- For those interested, Wired ran a backstory about the Attention is All You Need paper 2 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-...
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.
- > Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,”
Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.
- As a hacker, I kinda like naom's code. I was had to implement a TC MoE kernel, and stumbled upon his code from [tensor2tensor](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor/blob/master/tens...) and i think "alchemy" is justified. Dude writes some beautiful kernels.
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.
- There's no doubt about Noam's abilities. But I read through that code, and struggle to see its 'magic' or 'alchemy'. Can you elaborate what you find especially good about that code? (You may assume GPU kernel programming knowledge on my end.)
- To me the magic Noam moment was when he came to my team and said "that cluster has a bad node in it, but this other one doesn't" and we had to spend like a week tracking down a single bad processor out of thousands.
- Unrelated to the particular code above. There's a difference between writing code about or adjacent to a proven idea vs writing code in uncharted territory. I suspect that is what happened here. It's the same thing with say music and art. A lot of people today can play Chuck Berry.
- It's a good point. Though I do wonder if the magic he casted was more at the conceptual level (intense belief on a set of primitives that ought to work) more than the code itself. Even by 2018's standards, the Tensorflow code above doesn't really look that impressive. It's hard to judge based on those past standards, though. But, wonder if somebody who knows more than me can elaborate.
- Are you saying that with today's hindsight, or would you be saying that at the time of its creation?
- Also, evaluating complicated functions with numerical stability and automatic differentiation is hard.
- "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
- Does that apply to quotes from an article? They seemed to be criticizing a second or third degree source for being PR, which feels fair.
- Yes, in the sense that if there's nothing interesting to say about a quote then there's no reason to copy it into the thread.
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- It's not a question of painful - I'm happy to "admit" what's true, as best I can, and not what's not true. Let's see if we can sort that out a bit in the present case.
HN is certainly curated - I've been "admitting" that since the day I got outed as a mod here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621 (March 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507229 (April 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962942 (June 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569117 (Nov 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15556105 (Oct 2017)
But we try hard to do the curation by principle, not by personal whim. What principles? Really there's just one: intellectual curiosity—we try to feature what enhances that and dampen what degrades it [1]. From that starting point, though, you can derive lots of other principles. Probably the most important is that snark and indignation are bad for HN (especially in combination!) because they drown out curious conversation. That's all that you need to see why I posted that reply to the GP; no personal preference required.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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- > snark and indignation
These are preference-based but you're pretending they're objective. I find _your_ comments to be full of snark and indignation more than any you respond to, but of course you won't agree. (But because you don't agree, that makes me objectively wrong, I know.)
"Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences." - someone smarter than the average HN commenter.
- I’ve never seen any of the moderators here be snarky or indignant to anyone.
Do you have any specific examples of where dang or another moderator posted in that way?
- Literally every sentence dang has ever written on this site, that I've seen, is snarky.
> Yes, in the sense that if there's nothing interesting to say about a quote then there's no reason to copy it into the thread.
This one was both snarky and indignant. Indignant that anyone would post something dang doesn't like on his site, and snarky that the the original commenter hadn't conformed to norms of what positions are acceptable to utter here.
- Such a good quote, defending probably the last person on this Earth anyone would call "working class", including himself.
- Bourdieu ?
- Mods routinely lie and ignore their own code of conduct, okay favorites, and act highly partisan. This site is far from any sort of meeting ground of ideas.its a narrowly tailored set of mostly statist propaganda.
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- The "bells and whistles" label sounds more dismissive / perjorative to me. An odd, and not a particularly nice, thing to say. Makes me wonder how the "magic" and "alchemy" terms were intended in this case, also.
- If I use the words alchemy and magic about a piece of code, those are not flattering words.
- Wow. What could possibly have caused him to quit so soon after coming back?
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
- https://nitter.net/signulll/status/2067446889956430273 for those who don't want to click the above
- That was hilarious and sad.
- Thank you, I quit twitter 8 years ago and generally avoid twitter links.
Someone should write a bot to do this automatically. What is the HN policy on bots?
- signull is more of an anonymous sh*tposter than a known industry insider, but I think this does capture the sama contribution to OpenAI very well. At least from an outsider who follows this stuff based on vibes.
- That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture.
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.
- Google is facing a legitimate innovators dilemma here. It makes sense to have all this process when youre protecting a $4.5 trillion golden goose. The tragedy here is that one predictable outcome of this situation is google deciding to considerably cut research funding when they figure out it just serves to bootstrap future competitors.
- This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.
- Or maybe just have your R&D teams focused on doing R&D with zero corporate interference. Staff it with personal assistants whose only job is to ensure the researchers have whatever they need and are never bothered with meetings or other corporate shenanigans. The assistants could then be the proxies to management to provide feedback to management, but only on best effort and still staying the fuck out of the way of the researchers.
Easy peasy!
- Easy peasy yet still impossible for them to do as R&D doesn't add to the bottom line, it is a cost center.
- Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.
- Google bloat gave us transformers. Apple bloat gave us a usable touchscreen only, pocket computer (famously an entire org within Apple had developed an iPod-based approach that was competing with what was released)
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)
- I disagree. It's not about the culling, it has never been, and actually, it makes things worse. You spend countless hours and tons of money recruiting talented people not to lay them off because you don't want a bureaucratic org.
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)
- That depends who you are firing. There are many job roles who's primary output is meetings and documents.
What percentage of Google employees are engineers...
- Is that you Musk? Twitter lost half its revenue, more than 80% of its valuation.
- That was mostly because Elon told advertisers to fuck themselves at an advertising convention no?
- It's impossible to disambiguate but advertiser tools, brand safety, targeting, reporting etc all need a lot of ongoing effort. If it gets harder to advertise effectively on Twitter, those dollars can very easily go elsewhere.
- Eh, what has X/Twitter delivered since the cull? It’s basically in maintenance mode. Which is fine if that’s what you want to do, but Google and Apple definitely don’t (and I’m glad for that)
- > It’s basically in maintenance mode
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.
- Features aside, it was making considerably more money before Musk’s cull.
- Working recommended feed
- > Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.
