It is remarkable seeing whole other subthreads here criticising the vagueness of the words "pacing the frontier", as if no text existed below the title.
Let's face it, it's not that remarkable. A substantial proportion of Hacker News commentary has always been people only reading the submission title, then arguing with each other based on what they imagine the article might say.
It’s a tale as old as time — people don’t understand that marketing and branding are just as important, if not more so, than the product. Jev is exceptionally-well branded. Anyone can look at the webpage and understand it, and the implications, instantly.
OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!
I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.
This is also a really common thing in ML specifically. We joke about getting Schmidthuber'd, which is when Jurgen Schmidthuber (sometimes correctly) announces that he or one of his colleagues actually proposed your thing 37 years ago in a Japanese linguists journal.
Statistical modeling, from simple classical stuff up to modern deep learning, just has this dynamic where the theory is rich and bottomless, but the actual components of implementation are pretty neat and compact. So for any given idea, there are probably 20,000 other people who have had the same intuition, just with subtly different application or implementation. Add in that depending on what your particular flavor of research is, you might name an almost identical implementation something completely different. And it leads to a huge amount of sour grapes whenever anyone's idea really garners attention.
If you listen to any podcast with a founder in the ML space who has been in it for long enough, they will invariably say at some point "We actually developed xyz over a year before OpenAI"
You're right but it's not the full picture. It's much easier to market when you have a name brand behind you. Not sure the author would've done much better even if he messaged it better. It's like the difference between someone random saying something smart on Twitter and no one gives a shit and Karapthy saying the same thing and everyone talks about it. I'm not saying it in a bad way - those with clout around them earned the people's trust by doing something right. But it's not easy to get there and there are many people doing great things that get very little publicity if at all. Not to mention in this case Jev came from a startup that raised a lot of money and can spend it on good marketing.
OP's was leaky slop from day one [0][1], as is his article [2]
It is arrogant and entitled for the author to take credit for the concept of RL over sequence embeddings, and none of the work that went into pretraining, not to mention the egregious target leakage [1]
I was curious about this so I skimmed the paper [0]:
> SalesRLAgent achieved 96.7% accuracy, outperforming the best commercial alternative by 23.7 percentage points and the best LLM approach by 34.7 percentage points.
For a fuzzy natural language task like this, this magnitude of improvement should already set off alarm bells (Though i admit I'm not even sure what accuracy is even measured here, and the paper doesn't help either). Also, "best LLM" here refers to GPT-4 (at the time of upload, the public already had access to GPT-o3 and).
I would have loved to contextualize the performance by looking at model size, but the paper is frustratingly devoid of detail in that regard:
> The core of SalesRLAgent is a reinforcement learning
architecture consisting of:
• A state encoder network that processes Azure OpenAI
embeddings and features
• A policy network that estimates conversion probability
based on the current state
• A value network that estimates the expected cumulative
reward
• A meta-learning module that assesses prediction confi
dence
Also:
> Beyond technical metrics, we evaluated SalesRLAgent in
real-world sales environments through A/B testing. [...] After 90 days across 217 representatives and 12,433 con
versations, we observed:
• 43.2% increase in conversion rate for the test group
This would be a pretty huge result but the fact that this is just shoved into a single paragrpah with no further discussion on methodology, baselines and setup makes me very suspicious.
I think their problem is more not being cited by the team at typesafe, as in general academic politeness. On the one hand you have the charitable assumption that they developed it independently. On the other hand, my opinion is that it is naive to expect companies to do that even if they took inspo from it, especially when this is a core product theme, and not just some supporting infra. They will of course market it as their own. If they ever release a technical report, they might cite it there, but there is no way their landing page and announcement tweet cites it.
Also, the way highly empirical fields like ML work is that it could very well be the case that typesafe had to do a _lot_ of work to improve this one, and in this field it ends up different enough that they feel they are doing something entirely novel[1]. I am not endorsing that 100%, but that happens a lot even between academics. In many cases it is valid.
[1] For example, this guys implementation seems to have atleast one serious issue, as {solution to OLS} points out in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770027
> Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations
That's not just bad marketing, it's an example of anti-marketing.
