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 by a small number of experienced ‘magicians,’ to even show any signs of life,” says Uszkoreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery right away. He decided to write his own version of the transformer team’s code. “I took the basic idea and made the thing up myself,” he says. Occasionally he asked Kaiser questions, but mostly, he says, he “just acted on it for a while and came back and said, ‘Look, it works.’” Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” he had taken the system to a new level.
Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.
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.
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
Someone should write a bot to do this automatically. What is the HN policy on bots?
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
Easy peasy!
A dear friend of mine was doing R&D at a startup where management poured on a bunch of low-level management work that took him away from his joy, which was developing new tools and approaches to solving customer problems. He left, and went to another gig that promised him complete freedom to invent and discover. That job is at a Fortune 500 company that is slowly starting to pull its head out of its ass.
and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
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)
What percentage of Google employees are engineers...
You mean fire the very smart people who designed the core systems AND insult them so that anyone with options would never want to work there?
Has been in more of a maintenance mode with a multiple of those people. If anything, the pace of the product has improved. Regardless of what you think about Musk, the company he bought was a bloated mess.
You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.
(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)
Sadly the gap between reality and satire has shrunk.
But yes. I also wish that show would come back.
Noam shazeer would be google head dreamer
We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.
Maybe Noam measures status differently.
All those engineers making 20M a year at Anthropic and OpenAI are going to back down to normal super high comp of 700k a year after their starter grants run out, and yes many will quit but the people who stay aren't moving the needle on their finances that much.
Uszkoreit wanted to build a more efficient/scalable language/seq2seq model that could take advantage of GPU parallelism (replacing RNNs which were the main approach to sequence modelling at that time).
Uszkoreit's insight was that although language appears sequential, it is in fact really part parallel part hierarchical, as can be seen by linguist's sentence parse trees where at each level there is parallelism/independence between the branches of the tree, with them getting combined at the next level up. This is what gave rise to the idea of a model that consisted of a stack of of parallel processing layers (transformer layers). I believe that attention was also part of the plan from day one, as this had already been proven to be valuable (Bahdanau) with RNN seq2seq modelling.
So, this is what Uszkoreit wanted to build, but by his own account he failed to come up with an implementation that matched or outperformed the prevailing RNN approach that he wanted to replace. At this point, Uszkoreit mentioned the idea to Shazeer, who got on board and eventually arrived at a performant architecture which was then pared back by an ablation process resulting in the initial encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Shazeer later came up with the mixture-of-experts architecture, and also other optimizations after he left to found character.ai
I'm talking from plenty of group project experience here.
Why? If you read a research paper for its content this is not especially important.
This thread is more about the people of course, and here we care, but that's not the point of a research paper.
The research history leading up to this was interesting - there had been a bunch of work, in various domains, on "autoencoder" architectures used to learn compact representations for things like dimensionality reduction and sequence representation. The idea was to have an encoder-decoder pair, connected by a limited bottleneck representation, with the training goal of the decoder reconstructing the encoder input from the bottleneck representation.
One example of this was to learn a fixed size(!) sequence (e.g. sentence) representation using an LSTM-based autoencoder (LSTM->embedding->LSTM), which at the time seemed rather shocking - the ability to represent a variable length sequence with a fixed size embedding. Equally shocking was that you could use this for machine translation simply by connecting an LSTM encoder for one language to an LSTM decoder for another language.
This type of LSTM->LSTM seq2seq encode-decode architecture for machine translation was then improved by Bahdanau by replacing the fixed size representation with an attention mechanism so the decoder could learn to be more specific about input-output relationships.
This type of LSTM-based seq2seq encode-decode architecture, using attention, is what Uszkoreit et al set out to improve - to make more efficient by using a parallel vs sequential (RNN) architecture. The Transformer was never conceived of as purely for language modelling, or as an "AI" architecture. Later when the usage focused on language modelling (generation, not translation), the encoder was dropped since input and output are the same thing.
Equal contribution. Listing order is random. Jakob proposed replacing RNNs with self-attention and started the effort to evaluate this idea. Ashish, with Illia, designed and implemented the first Transformer models and has been crucially involved in every aspect of this work. Noam proposed scaled dot-product attention, multi-head attention and the parameter-free position representation and became the other person involved in nearly every detail. Niki designed, implemented, tuned and evaluated countless model variants in our original codebase and tensor2tensor. Llion also experimented with novel model variants, was responsible for our initial codebase, and efficient inference and visualizations. Lukasz and Aidan spent countless long days designing various parts of and implementing tensor2tensor, replacing our earlier codebase, greatly improving results and massively accelerating our research.