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)
- Google is competing with nvidia (TPU), AWS (GCP), Netflix (youtube), Tesla (waymo self driving), OpenAI (Gemini), Microsoft (Workspace), Apple (Android)....
- Apple was doing effectively everything on that list, though the self driving car was cancelled and the AI is now gemini.
- Err, maybe some of those, but there's a reason Apple is using GCP and TPUs for training their custom gemini model.
- "what Elon did with Twitter after taking over."
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?
- I’m convinced this is 90% of the way this actually played out.
- Thanks for this. I will be thinking about “we can create a permission working group” for a long time.
- If I had to make a guess, money played a role lol.
- He is close or already a billionaire, not sure much more money will be do much heavy-lifting
- you'd be surprised! people seem to have a limitless appetite for that money stuff. they just can't get enough of it, i've found
- I know some pretty wealthy people. They are very aware of those who are 10x wealthier than them. If Noam has 1B, he is probably pretty aware of those that have 10B. He's met them and seen their properties, scope, and powers. Likewise, they are thinking about those that have 100B, and those are thinking about Elon, who now has "four commas."
- That's not really Noam's style
- Most are happy and stop at multimillionaires, but of course we don't hear about them. The focus on hungry billionaires is survivor bias.
We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.
- For many business people, money is just a measure of status after becoming rich.
Maybe Noam measures status differently.
- How much money do you have? or are you just commenting from the peanut gallery?
- i’ve got 300k in a 401k, 50k in cash and i earn 230k pretax. i’m not sure what the point of the question is tho
- My point is you and I are still working for money because we want things/security etc.. I really don't get the sense that people who have tens or hundres of millions of dollars are doing it cause they need more money. It's other things that motivate people. I run into people in my workplace that just enjoy it, even though they're sitting on 20M.
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.
- You're doing well, but what of you want to buy a house?
- He left Character.ai for money.
- This reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. I wish that show was rebooted, they'd have so much funny material nowadays.
- I think real life has far eclipsed the absurdity of the original show. They might have a hard time competing with just the news now days.
- Even back then Mike Judge said he had to tone down the absurdity he saw on fact-finding trips to Bay Area. He said no one would believe how absolutely stupid so much of all of it he saw was.
- Or they might give tech companies more ideas!
- I loved that show. The love that went into it really shows.
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
- The gap between reality and satire was apparently already very small back when the the show was written. The creator, Mike Judge (who also created Beavis & Butthead, and Idiocracy) had worked in Silicon Valley as a developer and based the show on what he saw. Apparently it was very popular with SV insiders precisely because it was so accurate.
- Judge also consulted with various teams at places like Google; I worked with one of the guys who provided details that later showed up on the show (as well as many plushies). He didn't watch the show because "it hit too close to home"
- And office space!
- Gilfoyle was really ahead of the times with Son of Anton.
- Your dream may be only a prompt away.
- going to go with "money" and a lot of BS from altman
- Noam Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. (From Wikipedia)
- This understates his criticality. The author list was randomized, but the critical idea was truly his. Wonder what this says about GDM …
- The architecture was Shazeer's, but the rough idea came from Jakob Uszkoreit who initiated the project.
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
- Curious about others' contributions, such as Vaswani, Parmar, Jones and Gomez, to the paper. What sucks about co-authorship in research papers is that you don't get a clean breakdown of who contributed what to the research paper, and the distribution (in more cases than not) is very much like a pareto distribution.
I'm talking from plenty of group project experience here.
- This is fascinating. Do you know if there's something I can read that has this mix of timeline and technical detail?
- Can you expound on the ablation process? Is that referring to a stripping down of the data or weights or something? Or a stripping down of the transformer architecture structurally? Just curious
- You train the model then do a baseline evaluation. Then you evaluate many variants where you have removed or nulled out different layers or chunks of the model. By comparing the performance of those mutated models to the baseline you can learn a lot about the model. What parts don't have much value and can be removed, the location of "functions" or "facts." Etc. Google it.
- How come they didn’t ablate encoder? OpenAI GOT models are decoder only.
- It was originally built as a general purpose sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model.
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.
- If you read the Wired article linked elsewhere on this thread, then it explains that. The work was being done by people from the Google Translate team.
- Source for this? The notion of attention dates to a content-addressable lookup during sequence alignment (as well as, concurrently, memory lookups in neural Turing machines). Attention had been used in other models, like GRUs and LSTMs with attention. The Vaswani et. al. paper did not introduce attention, just removed everything _but_ attention (and FFW) from the network. Are you claiming the "critical idea" of removing the GRU and LSTM parts and just keeping attention was "truly" Noam's?
- At some point in late 2017 the paper was updated with this additional detail:
In any case, if the authors considered their contributions equal, that's good enough for me.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.- Thanks - wanted to point to this, and indeed should have worded my claim more precisely. And yes, am aware of prior work on attention. (I need to look it up, but I recall Noam saying publicly that he wouldn’t have agreed to random ordering of contributions if he knew this was going to be this big).
- I don't know we can just say things now. Ah we're on the internet
- That’s not true. Jakob, Ashish and Ilia for the core idea and initial implementation and Noam for several critical details on implementation.
- Is this a generally well known thing?
- Nope, but it’s not particularly unknown either. It shouldn’t be a surprise; he had remarkable research contributions before and after (separately, he was also an IMO gold medalist).
- Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.”
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!
- For context, the reason he left Google the first time was because Google wouldn't ship the chatbot-type products that he saw were possible.
Google bought him back (with lots of money) and made him one of the leads of Gemini.
- I first saw Noam on Dwarkesh’s podcast together with Jeff Dean. Recommend if you want a taste of what’s Google’s folks take on things.
- At this point is it even pay that’s tempting or is it more about what they get to do? I would assume Google could easily pay them what openAI can, unless as an older company it’s harder for Google to match something really out there
- Yeah my current feeling is that once I had double digit millions earning further money would be pretty meaningless to me, and the difference between 'large salary' and 'even larger salary' would be even more meaningless, but who knows maybe it really would change me. I kind of assume people like this are primarily chasing the most interesting/impactful work though.
- The problem with this belief is that it implies that all of bigtech is massively overpaying for top talent who would happily stay on for pennies. While bigtech overpaying talent is more plausible than any other bigcorp doing so, it's still rather unlikely.