Sales conversion? That makes me think of an old car's salesman trying to scam me into buying something I don't want. I positively don't want to read this paper based on the title.
It's also well established that an algorithm or architecture alone are not enough to produce a useful model. The same architecture can produce vastly different results depending on the training data, post-training, harness, etc.
This 100%. Engineers really lack understanding in marketing and branding.
No one cares if you are "first". They only care if your product is known by as many people as possible and is better than all the other alternatives at solving a problem that is worth paying for.
If you don't market, then no-one will care that you exist even if you solved a problem decades ago. Someone else will use your solution and take inspiration (and credit) off of your discovery because you didn't bother to tell anyone about it.
another way to look at it, a product is the whole experience (landing, docs, sales, support, code, branding), not the implementation of an algorithm or process
Sorry, but he did tell people about it, no? He showed his receipts. Reddit, arXiv- What I am seeing here is "it's just better marketing". When it comes to prior art, is better marketing sufficient? On one side we can say it's better marketing, but on another side, the side that should actually matter, coming from the direction of him being first, can't we say, it is just better research? Being that he was first and all, and Jev hasn't even published anything according other than what I read. What I am really trying to ask is, is marketing even relevant at this point? So if you have good marketing, you can just steal someone else's work, intentional or not?
Steal is a loaded word here, and I argue that you cannot unintentionally steal someone's work. Stealing is deliberate, malicious theft. Its an action taken with consciousness of guilt. Other derivations exist but then its not stealing and therefore isnt that word.
But that is NOT the point AT ALL. The point is, the same point that comes up on hacker news 1000 times a year - ideas alone are near worthless and execution matters.
Execution includes marketing that gets you enough attention. Because theres 10,000 other similar ideas of varying quality and marketing that others will point go saying "I wAS tHErE fiRsT"
All of this stems from the human bias of both (a) wishful thinking and (b)thinking people value what what we produce. These are natural human biases and are often dangerously wrong.
Programmers always think its just the idea and a prototype that is valuable, because they can produce and idea and a prototype (people what what I have) which causes them to massively overvalue ideas and the importance of "who was first" and all of that because they are sanctifying the small thing they produce.
It doesnt have to be malicious - the plain truth is theres 10,000 other ideas that are close enough that could be considered stealing even if they were truly independently developed, ideas are virtually worthless, get rid of your human biases that are clouding your judgment and focus on what matters if your idea is truly great : execution
How many people actually read the full post? It builds up this amazing underdog story where all the benchmarks are taken as victories, and then only late in the post and section 6 is it finally revealed that the only way they won was to fine tune directly on the benchmark.
I think OP, as said on Reddit, wanted to get a lot of investment and ride the wave but did not know how to. This was said as such on Reddit today by them. This is indeed a shame especially it was a year earlier but indeed a lack of marketing; many people on Reddit told what to do in this case, in hindsight, it’s worth checking it out imho.
There are entire youtube channels dedicated to "who did it first" rabbit holes regarding inventions that didn't gain popularity until it was properly marketed by someone else, whether independently discovered or not.
1052 pts on HN. I'd say they are pretty good at marketing actually.
HN readers are awesome at saying something is great and upvoting it, but unless HN readers are your market it means absolutely nothing. Marketing is as much about putting your message to the right audience as it is about saying the right thing.
This is made more complicated because a group as diverse as HN readers probably does contain some people who are in your target market, to be fair. The problem is that you're getting a strong signal from the whole cohort rather than the bit you're interested in, and it's really easy to conflate that with a sign of success.
As always with any startup activity, unless people are actually giving you their money it doesn't count and you should consider it a vanity metric.
I wrote an article detailing an idea I had back during web 1.0. I thought it was clever and maybe some people would find it interesting. Few years later a SaaS popped up selling the same idea as a service. It eventually became a pretty commonly followed pattern for a bunch of huge companies in the same domain.
I have no idea if I was literally the first person to have this idea or if anyone who launched one of these businesses read my article. I definitely didn't understand how much commerical value there was or even considered making a business out of it. I blame nobody but myself for missing an opportunity if there even was one.