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 leaving Google again for OpenAI.
Exciting times!
Google bought him back (with lots of money) and made him one of the leads of Gemini.
His raw skills are likely atrophied by now from delegating and operating at higher levels. His entire value is mostly political now.
If he can’t play the political game and win, he’s useless. He would probably just go to some other organization where people aren’t immune to his lore.
Google is a different place today than even 5 years ago.
What is exiting about this?
Google lost three critical years chasing AGI, and got acquired by SpaceX, now a Dyson Sphere startup whose pitch deck is just: "What if we put a paywall around the Sun?"
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
Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1].
The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission.
Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is.
Noam is the real deal, he was pretty legendary within old-time ('00s) Google engineering. Paul Buchheit had a story about interviewing him with the "how to write a spellchecker" question and then him coming up with something better than the state-of-the-art, then basically delivering Google's spell corrector in his first 2-week Noogler project.
"Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides" - https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/google-character-ai-lawsuit...
Be aware...very disturbing: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac...
Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.
The tea leaves were pretty easy to read, too; LLMs will eventually be commoditized. Once that happens, the only road to profitable AI will be paved with 1) branding and 2) cheap compute. Apple does not possess cheap inference hardware whatsoever. Their GPUs are raster-focused, inefficient and expensive for their dedicated compute role. Unless Apple crawls back to Nvidia with their tail between their legs, TPU inference was their only real option. The deal was even more obvious when you used Apple's local foundation models; they're downright eclipsed by the quality of Gemma. Once Apple Intelligence was announced, it became clear that Apple was the branding component in search of a strange bedfellow to thumb their nose at Nvidia.
We don't really see this type of opportunism in the hardware space. Case in point, the TPU is a pretty big accomplishment that successfully competes for inference and stimulates the need for cheaper compute.
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.
To some it still means favoring any existence of a Jewish state. The inertia isn't there because aside from the original partition plan being pushed by the UK, other countries have attacked Israel several times later in ways they would've have withstood without outside support.
it was actually Likud's official election slogan in the 70s and 80s just as ... oh, let me check, Netanyahu, was getting involved in all of this, formally becoming Likud's leader in 1993.
And the destruction of Israel is the explicit goal of Hamas as stated in their charter.
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it" and called for holy war to establish an Islamic state across historic Palestine.
Look, to be very clear: Hamas is absolutely a terrorist organization who has caused constant harm to both Israelis and the average Palestinian they purport to represent (there have been no elections since 2006, Hamas are the only people with weapons in Gaza, and the average citizen might as well be a hostage - and frankly they’d turn against Hamas a lot more if Israel didn’t steadily inflict collective punishment against them like turning off their electricity or even drinking water for days or weeks for actions of Hamas. All that is doing is making sympathizers of them).
Now that is a valid use of the term. I think the problem it that Zionism means so many different things it is nearly useless as a description. It seems more useful as a slur which has become very common in some circles.
"The inertia isn't there"
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
> Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
US and UK, yes. Not just cause of the weapons and money to Israel. After them, the top recipients of US foreign aid in the area are the bordering countries Egypt and Jordan, so that they don't attack.
And how is that?
Israel has a population of 10 million people and a very modern military and nuclear weapons. If it's existence was ever truly threatened things would get VERY ugly.
I have doubts about their ability to self-defend because otherwise we wouldn't be giving so much money, the situation would be stable. Even if they can severely hurt the attackers, it doesn't really matter if the attackers stop at nothing. We just lost a war against Iran despite having full air superiority and killing their leader. And especially if you're considering the scenario where Israel never got Western support, and thus never got those advanced weapons.
It's pretty obvious from the emotional response that you've got some kind of horse in the Israel-Hamas war that I don't, which is fine, but I'm not gonna get called a liar too. So bye.
My only emotion is exhaustion at hearing the same lies told over and over.Israel razed Gaza to the ground. It was a genocide.
It's true that Nazism lacks the religious aspect, and Zionism lacks the pagan aspect.
I hope you can agree that these are aesthetic differences.
Both movements advocate for one ethnicity having the right to live on a particular part of the land, ime. ethonationalism (Nazis: "Blood and soil" vs. Zios: "The chosen people who god promised the land to"), both movements are expansionist (N: "Lebensraum" vs. Z: "Buffer zones" and "Greater Israel"), both movements subjugate another ethnicity that they deem lesser and evil (N: Jews, Black people, Roma, vs. Z: Palestinians, Arabs).
Both movements have commited genocide against the other ethnicities.
So, are Nazis pigs? If they are, then the label fits Zionists as well.
