Strategy: Big fees and wages for “Galacticos” to dominate.

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