I’m a bit surprised of how antagonistic HN is against the builders, Sam was/is a Seller, it’s a needed function to pair with Builders, but no one can reasonably say that Sam built anything, Ilya and the safety contingent are the builders, but somehow the mob is angry at them for protecting what they made from the Sellers, kind of hard to see us becoming so profit motivated that we choose IBM over Woz
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It might be the influx of all the MBA-CEO-Steve-Job wannabe types due to the tech boom and normalisation of tech entrepreneurship, and due to YC becoming a brand.
HN has always been full of those types - in fact, much more than your average forum. They have only been outnumbered fairly recently.
I don't care too much about Sam. He seems to me just a bloke that was at the right place at the right time. With the builders, though - I always felt so much contempt to the extremities of AI safety "they" seem to be pushing (and many, I knoq, feel the same) - that makes it rather hard to emphasise.
550/700 OpenAi employees aka builders side with Sam, and that's 550 so far. No builders there wanted this except one I guess (llya).
> No builders there wanted this except one I guess (llya).
Ilya signed the letter, too, and has posted an apology[0].
[0] - https://nitter.net/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028?s=20
He posted an apology because he failed. If he had succeeded we would've said "it was very difficult but it was the right thing to do"
Except you can't really apologize after stabbing someone in the back
Sounds more like a regret than anything else
But do they build for free? Or do they build for money, and especially for the perspective of even more money?
In our society, why should they be expected to build for free? Unless you only hire previously wealthy individuals the idea that there's this class of selfless scientists at the top of their field that don't need to pay a mortgage or support a family is absurd.
In case you do not understand why you are being downvoted. This is precisely what the person you are replying to is saying. When push comes to shove, will these builders prefer a paycheck or stand on their principles.
If linux was not free - we would not be having this conversation and we would live in a drastically different world.
Tell me in which country Linux was first developed?
Which part of the world is that?
Do the countries there have something special which they are well known for, and which might make unpaid passion projects more attainable than, say, 2020s North America?
HN cheered on Elisabeth Holmes as well.
This is my main observation as well watching this play out.
I’ve welcomed how a non-profit board finally “struck back” on the trend of the commercialization and rollout of an incomplete yet highly impactful technology. It might have been imperfectly done, but it was done.
We went though scaling at all costs with social media etc and lived through the last several years to pay for that choice. Watching AI the last year felt like that was all starting again.
OAI’s 700 employees not having as clear a route to fat RSU payouts as they did on Friday seems to be the least important concern here. This technology and its impacts are greater than any 1 company or founder. The idea of another Zuck situation sitting on it in control is not good. Zero lessons were learned from ‘07-2022.
My impression is that Greg and Ilya are both builders, and so one of the builders picked Sam.
Eg see this Twitter exchange between Greg and Ilya: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1359603222491451394?lang=en
Is this what's happening, though? Haven't seen any sort of indication that there's a Builders x Sellers debate here.
It makes more sense if you think of it as reacting to the people and their actions rather than their perceived tribe.
Exactly, how are the researchers going to get all the compute power they need without the 'seller's selling something? Like it or not ChatGPT took the country by storm, has name recognition, generating revenue. And that all allows them to purchase more compute, hire more researchers. What do they think will happen if they stop selling? Will they work for free?
Ilya seems to be the guy telling people to stop building under some vague safety fears
That is such a good point!
OpenAI board completely messed up the framing.
It's contempt for the Yudkowskyans ("AI doomers"), not contempt for the builders.
I find these threads deeply frustrating, as a long-time Yudkowskyan, because approximately zero of the critics show any understanding at all of the arguments involved, and the vast majority seem not even to have tried to understand the core concern. Most seem to be engaging in some kind of status demonstration, sneering at a group of panicked nerds, rather than having any actual technical opinion at all.
Unlike another poster, I don't think this indicates that HN is full of MBA types. Just average software engineers.
>Ilya and the safety contingent are the builders
Ilya, yes. But in what universe are the AI Safety people the builders?