You're absolutely right, and this is antisemitic propaganda. Israel left more than 20 years ago and didn't return until 2023 due to Hamas terrorism.
They certainly didn't return:
- for five months in 2006 for Operation Summer Rains
- or again in 2006 for Operation Autumn Clouds
- or again in 2008 for Operation Hot Winter
- or again in 2008 into 2009 for Operation Cast Lead
- or again in 2012 for Operation Pillar of Defense
- or again in 2014 for Operation Protective Edge
- or again in 2018 and 2019 for incursions and special-forces actions, like that covert IDF operation in Khan Younis that got fucked up and led to a firefight deep in Gaza (but that couldn't have happened, because they left back in 2005, right?)
- or lastly, before October 7, in 2021 in Operation Guardians of the Walls.
None of those large named operations could have happened, let alone anything smaller than named operations, like special forces or commando raids, because those things are purely Hamas propaganda, and not formal IDF operations.
Right?
Hamas thinks it can destroy Israel with force. It can't anymore than native Americans can destroy the US. And Hamas trying and failing over and over and over and over has made the lives of Palastinians much worse. Hamas gleefully kills any Palestinians that point this out or oppose them in any way.
Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.
You're right. It -is- exhausting. Because I never said a word about the merit, or lack thereof, of Israel's actions or reactions, or Hamas'.
I just commented that Israel has spent multiple years in Gaza "since they left".
HOWEVER, you absolutely stated, and get bent out of shape multiple times in this thread alone, at anyone even hinting Israel set foot in Gaza since 2005:
Someone comments saying this exact thing, "Israel has been operating in buffer zones", etc., etc. and you?
"Israel left... Stop telling obvious lies."
Also, it might not be permanent occupation but when you're back there nearly every year for 3-9 months, it might not feel like you ever really left.
> 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.
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.
A non-zionist Israel would be one where all peoples had the same right, e.g.
It was never actually Palastinian land. It was Jewish land, then Roman land, then Ottoman land, then British land, then Jewish land after Palastinians attacked Israel and lost. At no point were the Palastinians ever a sovereign country and in fact they incredibly foolishly rejected the UN offer for one.
"other creeds and ethnicities should be second class "
Approximately 2.5 to 2.6 million non-Jews live in Israel, comprising about 25% to 26% of the country's total population. This is compared to less than 1% of the population of Gaza being non-muslim.
The Palestinians are the people who lived there. The Zionists expelled half of them and razed 500 villages to the ground in 1948. It was an ethnic cleansing. They denied them the right to return.
There was a Palestinian identity and there was a Palestinian society. They revolted against the Ottomans, and the British promised them sovereignty. The British betrayed them and caved to the Zionists, and the rest is settler colonialism and apartheid.
Right, like stomping around the comments claiming that anything less than pretending Israel didn't set foot in Gaza between 2025 and October 7, 2023 is filthy Hamas propaganda, the existence of at least six formally named IDF operations being just a pesky bit of reality that can be easily run over by a Merkava Mk V main battle tank.
Or, who am I kidding, of course it won't.
Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.
The Palestinians were the only people living on the land before the settlers came. That included Jews and Christians, because Palestinians are not a homogeneous group.
The Zionist settlers are not indigenous, they had no right to settle there. They also took the UN resolution and just started a war where they razed 500 villages. I'm sure if the Palestinian side had won, they would have expelled the settlers. But that is only natural. And beside the point, because the Palestinians didn't start the war, and of course uou expel invaders.
And native americans were living in Canada, US, and Mexico before settlers came. The Palestinians are hardly unique in losing land in a war. In fact this is basically the norm in human history. What is almost unique is how Palestinians have made their lives much much worse pathetically trying to get the land back when they have absolutely no chance of doing so, anymore than Native Americans do.
The jews living in Israel in 2026 are indigenous in the sense they are NOT leaving so any scenario where they do is a stupid fantasy. the Palestinians DID start the war, they rejected their own sovereign state in favor of gambling for everything and lost. But they have spent 78 years just refusing to accept reality while Israel has grown rich and powerful.
Israelis are not indigenous (there are rare exceptions of Mizrahis or Jerusalem Palestinians with some form of citizenship), they are colonists.
It doesn't matter if Israelis are indigenous or not because 7 million people are not going to leave.
It's not rare at all, the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi.
If you mean citizens of the State of Palestine, that’s a political matter, and zero Jews have that citizenship.
If you mean something along the lines of “unbroken lineage of ancestors who never left Palestine", that would also exclude many people who we all consider Palestinian, such as Arafat himself who was born in Cairo.
More specifically there are 0 Jews living in areas under control of the Palestinian Authority, or in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen.