- I think money’s marginal utility just changes from a vehicle for material comfort to a way to keep score.
- Only if there was a cartel which would agree to never outbid each other, of course... You can ask Steve Jobs about that one.
- It gets to the point where what you do is the main question while payment is barely a minor concern way earlier than that point, at least in my experience. You don't need to be in the top AI research tier for that.
- How can an acquired dude leave after less than 2 years?
- OpenAI pays for the earn out he would’ve otherwise received at Google + a new comp package. Made up numbers, if Google still owed him $10M for lasting the full two years, OpenAI can just pay him market rate +$10M.
- Yes, but what about the audacity of it? Get paid a lot to join a company but then decide to get up and leave again 2 years later? He just wants to be passed around?
- There's a possibility that he lost out in internal political battles, and things weren't going his way. Google is full of battle-hardened political warriors who will do anything (subterfuge, sabotage, etc.) to win battles. It is possible that a guy who just wants to build cool shit would feel like a misfit in such an environment.
- But he worked there previously and is Intelligent so knew all that before rejoining?
- True. But earlier he had the ear of people like @jeff ; but now even Jeff has been sidelined a little (Google Brain is no longer under Jeff, AFAIK). The MBA types can be brutal and since they're not technical, they don't have the same level of respect and deference for Noam.
Google is a different place today than even 5 years ago.
- You can have character and be loyal to Google (lol) or make $xx million… I’m not surprised when people choose the latter.
- I would argue its not the millions though, but rather that sweet rare compute - OpenAI has more of it for his interests than anyone - it is understandable why an exceptional mind would prioritize access to greater capabilities above all else
- Oh my goodness think of the poor multi-trillion dollar company!! No honour among thieves these days...
- Hopefully will get to the conclusion that "Hopfield Networks is All You Need"
- > Exciting times!
What is exiting about this?
- Right?! Unless you think this move is going to generate general excitement in our lives, it's just another rich guy moving from one high paying job to another.
- Maybe he figured out a good way to short AI companies?
- this character.ai? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3xgwyywe4o
- Oui!
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- Why shouldn't the court entertain it? If Character is innocent, shouldn't they have the opportunity to have the accusations disproven?
- The case is so blatantly frivolous it should have been thrown out. Nobody should have to spend legal fees defending claims that they're responsible for somebody killing themselves over saying "come home to me".
- Won't they get those fees back if dismissed or if the plaintiff doesn't prevail?
- My understanding is that this is generally not the case in the US.
- That would explain much. I'm not a USA citizen.
- These AI 'relationship' type bots are everything wrong with tech.
>> Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a "bright and beautiful boy", had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai app in late spring 2023.
People become obsessed with them. The builders have to know that their 'customers' are explicitly people with mental issues. Nobody sane or normal is talking to these things.
If you want to see how bad it is go checkout the reddit discourse when OpenAI deprecated one of their older models. Thousands of people acting like OpenAI had 'killed' their partners and best friends.
There are a lot of grey areas engineers work in when it comes to social stuff, privacy stuff, etc. There's no grey area with these. You're trying to hook people who are unwell and the people working on it should be ashamed.
- None of this pertains to the legal case whatsoever. If you think chatbots should be legislated out of existence, you are welcome to your opinion, but while they exist, trying to hold a particular company legally liable for a chatbot saying "come home to me" is beyond absurd.
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Edit replying to below post, as I am rate limited:
> Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
You replied to my post, so I thought your post perhaps had some relevance to mine rather than being unrelated soapboxing.
I don't particularly agree with your soapboxing, at any rate. Character.AI was not a "relationship bot" company. Like any LLM, they could simply be prompted to respond as such, in the same way that ChatGPT can. As you pointed out yourself, ChatGPT has the same issue with people forming parasocial bonds, despite not attempting to cater to that market in any way at all. Should people who release chatbots be legally required to censor them heavily when users attempt to use them for anything other than technical questions? That seems excessive, and it seems that ascribing moral responsibility of that degree is akin to holding video game, music, or movie producers responsible for violence committed by someone who saw a piece of violent media. Moreover, how far does it go? Should distributing open-weight models be made illegal, because you're making available something that can't be censored?
- >> trying to hold a particular company legally liable for a chatbot saying "come home to me" is beyond absurd
Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
- The Netflix documentary will reveal he was secretly working for Sam Altman the whole time... (Cue diabolical VC-backed evil laugh.)
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?"
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- Companies are not your friend who you need to be loyal to. There's a reason noncompetes are illegal in California.
- Think of it like if this:
Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.
- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.
You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.
- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.
It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.
It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?
- This is not at all what happened. They did deliver, in the form of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which Google made public. They took nothing from Google that wasn't already public.
Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.
- The original traitorous eight who left Shockley to found Fairchild semiconductor are what literally gave Silicon Valley its name. You want to keep valuable employees, you got to treat them really well. Given the number of tech giants coming out of silicon valley, there's something to that being a cornerstone of its culture.
- You do realize Google received a patent on the transformer right?
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- I think it becomes somewhat more defensible when considering that the alternative was operatiny Google's policy (before the advent of competition) of "these models would bring unknown dangers in the hands of the public, we shouldn't release them until we better understand the implications" (or perhaps more selfishly "these effectively nullify all our detectors of generated text, if released they would instantly lose us the war on SEO").
(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)
- talent poaching is something pretty common in tech, google knows something like this can and will happen, so does openAI
also "empty handed" is just unnecesarily dramatic, he left all the knwoledge base he helped build, that's google's IP and is worth m(b?)illions
- Not sure what kind of take is that in the light of so many layoffs done by companies despite making profits. It was at-will employment, its over and people moved on. If there is/was any wrong doing then the companies have enough resources to pursue individuals.
- i dont keep up on this stuff so maybe i am missing some context.
should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?
- Google essentially (but not exactly) aqui-hired Shazeer from character.ai in a deal that cost them $2.7B, with Shazeer personally making something in the region of $1B from it. Presumably there was some sort of retention period specified in the contract (you are not going to pay $2.7B to hire someone, then let them leave with no penalty the next day), but in the event Shazeer only stayed for 22 months before now leaving. Maybe he paid some penalty for leaving, but if so presumably more than compensated for by OpenAI.