I did get like $200 for writing it which was nice.
I don't understand why people continue to use em-dashes. As far I know, the comment system on HN doesn't offer them. And iOS and android don't make them a default. They aren't something normally used by humans because - is a keyboard option that's easier to use.
The usage of them immediately makes your commentary suspect. Either you aren't using the standard web interface to make a comment, you're using and odd 3rd party client, or its LLM generated.
I just typed dash twice into iPhone. Hardly a “non-standard” web interface. Also, I’d like to think my comment was higher quality than anything an LLM could generate! At least, yet.
I've been using compose keys on desktop operating systems and the default keyboard on Android to write em-dashes for 10 years. I also use LLMs every workday, but I have never once used one to write, review, or edit prose because my voice is important to me.
I don't give a shit if my Hacker News comments sometimes look "suspect" to some people. The way I use language is deeply personal and I'm not going to let the clankers or reactionaries against them take it away from me.
Hear, hear! An em-dash is a great stylistic device for structuring sentences. It saddens me that the use of it now has become some sort of scarlet letter. I’m hoping the co-opting can be reversed.
It’s unfortunate because what the OP describes is a real problem. Regardless of whether or not Bend2 is realistically usable or not, the author definitely does not fit the description of the type of people who are actually causing the issue.
Models do not get nerfed. There has never been evidence of this. This would be trivial to prove if it were true, and such a proof would be a huge story and scandal to a news market hungry for a shred of a signal on AI's downfall.
This is the "your iPhone is listening to you and serving ads based on what you say" of the 2020s.
As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.
Earlier today saw a guy on a pick up truck griefing an empty Waymo by brake checking and boxing it, all over the road for about 10 minutes and over 5 blocks (no idea how much earlier it started), causing every other driver to freak out or be confused about what was going on.
All the while all I could think was "you're spending your time making it more likely for a collision to happen, all to 'anger' a toaster with 360° camera coverage".
I hope the cops showed up at his house and confiscated his vehicle.
One advantage of existence of self-driving cars is the state can permanently revoke someone's ability to own or operate manually driven motor vehicles, without the argument this is ruining their lives.
Where I live in Canada, there's careless driving and dangerous driving. Dangerous driving is in the criminal code. Careless driving is a citation akin to speeding.
I've seen courts grant an exception from a license suspension, for normal (but a suspendable amount of) citations such as speeding or something of that ilk.
Those drivers licenses have special wording on them, that indicate the person may only drive to and from work, and often has the address the person has to drive to and from.
However I've also seen contractors allowed to drive to and from job sites, and directly home.
This is in a province of Canada, and dangerous driving or alcohol use, would invalidate that ability to get an exception.
This driver with the Waymo sounds like dangerous driving.
Unclear if in this US State the situation is similar.
Good thing we get wiser with age. Oh, wait no we don't. We insist on driving while beeing unable to look over the shoulder or having dementia. Knew somebody whose by no deceased dementia afflicted father used google to navigate him home when he forgot where he was. Thats the accidents with a "confused" driver, not from the accident.
Most people are losing their facilities years before any formal diagnosis and plenty of people, especially those who don't want to lose their freedom simply won't go to the doctor for a diagnosis. Nobody can force someone to see a doctor.
My father was one of these. He lived across the country from us adult children and just seemed to be slowing down but an unrelated traumatic event exposed his early onset dementia acutely when his reactions to it were so strange. It also seemed to knock the facade off his familiarity with day to day life that was somewhat hiding his dementia. We then took him to the doctor and he was diagnosed.
Luckily he did not put up a fight when we took his keys but up to that point he was driving a giant truck around every day, seemingly mostly on instinct. I am still thankful that did not end in tragedy before we were able to move him into a controlled environment.
I have friends who dealt with the same thing with their father except the father insisted absolutely nothing was wrong, he was fine, everything was fine. They eventually got him diagnosed and into assisted living but it took literally years, plural, he lost thousands of dollars to scammers, and had multiple car crashes.
I've been following Tesla communities and a common response to using FSD is that it makes people nicer drivers. Thousands of people admitting that they can be angry drivers. That they get frustrated in traffic and can take risks or be aggressive on the road. With FSD they almost universally claim to be calmer, care less about being cut off, and almost never experience road rage.