Thank you for providing a perfect example of how the word zionist has become a replacement for kike among jew-haters.
Let's compare figures like, say Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker.
Fuentes regularly spouts vile anti-semitic rhetoric, painting up a picture of Jews as greedy schemers.
Piker always makes it clear he is talking about Israel, not Jews. Painfully so.
I have not seen a single self-odentified leftist say anything anti-semitic IRL. But I have seen right-wingers do this.
And this same story is reflected in politicians statements as well. The right is anti-semitic.
The ADL claims that the left is, but that is because the ADL wants to conflate Israel with the entire ethnic group of Jews. Which is an obvious and silly bad faith trick. You're also doing the same thing.
"God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam"
And it's not really about religion. It's about Palestinians specifically, who are indigenous to Palestine, and are under Israeli apartheid.
The Palestinians who have been exiled by Israel, and their children, cannot live where their grandparents lived (even though they should have a right to return, under UN resolutions that Israel has accepted), but any Jew from, let's say Brooklyn, does.
Also, Islam is the only faith in Israel which is not allowed to self-organize. It is singled out among all religious communities as the only one who is not given this right. Which is of course incredibly discriminatory.
There isn't a single jew living in Gaza. Why is that?
It is very much about religion. Hamas is an explicitly Islamic supremacist organization that calls for the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation.
If you had the option to live as a full citizen in Israel, being told you're part of the dominant ethnicity that's treated as human beings; or staying in Gaza, where you are being bombed to death by the IDF, I wonder which you would choose?
Your argument is essentially stating the conditions of apartheid as negative for dominant ethnic group. I didn't know someone could be so divorced from reality.
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'm no super-insider, I only hear industry scuttlebutt like everyone else, but I have about a 95% confidence that the last 18 months has just been about more and better, without any kind of real leap or breakthrough. More hardware, more data, better technique. Well, technique diffuses as people change companies, hardware can be built, and data can be gathered (or stolen!).
From my admittedly outsider perspective, the only years-long moat there is who has the most hardware. If you have the hardware, you can give away the compute to get the data (hello, subsidized subscriptions!). Technique can simply be hired. The only durable, multi-year advantage is the hardware.
So is that a moat? Sure, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the leading model companies of the moment. ASML is the real moat, and so it's ASML China is besieging, correctly (IMO) identifying that everything else can be caught up easily enough.
Check back in a few years...
Don't we all want to (automatically) and passively invest in a company losing billions of dollars ?
At least we can diversify our portfolio from SpaceX.
That's their moat.
Maybe also stolen copyrighted content that cannot be found anywhere else now, so they are the only ones who can train on it.
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.
You don't know what Cursor's game plan was. Maybe acquisition was their plan.
Buying at $1 and selling for $0.1 is still viable as long as they have money in the bank, until they achieve their goals. Most startups start out that way. Even giving away their services for free.
Obviously there will be failures. Doesn't mean they have no moat. Can you say a business with 100 customers and $1000 debt is less viable than one with a single customer and no debt?
Possibly true. Any smart innovations developed by one organization will be smuggled into others.
Training, inferring, and data collection, infrastructures are definitely moats. High-volume usage feedback is also hard to come by for new entrants.
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 like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
As do thousands of people say this point. You think the head of deepseek doesn't?
1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).
2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.
Question two: Why are OpenAI spending that money taking talent from Google, who can definitely outspend them for talent, and not Anthropic, who are leading the market and are at least somewhat financially constrained.
But I'm sure for at least some folks, this is true, given recent valuations.
Because I think as far as running the existing models and handling whatever nuances, it must be well understood by oai and ANT -- but you don't what you don't know.
But money at that level isn't about being financially secure - to have a roof over your head and food to eat - it's about power.
Money at that level gives you the ability to shape the world in ways others can only dream of - whether that be starting your own company where you can set the values, funding a cure for Malaria, or political lobbying.
Depends on whether the person in question has strong views and a strong belief that they are in the right.
Full disclaimer - I have no insight or knowledge about this particular person - just making the rather obvious and general case that joining OpenAI now at a senior level is likely to generate a serious windfall, and such a windfall is power.
As I said, no idea what motivates this particular person - don't know them at all - the money may be entirely coincidental and it's all about getting stuff done - but he did choose OpenAI rather than somebody like Anthropic....
Karpathy to Anthropic, now Noam to OpenAI.
He could raise and build his own company. But the ability to attract the level of talent that Google/Anthropic/OpenAI have is a different story.
And Deepminds Demis Hassabis was the single other? Or were there more?
