While most of the interview is boring and nothing new has been said by Toner, to me, it feels like huge political fight where sama tried to overthrow her first and then Toner went in attack mode trying to overthrow him. It's clear she was the lead instigator and accidently found Illya as sympathetic co-conspirator. Board was obviously ok and took no action when they weren't informed about release of ChatGPT. It also didn't took action when sama didn't told them about startup fund. Only after Toner's paper and sama's move, all these became important.
Overall, I genuinely believe that the board needs to get out of way. They are not the founder, they are not even technical. They should do oversight for intentional and significant wrong doings but politics and brewing up secret coups is not their job.
My guess is that Mustafa wanted to sell to MSFT at 10X but MSFT didn’t wanted pay that kind of money. Mustafa was ok with fire sale but VCs were greedy. Mustafa then quite in rage.
They had raised massive amount and not from good patient investors. No traction means Mustafa got fired. This is not surprising though but what is surprising is MSFT picked him up. The guy is not technical, is not even visionary and had just got lucky hanging out with Demis. I would think Satya had better taste.
It is especially horrible for new Amazon employee because of their tiered stock vests. You might have left your great job because Amazon offered you half million signing bonus but you won't last long enough to get even 30% of that.
I have tried using LLamaIndex and APIs are just aweful. It's a nightmare of class hierarchies and abstractions that only author can wrap their heads around. Comments are basically useless classic style of rewriting the function name. Just look at this example:
def get_context(self, response: Response) -> List[Document]:
"""Get context information from given Response object using source nodes.
Most people don’t know some history. During 1990s, a group of people made a fortune out of consulting gigs where they will be called in by their CTO friends in traditional enterprises to save the late and over budget projects. One of these people was Kent Beck. Kent will use his license to kill to turn things around and eventually generalize his rescue formula and sell it to make 100X more. His crowning glory during those days was XP or eXtreme Programming.
Like with all self-help formulas, Kent will label his solution as magic bullet for all software development problems. He will advertise it as secret medicine that cures all ills. He will be at every conference, write articles after articles, publish books.
Also, like all magic self-help formulas, it wouldn’t quite work. So, Kent will invent something new. His next prescription was TDD and when I first saw it, I thought it was a joke. But people around me started drinking cool aid and if you didn’t join them then you weren’t one of them. Again, Kent and friends will go out on massive marketing spree advertising it as secret talisman. Like all overweight desperate people in need to lose weight, people will enthusiastically start new Kent Beck diet, lose few pounds and endorse the formula. But they will soon find that they had simply traded one problem for another more uglier one.
This went on for long time. For more than two decades, these group of people kept inventing these processes, selling it as magic pill and made millions upon millions in consulting gigs, books, training, certifications and so on. They came up with Agile and 17 people in that group created “agile manifesto”. Their most aggressively marketed prescription was scrum. Like their all previous prescription, world is finally coming off of night of drinking cool aid and feeling severe headache.
I think most of these people have now sort of retired after amassing massive fortunes and hopefully we will not see more of these magic processes pushed to dumb CTOs with promises of curing all ills.
The truth is Scrum was never a magic bullet and it is downright harmful for many projects. It is useful for highly predictable projects where research component is negligible, for example, CRUD websites AND where you are stuck with unmotivated tier-3 talent who failed to get job at insurance company. For everything else, it should never have been used. It is especially going to hurt creativity, originality and novelty if you are in business of making a differentiating unique novel product. It also is very very bad choice if you already had tier-1 highly motivated team.
Below summarizes the epidemic at many labs, especially in AI. If you want funding, GPUs and head count then you must prove yourself to be in top 5. The result is relentless pressure for the results that can create headlines.
It identified a culture where Tessier-Lavigne “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that is, postdocs who could generate favorable results) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (that is, postdocs who were unable or struggled to generate such data).”
Most people don’t know this but OpenAI is actually very dysfunctional company and only accidentally successfully because of just handful of right people having a rather lucky hunch (Schulman, Redcliff et al). However, execution wise they are really really poor. You can see this i myriad of problems such as their dataset is still stuck in 2022, plugins was a complete disaster, web browser mode sucks, app is poor, unable to release 32k and multimodal, rate limit even for paid users etc etc.
All thesis problems are now even more aggravated by their recent massive hiring spree of AI doomer crowd and Yudkowsky’s cult members instead of actually doing real research. Now the company is full of doomers whose sole job is to slow things down and be barrier to efforts. Meanwhile Bard has been making amazing progress. It’s free, doesn’t log you off all the time, it always feel latest and very close - if not better than current limited ChatGPT. Given OpenAI’s new staffing composition, they are unlikely to be leader down the road, especially when Gemini comes out. This is unfortunately sama’s second failed execution. He should probably just focus on investments.