- What a crazy take lol. Even by HN's standard this is crazy. First of all the idea that an employee should be loyal is bad enough. And the following statements are only getting worse. Leaving Google empty-handed? How do you think corporations work? Google chose to publish their research results, not him.
- Oh no, he wasn't loyal to the soulless trillion dollar mega corp :( what a terrible person
- > Well in terms of employers loyalty
I have no dog in this race as I'm not fond of either OpenAI or Google.... but employees not being loyal to their big tech employers is a wild thing to be concerned about in 2026 when year after year many large tech companies (Google very prominently among them) continually post record profits and still lay people off by the thousands.
- What are you talking about?
The Attention is all you need paper has Google logo, not character.ai
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- what's the context behind this?
- The context is AI made some knowledge work less cushy so now some folks are trying to point out random imaginary flaws (e.g TP or "water usage") when they're not busy trying to convince everyone AI doesn't work.
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- Good thing Elliott Smith is already dead or I imagine you would have a bone to pick with him.
- And when you file the edges off of every tool in your house, what will you do when you need to cut your steak^H^H^H^H^H celery sticks?
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- [Edit: note that my comment was reparented, it was originally a response to someone claiming Noam was another "Scam Altman". I don't mind the reparenting or the killing of the original subthread, but I feel like this is necessary context to understand this.]
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.
- Wow, he was using AI to solve problems in 2000 already, that spell corrector being trained on the Web and becoming the first widely used AI tool. Decades ahead.
- If he is supposedly extremely smart, then surely he would have known what he was doing. So how can anyone claim all this was just an accident?
"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...
- Is this genuinely confusing for people? He helped invent the transformer, he didn’t solve content moderation.
- he didn’t solve content moderation.
Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.
- Just from reading the threads here it seems readily apparent that he then went to start this company that did these bad things. Does not seem confusing at all?
- What bad things?
- Wow - Google paid a couple billion dollars to bring Noam back. Really impressive by OAI if this reporting is accurate!
- It is accurate. Confirmed by Noam himself on X https://x.com/i/status/2067400851438932297
- Love the choice of words by Noam- exceptional team for OpenAI, amazing team for GDM.
- it would sound weird to say either word twice in such a short blurb.
- Love this type of detailed textual analysis.
- Surprised to not see more comments on this, especially given the popularity of the Anthropic/Karpathy article. What a win for OpenAI - and what a loss for Google, just 2 years after paying $2.7bn to bring Noam back into the fold. Does not bode well for Gemini long-term... Or could be a signal for how deeply they are leaning into world models.
- I think nobody they acquired from Character.AI is at Google anymore.
- I wonder about the motivation to switch teams. What has Google done wrong? Was he tired? He could retire, open his own lab, raise capital. So many opportunities, why go to OpenAI? Folks talking about the amount of money paid, wasnt he the guy that was acqhired for billions? would OAI pay billions (basically to google) to get him?
- This does suck for Google. Noam will take a lot of Google trade secrets with him to OpenAi. Google's bench is deeper than this one guy though.
- Trade secrets? Like how to invent a trillion dollar technology and then sit on it for years while others eat your lunch with it? Like how to consistenly release inferior quality models to others despite infinite compute and engineering talent and insane profitability in your legacy businesses?
- Not really sure what you're talking about. Apple just licensed Gemini for Siri, Google and their TPU hardware is starting to hit primetime audiences that OpenAI can only dream of.
- My favourite part of their strategy here is its profitability
- https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_l...
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.
- https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts... seems to have some context
- Shazeer is an aggressive Zionist, and while Altman is better at reading the room, he has previously aligned himself with Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/openais-sam-altman-says-israel...
- What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.
- I'm confused, is 78 years a long time? even the US is considered a toddler by empirical terms. zionism wasn't a thing until a minority group had the loudest voice in the room when the allies were discussing what to do with all the european refugees after ww2, and it happened to align well with the brits abandoning their failed colony in the region due to disputes with the locals
- here's a quote from wikipedia. it was an utter land grab and an easy way out of responsibility for those in power
> 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.
- Yes, this is the important thing to know. I've heard way too many conversations that go back and forth about every act of vengeance in either direction after this, it's all noise. Partition plan started this. But I wouldn't call it an easy way out of responsibility; UK's leaders took a clear and binding position in favor of Zionism.
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.
- You didn't actually answer my question. How does using the word for people who want to create a Jewish state make sense when a Jewish state has existed for 78 years?
- One reasonable possibility is they're referring to people like Ben-Gvir who have themselves claimed that Zionism means fighting for Israeli control over more territory like the West Bank. They're the ones calling the shots right now. I don't know whether Zionists 78 years ago would've agreed, it's possible.
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.
- "Zionism means fighting for Israeli control over more territory like the West Bank."
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?
- I think it's valid to use the word the way that Israel's present leadership is using it.
> 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.
- > I think it's valid to use the word the way that Israel's present leadership is using it.
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.
- Because that's what matters. The original Zionists aren't alive to ask what they think. Self-proclaimed Zionists are taking the West Bank and Gaza. In fact they've been kinda doing it for decades under previous governments, but more slowly. If there's some other kind of Zionism around, the most it's doing is complaining, and it's been outvoted.
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.
- Israel actually LEFT Gaza. You seem biased to the point of just plain lying.
- West Bank and Gaza are different situations. West Bank settlements have been popping up continuously. Settlers were in Gaza until they exited in 2005, but now that Israel's military occupies it again, Zionists believe it should be resettled. Sorry for CNN link, but it has direct quotes https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/middleeast/israel-far-right-g... To be clear they haven't done it yet, aside from some illegal (by Israeli law) attempts, but they're trying.
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.
- They did not. They're still occupying a buffer zone, have broken the ceasefire countless times, and are blocking people from crossing.
Israel razed Gaza to the ground. It was a genocide.