So didn’t they get on? The latter is in London so time difference to put up with too
Although I can't fathom why we'd want to? Like what is the advantage of giving tools sentience?
I always appreciated Jeff having a level head ... which this article seems to confirm:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts...
I've seen engmisc and industryinfo, and I agree they are sometimes insufferable but having a level head would be ignoring them.
What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.
Popular entertainment and unique progress of human civilization can’t be really compared either
I'd argue that professional sport is the closest thing to a true meritocracy - doesn't matter who your Dad knows - you ability is there for all to see on the pitch.
And at the team level - if cosy cliques form, again - team performance doesn't lie - hard work, team work and talent is ultimately what delivers results on the pitch.
The other interesting part of professional sport is that the 'workers' have managed to capture more of the value than is traditionally the case - this is precisely because they are so hard to replace.
If you think professional footballers earn too much and are interchangable - feel free to try and get in the team.
So take this scenario - I'd argue that if you want to make progress in the field of these particular ML models, then you are going to need resources ( compute/data etc ) that is beyond most individuals capability to muster. ie you have to join a company with resources ( or persuade somebody to give you them ).
Right now there is one of those scenarios where capital is chasing talent - and so talent, if they are so inclined, is able to make the most of that.
But in normal times that's typically not the case - most of the time scientists are chasing the capital ( directly or indirectly in the form of a job in a well resourced company ) in order to be able to science, rather than the other way around.
To become a good scientist you don’t need much classic capital, you need a good environment. And for ML you only need one computer for yourself or you can rent online
There are still big inefficiencies for those who have capital to discover good scientists / engineers. Lots of them are unknown.
But if there are top ones famous it will bring more people to study those fields
The way it works in academia is that scientists compete with each other for the limited capital ( grant funding and jobs ). Not the other way around.
> But if there are top ones famous it will bring more people to study those fields
Is the problem lack of talent in these fields or the narrow allocation of capital?
Is it really true that Noam is the only person in the world that could have done what he did or where their in fact lots of people who would have succeed given the same opportunities?
That's not to devalue what they did or the impact - and I'm all for recognising the contributions of scientists to society - but the reality is, for the most part, talent competes for capital rather than the other way around.
I'd also point out that I suspect the high profile appointments of people like Noam and John to OpenAI and Anthropic is as much to do with adding star quality to the IPO as much bringing in talent ( and that's not to diminish their talent ).
This is good.
I don’t care that some are jealous of him because they think they are as good as him in linear algebra.
The existence of pay-per-view sports TV wasn't a pre-requisite for professional football - that existed way before - clubs self funded from gate receipts, local business sponsorship - they grew out of the local communities.
Sure, global TV has brought in the big money, but it wasn't required for the game to exist - but the opposite is true - pay-per-view sports TV is very dependent on sports like football.
> To become a good scientist you don’t need much classic capital, you need a good environment.
Pretty much all scientists learn their craft doing a government funded PhD in government funded labs using government funded equipment. ie governments provide the capital. People simply aren't self taught.
> And for ML you only need one computer for yourself or you can rent online
In theory - but modern AI is so resource intensive, good luck competing with the likes of Google/OpenAI, even Deepseek like that.
We need to make science more popular
We disagree on learning science and engineers, this doesn’t require physical capital, it only requires human capital
So? The point is football doesn't require this. It's not necessary for football to happen. The first Fifa world cup was in 1930.
> We disagree on learning science and engineers, this doesn’t require physical capital, it only requires human capital
Try building a bridge without any money. Try detecting the Higgs Boson without CERN. Sure Peter Higgs can come up with the idea of the Higgs Boson with little capital ( though somebody still paid for his living expenses - he wasn't a self funded gentlemen scientist ) - but that's the exception - most of the work is like CERN - and requires significant equipment and capital.
It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.
What is going on at Google?
I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.
I doubt that the money had anything to do with it.
I also doubt that the state of the technology at OAI vs. Google had much to do with it, Google is behind no doubt, but the gap is not as far as we know, insurmountable.
I suspect that this is a leadership clash. Noam was working in GDM. GDM somehow went away from coding and RSI into "world models" and that has played out very poorly. Who made that call? Who was still playing politics?
Given this is Noam the list of people that could be pissing him off is very small: Demis, Sergey (?!), a couple of VPs in GDM.
What the hell happened?
Also, why didn't they nail him down contractually when they bought character.ai ... isn't that pretty standard with these type of superstar (re)hires?
OpenAI is in a unique position right now to grant pre-IPO options (probably in the form of RSUs). And they wanted him badly enough to grant the extra options necessary to effectively 'buy out' whatever unvested Google bonus he's walking away from.
LOL.