I’ve been known to get snippy on HN from time to time myself :) So please know that I’m only offering a gentle nudge that I’d want from a fellow long-timer myself regarding a line of discussion that’s liable to age poorly.
Talking about sorting hats for those who do and don’t have the one-percenter AI badge isn’t a super hot look my guy (and I’ve veered dangerously close to that sort of thing myself, this is painful experience talking): while there is no shortage of uninformed editorializing about fairly cutting edge stuff, the image of a small cabal of robed insiders chucking in their cashews while swiping left and right on who gets to be part of the discussion serves neither experts nor their employers nor enthusiastic laypeople. This is especially true for “alignment” stuff, which is probably the single most electrified rail in the whole discussion.
And as a Google employee in the diffuser game by way of color theory, you guys have a “days since we over-aligned an image generation model right into a PR catastrophe” sign on the wall in the micro kitchen right? That looked “control vector” whacky, not DPO with pretty extreme negative prompt whacky, and substantially undermined the public’s trust in the secretive mega labs.
So as one long-time HN user and FAANG ML person to another, maybe ixnay with the atekeepinggay on the contentious AI #1 thread a bit?
regardless of whether they say it out loud, it is what many of us think - might be good for people to know why their opinions are getting immediately dismissed by insiders
Letting people know how why their opinions are getting dismissed in a productive way is done by citing well-known sources in low-effort way, or by explaining things thoughtfully in a high-effort way: Karpathy has chosen the highest-effort way of most anyone, it seems unlikely that anyone is at a higher rung of "insiderness" than he is, having been at Toronto with (IIRC) Hinton and Alex and those folks since this was called "deep learning", and has worked at this point at most of the best respected labs.
But even if folks don't find that argument persuasive, I'd remind everyone that the "insiders" have a tendency to get run over by the commons/maker/hacker/technical public in this business: Linux destroying basically the entire elite Unix vendor ecosystem and ending up on well over half of mobile came about (among many other reasons) because plenty of good hackers weren't part of the establishment, or were sick of the bullshit they were doing at work all day and went home and worked on the open stuff (bringing all their expertise with them) is a signal example. And what e.g. the Sun people were doing in the 90s was every bit as impressive given the hardware they had as anything coming out of a big lab today. I think LeCun did the original MNIST stuff on a Sun box.
The hard-core DRM stuff during the Napster Wars getting hacked, leaked, reverse engineered, and otherwise rendered irrelevant until a workable compromise was brokered would be another example of how that mentality destroyed the old guard.
I guess I sort of agree that it's good people are saying this out loud, because it's probably a conversation we should have, but yikes, someone is going to end up on the wrong side of history here and realizing how closely scrutinized all of this is going to be by that history has really motivated me to watch my snark on the topic and apologize pretty quickly when I land in that place.
When I was in Menlo Park, Mark and Sheryl had intentionally left a ton of Sun Microsystems iconography all over the place and the message was pretty clear: if you get complacent in this business, start thinking you're too smart to be challenged, someone else is going to be working in your office faster than you ever thought possible.
I have no idea how you've wandered all the way to Napster, Sun, hackers, etc. Really incredible work.
Well, I kind of know, you're still rolling with "this dude's a google employee", so the guy foaming at his mouth about Google makes sense to you, and now you have to reach to ancient lore to provide grounding for it.
Then don't link to an "About Me" page [1] that says you do? How is confusion on that subject any reader or commenter's fault?
I don't care if you personally work at Google or not, Google got itself in quite a jam as concerns public perception of their product in particular and the AI topic in general by going overboard with over-alignment, everyone knows that so one assumes that insiders know it, which is one of a great many examples of how strongly-forced models are a real problem for arbitrarily prestigious insider-laden labs.
Framing the debate about whether large, proprietary models are over-aligned or mis-aligned as an acid test for whether or not someone is worth paying attention to is really weird hill to stand on.
You're making up a person and being extremely creepy while doing a poor job of it.
It's at least funny, because you're doubling down on OP's bad takes, and embarrassing yourself with trying to justify it with what you thought was brilliant research and a witty
person-based argument. But, you messed up. So it's funny.
Punchline? Even if you weren't wrong, it would have been trivial while doing your research to find out half of Deep Mind followed me this week. Why? I crapped all over Gemini this week and went viral for it.
I guess, given that, I should find it utterly unsurprising you're also getting personal, and clinging to 1% as a class distinction thing and making mental images of cloistered councils in robes, instead of, well, people who know what they're talking about, as the other repliers to you point out.
"1%ers are when the Home Depot elites make fun of me for screaming about how a hammer is a nerfed screwdriver!"
I've been around here a pretty long time, but I could still be off base here: as far as I understood people generally posted links to their own blog [1] in their HN profile because they want people to read them? I read your blog and particularly the posts about Gigadiffusion because I wanted to reply from a position of having put some effort into understanding where the poster I was replying to was coming from before popping off with what could be taken as a criticism. If that offends you or creeps you out I'm more than happy to steer clear of it with the parting remark that I really like Material and had hoped that any follow up would give me the opportunity to compliment you on some nice work.
If that's not your blog, you should probably take it off your profile?
I'm not doing a faux-nice thing with you. You made up an elaborate argument, to justify rank fact-free ranting, based on false information. Thanks for your time.
Talking about sorting hats for those who do and don’t have the one-percenter AI badge isn’t a super hot look my guy (and I’ve veered dangerously close to that sort of thing myself, this is painful experience talking): while there is no shortage of uninformed editorializing about fairly cutting edge stuff, the image of a small cabal of robed insiders chucking in their cashews while swiping left and right on who gets to be part of the discussion serves neither experts nor their employers nor enthusiastic laypeople. This is especially true for “alignment” stuff, which is probably the single most electrified rail in the whole discussion.
And as a Google employee in the diffuser game by way of color theory, you guys have a “days since we over-aligned an image generation model right into a PR catastrophe” sign on the wall in the micro kitchen right? That looked “control vector” whacky, not DPO with pretty extreme negative prompt whacky, and substantially undermined the public’s trust in the secretive mega labs.
So as one long-time HN user and FAANG ML person to another, maybe ixnay with the atekeepinggay on the contentious AI #1 thread a bit?