- Israel left Gaza in 2005.stop telling obvious lies. Hamas attacked Israel on Oct 7 2023 killing at least 800 civilians in an act of incredibly bloodthirsty barbarism, including children, the elderly, and 364 victims attending the Nova music festival. Remember when Hamas paraded the body of that young German woman Shani Louk they killed like a hunting trophy?
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- IMO people just use the term to mean “pro-Israel” rather than in any reference to the original meaning ("supporter of the idea of a Jewish state"). Which could mean any combination of “pro-American financial support for Israel”, “moral support for Israel in their various military actions”, “opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state”, “a belief that Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state”, and so on. It's more about the broad political alignment than the specific meaning of the word.
- Thank you for actually answering my question. That is very vague and explains why I find the word so annoying.
- Zionist does have a specific meaning. It means you think the Jewish people have a god-given right to the Palestinian land, and that other creeds and ethnicities should be second class within the Jewish state in Palestine.
A non-zionist Israel would be one where all peoples had the same right, e.g.
- There are more Muslims living happily in Israel than Jews in all Muslim countries combined.
More specifically there are 0 Jews living in areas under control of the Palestinian Authority, or in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen.
- "It means you think the Jewish people have a god-given right to the Palestinian land"
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.
- Alright. OpenAI feels like a better fit for him after all
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- People who have intellectually based skills think it makes them an intellectual.
They fail to understand that their skill doesn't generalise.
That and the hyperglazing and platforming they get for having said skill makes them a prime candidate for exposing how average they are.
- What a brave new world where only machines possess general intelligence.
- It is possible to rationalize all sorts of irrational ideas. It's a trap many fall into.
- Referring to this or what? Reddit post is gone, but Yahoo has something.
> "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender," Shazeer wrote, news site the Information reported Friday. "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them."
It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this. But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic, which clearly crosses the line into disrupting work.
- Accusing coworkers of being antisemitic crosses the line, but accusing coworkers of sterilizing children and denying the existence of gender is ok? Surely both are bad, neither is acceptable in a workplace. Do you mean it’s not dumb because you share his views?
- The first one doesn't accuse coworkers of sterilizing children. As for saying there's no gender attribute, I disagree, but it's just his belief and not a dumb one either.
- The "sterilizing children" is how anti-trans activists talk about giving trans children gender-affirming care. Framing it this way makes it sound monstrous rather than an unfortunate side-effect of a medically necessary procedure, in the same way that characterizing a surgeon who performs hysterectomies for women with ovarian cancer as "a doctor who goes around sterilizing women" would be painting them in an unfair light.
And of course he's not directly accusing his coworkers of "sterilizing children", but he's 1) using language that compares politically sensitive health services that many of his coworkers or their families may have used and/or may feel defensive about to atrocities and 2) accusing his coworkers of supporting atrocities. That feels quite disruptive and inappropriate in the work environment IMO.
- That all assumes it's a medically necessary procedure, which is exactly what people disagree about. And again, no mention of coworkers in that quote at least, not said in a work setting either.
- What's medically necessary is for a person and their own doctors to decide on, not for you or some AI engineer or anyone else to disagree about.
- Not when public money is involved, which pro-trans voices absolutely want it to be. And even without it, society does have reasons to concern itself with how parents treat their children. There's no side that separates the responsibilities, it's just a matter of who thinks this is socially right.
- I actually don't know how much of that's especially true where doctors are involved. We as a society strictly regulate who can call themselves a doctor and the credentials that are required to do so, and then in doing so entrust them as a class to be reliable arbiters of what constitutes what's medically necessary, how public medical funds should be spent (which, even if that's something activists agitate for, is still a separate issue), and so on. We also entrust them to help monitor how parents are treating their children.
Anyway, to double back once, it actually doesn't really "assume it's a medically necessary procedure"; we can soften it to something like a "medically desired procedure" and the point in fact still stands that Shazeer's wording - which really should be the point here, not re-enacting the tired trans healthcare debate - is deliberately incendiary and manipulative. Broadly, no one is advocating for parents to be sterilizing their children as an end to itself, so it shouldn't be characterized as such.
- Doctors are allowed to make judgement calls within whatever rules the insurance providers and laws give. The status quo before all this was that gender-affirming care was never covered, which changed to always covered in discrete steps across the 2000s and 2010s. Doctors didn't get to decide that on their own. Before that even, medical schools instill rules and values that come mostly from the outside, while the medical knowledge and experience is from the inside.
Another controversy is physician-assisted s–... euthanasia. Some doctors would consider it medically necessary, but they can't legally perform or even recommend it, as it's considered murder. They can in Canada. Abortion of a viable fetus not threatening the mother is illegal in all 50 US states, but legal in many states in earlier stages, again based on what the states consider murder (but the doctor judges what is viable or a threat to the mother).
Anyway if gender-affirming care is just medically desired but not medically necessary, the sterilization is accepted but not necessary. I agree with the spirit of the wording, even though it's imprecise, because it highlights that children are taking on an irreversible side effect. It's a short quote and not a whole essay where he gets to clarify.
- I’m curious, do you personally know anybody who’s gone through gender-affirming-care?
For me it was a really confusing issue until I became close friends with someone whose childhood best friend is trans.
If he was born a decade earlier, he probably would have killed himself (this was the path he was on, which is incredibly tragic and all too common); the gender dysphoria invoked depression was unbearable.
Instead, he was able to work through therapy and medical care to understand his gender dysphoria and receive gender affirming care in his late teens.
Now (over a decade post treatment) he’s among the most cheerful people I’ve ever met. He inspires joy as a band teacher, is inspiringly happily married, and is raising a beautiful baby girl.
I often think about him when people talk about the issue in the abstract. The hundreds of children whose lives he’s impacted for the better, let alone the lives of his friends and family. Removing gender affirming care is implicitly saying you don’t want any of that to happen, because the logical conclusion of removing is people like him in a pit of depression and despair that often ends in suicide, all over an affliction that they did not choose.
This is where the “medically necessary” part of gender affirming care comes from.
I didn’t understand it before I knew him and his story so I don’t begrudge people who are in shows I used to walk in. But I’d encourage people to try to understand and lead with empathy and meet people where they are.
