How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Greg Brockman (President of OpenAI) also said that OpenAI is around 80% close to achieving "AGI", but it was disclosed that his stake in OpenAI is worth around 30BN.
So what does the true definition of "AGI" actually mean? It depends on who you ask.
It appears to many to mean "A Great IPO" or "A Gigantic IPO" at this point rather than "Artificial General Intelligence" which has been clearly hijacked to mean something else.
How much money did Y Combinator invest to get that 0.6% stake? I hope it was more than zero. Funny how in 2019 they just start doling out shares in a previously shareless entity.
News at Y Combinator used to be my preferred reading diversion: reading interesting technical stories, debates on political topics, learning things, my comfort food of the same topics repeating the same arguments over the span of a decade. Now it’s that but also 65% AI doomscrolling.
The AI bothered me less, but I got a little frustrated with less than substantive comments on the front page.
Oddly I made an extension* to use the site more the way I wanted and now I find it a little easier to get a higher SNR past the front page and am enjoying that. I didn't really get past post rank 60 for two decades and now generally get much further.
*(It's basically vim-keys support for basically two functions. A function to "highlight" stories/comment threads I think will be promising and then hide function for the rest.)
Pedantically, "doomscrolling" refers specifically to consuming bad news -- the doom is load-bearing. This is more like AI saturation or topic capture. But I get what you mean; it has that same compulsive, hollowing quality regardless of what the subject matter actually is.
Same with me. I found a new hobby: reading pre-LLM HN. It turns out I missed so many interesting projects and discussions. Some are a bit funny in hindsight, some are inspiring.
At the same time, the current version of HN is still usable, you just need to mentally filter LLM-related stuff. It was similar with cryptocurrencies TBH.
I just press the "Hide" button under most stories related to AI; it removes the temptation for me to jump into the thread, and surfaces more interesting (i.e. not AI bullshit) submissions.
You could probably automate it with a browser extension and a regex that looks for words like "AI", "LLM", and the names of any popular companies or projects.
i always thought there were two reasons for AI interest on HN.
1. since AI has captured the imagination of capitalists and they think this is the next industrial revolution, they gotta be in it to win it. combined with the fact that i believe most people here are wealthy or at least aspirationally so, that explained half of it.
2. the other half is that AI as a tech is interesting from a mathematical and compsci point of view, tho certainly not interesting enough to justify the proportion of topics about it here.
i guess i should add a 3rd reason.
3. ycomb has a financial stake in spreading the news about how wonderful this tech is!
The only thing that should be surprising to anyone who knows about the early history of OpenAI is how little of it YC owns, given how much it leveraged YC’s credibility to get started (early employees joined an institution called “YC Research”, operating from YC’s office space). Once that stake is divided up among all the LPs and small unit holders, it’s not a huge outcome.
Also: nothing gets sustained attention on HN unless good hackers find it interesting. Our entire objective is to be the website that attracts the best hackers, serves them the most interesting content and facilitates the most interesting discussions. That can’t happen if we’re nefariously pushing a commercial agenda.
- Steve Huffman ~3% Although he had ~4% voting power via Class B shares.
- Alexis Ohanian: Minimal
- Advance Publications: ~30%
- Tencent: ~11%.
The original founders (Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) massively diluted when they sold Reddit to Advance Publications in 2006 for $10 to $20 million.
The interest in AI is global and spans nearly every corner of the Internet, it’s not something exclusive to HN. The root cause of this is #1 by a wide margin. Our society is governed by money, the investor class sees an opportunity to become trillionaires, the labor class is afraid of becoming the permanent underclass, all of these things are defined by money.
One more (for me, and definitely for many others since I've seen similar posts):
It's letting me build stuff I probably wouldn't be able to build by myself without raising lots of money for way cheaper, at least until GitHub Copilot gets incredibly nerfed next month.
Please don’t post snark on HN. Gary is, objectively, an AI expert. He’s been a leading researcher for decades and sold an AI company to Uber. He obviously sees things differently from the current generation of AI company leaders and has concerns about the direction of the AI industry. That doesn’t mean it’s fine to disrespect someone like this here. The first rule of the “In Comments” section of the guidelines is be kind.
Such suspicious phrasing lol. So you’re saying Paul Graham and his wife Jessica have 800 MILLION dollars worth of OpenAI stock, and that’s not so significant?
$800M is life-changing for a normal person, but for someone at Jessica's level of wealth it's probably not the number that changes decisions. The more interesting question is whether YC's institutional 0.6% creates structural conflicts, not personal ones.
My understanding is dang has said in the past they do some anti moderation(I’m sure he has a better term) for posts related to ycombinator. That is to say they moderate less and might, do not quote me here, even boost a tad. So upvoted story by a well reputed source even without many comments is likely to hang onto the front page for a bit.
"Less" doesn't mean "not at all", of course—that would be too big a loophole. But it does mean strictly less, and we stick to that, despite its various downsides, because the upside is bigger.
In the present case, it means we haven't applied any moderation downweights to this post, even though it's obviously the sort of thing we would downweight under other circumstances, since it's neither particularly substantive nor intellectually interesting (though it could be some other kind of interesting, at least to some readers).
The actual content of the post is straightforward and not particularly novel — YC has a stake in OpenAI, that creates a conflict of interest, and the New Yorker is negligent (in the informal sense) for not putting that in their piece.
It’s a sobering reminder and worthy of being on the front page on that basis alone, but I don’t see much of a discussion to be had. “Unusually quiet for a front page post” is probably where this post is meant to be.
Conflicts of interest in tech coverage tend to generate less discussion when they're already documented. YC's stake in OpenAI isn't new information, as far as I know. The quiet might reflect "yes, and?" more than indifference.
Could someone (non-AI) summarize this? I'm sorry but I just literally don't have time to even read long posts from very reputable sources. I know I need the info but time just isn't there in my life right now.
Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz had a critical investigative report in The New Yorker on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month asking whether Altman could be trusted.
Paul Graham of Y-Combinator in response tweeted some positive things about Altman, emphasising that they didn't fire him as CEO of YC (though not going as far as declaring him trustworthy).
Now John Gruber of DaringFireball (an Apple blog) added context by claiming that YC owns a 0.6% stake in OpenAi, worth around $5bn, which might colour Graham's judgement.
Same thing happened with Sequoia and Google. Early bets dilute through rounds, preferred liquidation stacks eat returns. 0.6% of OpenAI's current paper valuation sounds huge until you model what actually gets distributed if this thing ever liquidates.
So what does the true definition of "AGI" actually mean? It depends on who you ask.
It appears to many to mean "A Great IPO" or "A Gigantic IPO" at this point rather than "Artificial General Intelligence" which has been clearly hijacked to mean something else.