Everyone not cynical about marriage only realize their mistake after they get put in 50% bucket of divorces couples. No one who is getting married think they will the one who end up in divorce. It's always that other couple :).
Another case in point: Musk's wife went to court for Tesla's ownership during their divorce but Tesla board had made some provision to avoid this. If Musk had written public letters like above during good days of their relationship, he will toast in the court. I am not saying Musk must deny legitimate ownership of other co-founder but someone just claiming ownership because of marriage laws without putting in blood and sweat of actual founder is just wrong.
From everything I can read, I think Jessica contributed as much as pg but I have no direct knowledge in their world and it's not my business to speculate there.
On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that Lucas, Bezos or Gates wives had same contributions in Lucas Films, Amazon and Microsoft. When I look at their cases, I feel they cashed out with massive windfall taking advantage of broken laws.
I wish pg the best but I think everyone should know how much legal liability these kind of public writings creates. A person I know closely had 25 year marriage in CA and he always believed in love and lifelong relationship. But as their kids went to college, wife's priorities changed. She started affair, started helping out her partner financially etc. Husband discovered all these accidently from her phone. After many discussions, they decided to file for divorce. She apparently claimed in court that she owned majority of his company even though she didn't played much of the part. The guy had started the company even before marriage by his own money. She produced bunch of emails among friend where he appreciated her for help. That was the end of it.
It's easy to swept away in "love" and all that but the reality is that 50% of marriages in Western world ends in divorce. Always remember that people change over time.
The data created by people should be owned by people. They should have right to decide if it can be distributed free or with charge through APIs, archrivals etc. I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.
No. The court has kindly ordered to pay half billion to her billionaire investors. Apparently they are going in prison ONLY because they screwed investors. I truly don't understand this part. These investors agreed to give money based on risk/reward. They were on the board and happily paddled along. They literally didn't cared even when issues were brought to them. They thought it is just like WeWork/Uber founder doing bullshit for exponential growth. Only when press released news and they thought they might get some mud, they pressed eject button.
No one should be going to prison because of these billionaire investors.
Balwani's story is quite amazing. The dude won startup lottery and made enough money that he wouldn't have to worry rest of the life. He had a mansions, sports cars and lived his life happily. One day this young women walks in his life and wants help with her startup. The dude throws away everything to make her startup success, burns midnight oil and torches ethics. He is much older and thinks he is in love. Only later to realize that the woman was simply using him and chewed him out as soon as his purpose was done. They became so adversarial in the end that they literally campaigned to have each other in prison.
Important Life Lesson for Everyone: If you made your money, do NOT fall in love (or, god forbid, marry without iron-clade prenup).
Imagine you are running at 2 miles/hr and your competitor is doing 4 miles/hr. How much distance gap increases between two of you as time passes? The answer is secret to virtually all success in most companies which started as startup. In companies where people do 9-5 and competition where people sleep under desk, the gap grows tremendously. Yes, people burn out and they will be discarded and replaced with new blood but that’s how history is made, unfortunately. The 9-5 companies are exactly the target to be swept away by startups.
Sprints were actually invented for team and culture that is below average. The goal is to keep putting pressure while pretending not to do so. It works well on boring projects or subpar teams. If you did your recruiting right and didn’t end up in pointless projects then you don’t need sprint bullshit. A high powered team is typically self-motivated and can get things done without scrum master asking them what they were upto.
Another ex-colleague here. I was not going to participate in the discussions but your post made me realize objective truth should come out. I do believe she actually thinks she is making the world a better place but in reality any interaction with her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully weigh every move made in her presence. When this blows over her departure will be a net positive for the morale of the company.
To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has also also responded with his thoughts. He is not Lecun or Dean but he is close. What followed for the rest of the thread was Timnit blasting privileged white men for ignoring the voice of a black woman. Nevermind that it was painfully clear they were writing their responses at the same time. Message after message she would blast both the high profile figure and anyone who so much as implied it could have been a misunderstanding. In the end everyone just bent over backwards apologizing to her and the thread was abandoned along with the whole brain papers group which was relatively active up to that point. She has effectively robbed thousands of colleagues of insights into their seniors thought process just because she didn't immediately get attention.
The thread is still up there so any googler can see it for themselves and verify I am telling the truth.
Overall, I genuinely believe that the board needs to get out of way. They are not the founder, they are not even technical. They should do oversight for intentional and significant wrong doings but politics and brewing up secret coups is not their job.