- Since you ask, I know three. One guy I knew in high school transitioned to female around 2013, and requested I say "she." She was bullied a bit for it, not too much thankfully, but it was clear she was never comfortable with being male before. Another was similar but later.
It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates. So I can't support it. I still think people should have the right to do it on their own dime, and won't judge them for it either way. I can't trust any studies on this anymore because it's become politicized and weirdly speech-policed. This isn't a unique or nuanced opinion, it's probably the majority one and I sound like the rest.
- > It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates
The range of human (mis-)behavior is extremely wide, so I wouldn’t doubt that some doctors and patients are doing what you fear here. I don’t think we should form opinions on such a broad situation on the basis of a few extreme people and situations.
The question I would ask is would you rather have more people suffer from not having care, than some people suffer from receiving care that they later regret? The latter is something that’s incredibly sad, no doubt, but it’s an intractable and tragic side effect of offering major medical treatments and interventions in general; the “false positive” aspect is not unique to gender affirming care, either in its existence or its magnitude. (The politicizing of the false positive is, though, because gender in general is incredibly politicized).
Gender dysphoria solved by one-way-door gender affirming care is quite rare (there are many intermediary steps people can try and ultimately be helped with), but education about the issue and the availability of treatment helps people like my friend. I think it’s pretty unambiguously positive to universalize the availability of that care in the same way as any other form of healthcare and education, because it’s genuinely the only way some people can feel comfortable in their skin. And although there may be problems with the standard of care, the standard for care can only improve with time and experience.
- That's analogous to how frontal lobotomies were justified as a medical procedure. But it still caused significant, lifelong harm to tens of thousands of people, most of them children and young women.
- yeah, the argument is ridiculous; like, formally, it is ridiculous. i also disagree with the sentiment and conclusions of the argument, but the actual form of the argument is garbage: "i introduce an axiom that says there is no gender and therefore the distinction between sex and gender doesn't exist".
- He thinks there's no gender. I could give reasons why I disagree, but not proof, same with the religion he kinda mentions.
- > It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this.
Google knows Shazeer's value & paid $2bn to c.ai for it: Its undesirable for anyone (regardless of their seniority) to engage in a discussion without being invited to it. Flaring up discord isn't how someone in a leadership position at a huge company is supposed to operate. It is another thing if they've got the "fuck you" money & a few feathers to rattle; then they do whatever without care.
> But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic
Per reports, Sergey Brin said something similar in the internal forums, too. Don't think its the only problem. After all, Shazeer can literally pick & choose where they want to work, and probably has more leverage over GDM than GDM does over him.
- I know about the Sergey Brin thing too, same issue but tbh less important of a person
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- the g-slur? I won't say it in case it is a slur, is that the word the jews call non-jews?
- That makes way more sense, I thought he meant gypsy. In either case he should just say the word, this site isn't for children.
- Avicebron is correct. I avoided being specific because I didn't want to derail the thread with responses from people that fulminate over specific keywords.
- Whether or not “goy” is a slur is pretty complicated. It has pejorative uses, and outside of a strictly religious context any non-Jew is almost certainly only going to see those pejorative uses. But strictly speaking it’s a Hebrew word that means “nation,” and isn’t any more or less offensive in the abstract than Jew, Arab, Brit, etc.
(To my understanding, the closest equivalent is “ummah” in Arabic, where the connotation is flipped: goy can refer to a Jewish person but typically does not, whereas the ummah typically refers to Muslim peoples as a collective but can also be a general stand-in for “nation” or “world.”)
- It’s not literally a slur, but because it has developed negative connotations Jewish people tend to avoid it nowadays. Online, you are more likely to see it used by antisemites.
Which is why I think that story is very likely bullshit. It’s from an account that very frequently posts pro-IRGC content, and has previously used “the G word” itself.
- A bit bizarre that you're dragging a six-month old post, but I stand by what I said. Nothing in that comment is pejorative.
I explained my reasoning for avoiding the word downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591986
- I think “goybucks” is straightforwardly pejorative. You maybe didn’t mean it so, but that’s the straight line read of it given the white nationalist template of “goy$x” for some x.
- I think he ment Gypsy and not Gentile.
- Goyum?
- Your contribution to a story about a Jewish person is that you once worked for a Jew and you didn’t like him.
- Thank you for your input, six-number throwaway. I am answering the parent's question while humanizing a complex, intelligent person that I worked for.
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- Please don't comment like this here. The HN guidelines ask us not to engage in political or ideological battle or use swipes like "comically stupid take". Same goes for your other comment in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48590901) – "sigh how are so many brilliant people this stupid?" adds nothing but venom to the discussion.
Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- the first post was a swipe, i'll grant you. probably shouldn't have said it. it was a knee-jerk reaction to a structurally fallacious argument that leaves no room for discussion: "i reject your stance not based on reason, evidence, or anything that you can interact with, but based on an new presupposition i've just now decided is true". though i'll admit the severity of my knee jerking was probably amplified by some of the other opinions he holds.
the second post is actually about (a) me having understanding for a position of someone i disagree with harshly, and (b) the logical structure of an argument, not the underlying topic itself. it was in reference to the content of the link that was posted.
anyway, mods can take it down, i get why the rules are there. you're also right to ask folks to keep it clean. but i stand by it; dude just seems to have a trifecta of awful traits and i'm so so so tired of super rich tech dudes ruining the world.
- Thanks. We don't take anything down (except in rare cases when a user explicitly asks us to remove one of their posts for privacy reasons). We just need everyone to make the effort to observe the guidelines at all times when participating here, no matter the topic or how they feel about it.
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- What you're describing about gender is.... not really scientific. It was basically declared by fiat by researchers. It's not an authoritative definition and many people disagree with the concept, at least when it gets conflated with scientific topics.
- there are some things that clearly exist that are really hard to nail down with definitions; once we get into anything social, we are kinda playing with that territory. everything is so fuzzy that our normal way of defining things breaks down. so saying precisely what gender _is_ is going to be almost impossible. but there are definitely roles and traits that are highly correlated with a person's birth sex that are distinct from their birth sex. there can even be genetic reasons why those correlations emerged. but they are still distinct.
as evidence, what it _means_ to be a man, woman, etc, differs from society to society. if you ask me to quantify this precisely, i will struggle. but it's plain for all to see.
- I think you need to read their comment again - they are clearly talking about sex and gender as two different concepts.
- This is a motte and bailey though. A regular person on the street has never seen a distinction between these two words, and common sense prevailed after years of Silicon Valley policing of speech to try to make an unpopular position seem tenable and widely agreed upon to get the average person to step in line.
- Are you seriously trying to claim that e.g. wearing dresses or liking the color pink is somehow fundamentally tied the the genitals in your pants or the chromosomes you have?
The idea that gender is a social concept is so blindingly obvious that, like bbeonx I kind of assume that anyone making comments like yours about "common sense" is either blindly parroting talking points without thinking about them, or arguing in bad faith.
- sorry, is this in response to my post? in which case, this is exactly the distinction i'm making. the entire argument is whether or not there _is_ a distinction; my point is that this guy just, a priori, decides gender doesn't exist. but there is plenty of evidence that it does. there are plenty of social traits associated with sex that differ across different cultures: pink used to be a manly color, now it's a feminine color; "be a man" doesn't literally mean "make sure your sex is male"; etc. there are traits that are heavily correlated with a person's sex that are culturally reinforced, and this is distinct from their sex.
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- > Basically saying that women and men should present and behave within a narrow set of parameters.
I think you're putting words into peoples mouths there.
Acknowledging that there is a social construct we generally know of as "gender" and acknowledging that certain stereotypes and common understandings of that concept exist is not at all the same thing as demanding that people should fit into the narrowest stereotypes that you can think of.
Also worth noting that you acknowledging the existence of sexist stereotyping is an acknowledgement of the existence of gender as a social construct.
- There are both descriptive and normative uses of gender. To use a less charged example, it's not prescriptive to identify as American. It's not prescriptive to say other people identify you that way, even if your passport says Canadian.
An example of using the category normatively would be saying someone isn't American because they burn the flag. My experience is that most of the people using "gender" normatively don't differentiate it from sex.
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- This isn't an either-or thing. Google is an American company, neither of those entities is American. The people who care about this foreign war so much can donate their own money or go fight it themselves.
What's even worse is Google refused to work with the American military in the past, but as soon as it was Israel, #1 priority for them. So it's pretty clear where their loyalty is.
- Very bad news for Gemini - the brief comeback with 2.5 Pro last year looked to be driven by Noam
- Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity.
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 think the 'models have no moat' thing is overblown. Only like 3-4 companies in the entire world have cutting edge models, that means there is some kind of moat...
- I think when you follow this stuff every day it's easy to lose perspective of the rate of change and these leads seem more profound than they really are when you zoom out a bit.
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...
- money. but it eventually runs out
- Grok and Meta. Both have money and compute, both have shit models. Also Google. Has money, models not so good.
- A little IPO is the solution.
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.
- Pre-Quote: "We are all going to lose, hundreds of billions"
- Money.
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.
- Meta has tons of that, but no frontier contender. Clearly there’s _something_ more to the equation than money
- I feel like the models have no moat paradigm died when a single model expanded past the memory of single GPU slices. The moat is hosting the model. Even paying a server host to run a rack of GPUs has immense upstart cost, and then you're still struggling to compete on the add-ons of the things on top of the model (prompts, validation loops, etc). You can only throw so much money at a problem.
- Many different companies host the open source models. Where's the moat there?
- yeah, sure, look at anthropic revenue, what is it if not the moat? you can argue for how long but for them good model = the fastest growing company ever.
- Revenue is not a metric of success at all.
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.
- Revenue is moat. Ask Amazon. Or Alibaba. Or Temu.
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?
- > models have no moat
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.
- And Google has all of those. Custom silicon, more data than anyone else and probably the most comprehensive data collection system, and phones in the hands of 73% of the global smartphone using population to push gemini into to get high volume usage feedback and even more telemetry and data.
- I don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more.
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.
- > Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level
As do thousands of people say this point. You think the head of deepseek doesn't?
- I honestly don't think that matters for multiple reasons:
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.
- Sorry to bring up the elephant in the room - but could this decision be in part the opportunity to acquire large amounts of stock before a massively inflated IPO?
- Google acquired his company in 2024 for $2.7Bn with him taking about 40% of that. I'm quite sure that no matter where he went, any lab or his own start up, he would be fine financially.
- I'm sure he was fine financially when he first worked at Google - without leaving to found the startup as well.
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....
- For those who missed: Gemini coding and agentic capabilities have been lagging the sota models (Opus mostly) since Dec 2026. If you're a co-lead and your model is underperforming there has to be some consequences. I don't know as a fact if this has anything to do with Noam's departure, but work performance is never about past successes.
- I'm curious to know the hype behind the hiring for Karpathy and Noam. In the sense that did oai and anthropic do that for sort of long term and potential new directions (investing in them so they come up with the new transformer). Because it definitely cannot be just a regular filling vacant roles.
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.
- Question one: How much did this cost OpenAI?
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.
- Reporting on this seems to indicate that people at Anthropic are significantly more loyal, and that attempts to poach by OpenAI and Meta have been largely unsuccessful.
- Their options are probably insane sunk cost, hard to steal an engineer who has Xm in potential gains if they choose to stay.
- People seem to have turned down offers that would have netted out more upside for them, so it doesn't seem to just be that. Anthropic seems to lure in the true believers, whereas people are highly skeptical of Sam's motivations these days (particularly after how much safety/alignment has been reportedly cut).
But I'm sure for at least some folks, this is true, given recent valuations.
- Allegedly OpenAI is struggling to jump to bigger models and had serious issues in the past (4.5) and also allegedly Shazeer is just the right guy for that. OpenAI is having issues hiring talent as most SF-style people want to go to Anthropic. Shazeer seems more politically aligned with OpenAI. But it's all speculation.
- Anthropic is a cult making a god.
- He was one of the leaders and not the leader
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
- AI hiring starting to look like sports free agency.
Karpathy to Anthropic, now Noam to OpenAI.
- I thought Karpathy was going to OpenAI?
- Google seems to have difficulties keeping their AI talent.
What is going on at Google?
- The engineers let the know-nothing tech illiterate MBAs drive the ship
- From the excited comments and fanboyism, I have to say KRAZAM predicted the cult of personality that has infected the AI space.
- I hope this doesn't impact Google's progress on open models.
- Is Shazeer known to be opposed to open-weight releases?
- OpenAI hasn't released open weights since GPT-OSS-20/120B. Google has the Gemma line.
I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.
- Their models are the only moat they think they have left, which at this point is more of filled-in wet circle of dirt.
- Looks like Google is leaking both AI talent and know-how something fierce ... and since the very day the transformer paper was written.
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 has muddied the waters on their Gemini usage statistics as it now powers a big chunk of Search. Depending on how you cut it, Gemini (and Gemini powered products) are probably producing the most output tokens seen by the most human eyeballs by a large margin.
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.
- Sounds like Noam just wanted to serve 5 terabytes.
- Shouldn't ai create ai research at this point?
- I guess this means Google is nowhere close, to even discern a hint of an AGI? So when Demis Hassabis says AGI...could arrive in just 3 years he has learned the best from Larry Ellison?
- Nobody in the space has seen a hint of AGI.
Although I can't fathom why we'd want to? Like what is the advantage of giving tools sentience?
- Its getting pretty lame that we talk about the these guys like they're football players transferring teams.
- In this case, it's not a new thing ... back in 2005 (yes 21 years ago), people talked about the achievements of Noam Shazeer at Google (and Jeff Dean and Sanjay, etc)
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 wonder if the ideological censorship described in your link is part of why Noam decided to leave.
- Shitposting about politics on internal boards is "having a level head"?
I've seen engmisc and industryinfo, and I agree they are sometimes insufferable but having a level head would be ignoring them.
- Reread the comment: Shazeer was the one shitposting about politics, not Jeff Dean. Dean called him out over it.
- Oh, my bad, I mixed up the names on the comment. Yeah, Dean did always seem to have a level head from what little I've seen.
- Speak for yourself, my Fantasy Developer League is crushing it this season
- How do I ̷g̷a̷m̷b̷l̷e̷ sports bet on this
- I feel like there was a scene in Silicon Valley about a developer fantasy league.
- Krazam already has a video covering this exact idea.
- Fantasy FAANGball
- It could be the opposite. Those are really useful people, they deserve this more than football players
- Idk, football players actually make a bunch of people happy and entertained. 80% of the United States wishes this tech never existed.
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.
- Very few people interpret football so much that the actual frontier work of the best players matter. Out of 30 friends I know who like football only 1 of them could explain what’s going on in the field technically. For most people, pro players are replaceable.
Popular entertainment and unique progress of human civilization can’t be really compared either
- > For most people, pro players are replaceable.
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.
- I only said top scientists and top engineers deserve as much fame / respect / gossip as top football players yeah
- Sadly most science and engineering is very capital intensive.
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.
- Having the whole world connected to top sports players also costs a lot of money, it doesn’t happen naturally
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
- This "guy" is worth on the order of all football players put together.
- Yeah because hes a zionist Jew whos into kabaala and is obsessed with wealth. Many such cases.
- Have you seen the Krazam fantasy FAANGball sketch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo
It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.
- I think it's more about how the products that impact our lives might change and what might flow down to us becasue of that.
- We're a community of geeks. We admire Tesla, Feynman, Linus and such. For me they are far greater than football players
- wait this is kinda brilliant tho
- Good luck Noam, Gemini is a great piece of work.
- This is what you call a PR hire.
- Huge blow to Google.
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?
- It's entirely possible he got in a flame war over political issues with other Googlers and Google asked him to leave.
- Tell me open ai are in emergency mode without telling me they are in emergency mode
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- I would just love to hear your definition of that word.
- Any sources on this?
- Defining opposition to genocide as antisemitic is a really bad idea.
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- > idea thief. Takes credit for others’ work.
Based on what?
- GP is a serial troll whom we've banned hundreds of times, so the answer to your question is almost certainly nothing.
- I think this is a hard question if you ask people to start providing proof for things like this. A lot of such opinions are usually baked into individuals personal experience and perception. Nevertheless one has to feel very strongly to share such a take here in this manner unless they are gaining something from it.
- > Nevertheless one has to feel very strongly to share such a take here in this manner unless they are gaining something from it.
Do they really? What does it cost them if they're wrong?
- What? If I call someone a thief, I should be able to point to something they stole.
- There is a big difference how one acts in a court and in real life. The original statement could either be a slandering (hard to know what they get to gain from it) or its their bitter experience/perception that they feel strongly about, are are sharing on a platform like this.
- sandeepkd is an idea thief. Also, he is short guy but walks with high shoes so people will think he is tall.
- In a court of law sometimes. In the real world some facts have verifiable proof but the majority have little if anything that can be shared publicly or exists.
- If someone called my friend a thief and couldn’t even point to what they stole, I’d mercilessly judge them even outside a court of law. That’s a serious accusation. Going off vibes is totally inappropriate.
- This perspective is only relevant if we assume nobody on HN ever posts maliciously. Some of the circles here are small, incestuous, and probably have some resentment. Other times, there's clear botting - very hard to talk against Elon or his companies without a load of down votes.
Needless to say, the OP could be right but they could be right without proof. Or proof would out them. Or it's malicious posting. Don't take anything on the internet too seriously, even in such sanctimonious spaces as HN.
- I always thought it was people who were married to their book, or just fanboys. Some of these accounts that jump in to defend are quite old.
- Maybe he's preparing the next aquihire for Google ?
C'mon people, if you don't know Noam personally, who are you to fling such accusations?
I really hate the low bar of HN discussions lately. It's late-Slashdot-level. Brrr.
- Niceee
- Silver lining: given the leaked financials of OpenAI, he might very well be joining a sinking ship.
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?
- You can't force someone to keep taking your money (that's indentured servitude), you can only incentivize them to stay with increasing amounts of money. Google almost certainly did do that. Probably by vesting his hiring bonus over 2-3 years.
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.
- Yah, I guess Cali doesn't allow non-competes or something like that.
LOL.
- Oh! Big deal. Exciting.