Inclined to agree. I think what we call "car brain" is just one manifestation of hardwired circuits in our brain that detect any (even temporary) power differential and leverages it for maximum survival advantage. There is no way to put nearly 200 horse power at the disposal of one man, without triggering at least some part of those circuits.
Nah I think the brain shuts down once you’re not in the driver seat. Wouldn’t see someone care enough to throw something at others from a taxi or a bus either.
The whole premise imagines that we have a fixed set of problems that have always been this way and are fully/honestly represented by this headline article by the chief NYT industry plug… and once corporations roll out the solutions, ta ta. We’ll be rolling fancy free. With 580,000 surplus Americans to boot!
As a blind pedestrian, 95% of the pain I have to endure while out and about is due to lazily parked bikes. IOW, bikes can even hurt people if they are NOT moving and their owner isn't even around.
Photographing bikes or electric scooters does nothing without enforcement through the city. It allows tracking down the person who placed it wrong, but in the absence of fines through the city, the rental companies surely won't start fining their customers and drive them away.
The Lime app (bikes and scooters) refuses to close down a trip if you enter an area where parking is forbidden or if the picture shows that the vehicle is blocking the sidewalk or pedestrian paths.
It will also 100% forward you a fine if they get one and their records show you were the last user who misplaced it.
I doubt that. Across the street of our small organic shop around the corner is a bike parking spot. Still, I recently fall over a bike parked directly in front of the door of said shop. Bike people are lazy more often then not.
If someone parks a car in an illegal area, it can and should be towed. Same for bikes. Part of the needed "biking infrastructure" is proper policing and enforcement.
And in the future it will be robots pushing you around. They will learn to be intimidating. That's what AI does. It spots patterns and then exploits them for its own purposes.
I am not putting words in his mouth. I am pointing out the logical error in this memetic argument that cyclists are tired of reading again and again.
Whenever we mention that drivers harass and kill cyclists, there is somebody retorting that "cyclists don't follow the rules of the road", as if it somehow justified road violence against all cyclists, law abiding or not. It is a complete non-sequitur that pops up every time we point at the main source of death and dismemberment in our cities: drivers. [0] [1]
I read it as doing a mimic of the bad logic in the argument he replied to in order point out the flaw there via sarcasm. Random anecdotes don't prove anything about large classes of people, whether cyclists or car drivers.
Classifying something as a textbook whataboutism is typically itself a rhetorical fallacy. It is rare for it to be used in the sense of identifying a real problem. Normally when it gets invoked someone has an argument, often a reasonable one, and someone else wants to pretend it isn't a valid but can't come up with a logical inconsistency.
In this case nxm's comment has formal problems - it is just irrelevant. True or not, it doesn't justify mowing down cyclists.
I don’t think they enjoy sharing the road with you any more than you do with them. Maybe we could encourage our elected representatives to install more bike friendly infrastructure like bike trails and bikeways
I live in a place that has what I consider to be the best cycle infrastructures possible. Every road has a cycle lane next to it, usually at least 20ft away from the road, in tree lined purpose built areas, large amounts of grass between the road and the cycle lanes, they form a grid that matches every road in the city. Where they cross the road, there are underpasses or bridges. At no point does a cyclist ever need to be on a road, often you can't even see the roads.
There are still some cyclists (specifically middle aged men in spandex, never women, never dressed normally) who insist on cycling on the road, giving the finger to every passing car, who will loudly tell you to fuck off if you point out that literally next to them, about 20ft off the road, there is a cycle lane. built just for them, so they can cycle safely.
Anyway, this comment is in support of the comment of johnfn. No amount of training or testing will stop the arseholes being arseholes. But it is also to point out that arseholes are not restricted to a particular form of transport.
Roads should be built to handle the throughput needed of them for the next several years. Adding more cars doesn't add more traffic if throughput of the pipe is big enough.
I'm not interested in issuing an automobile loan to you, but there are others who specialize in this. Even dealerships themselves can help you finance it.
Or using motorcycles or scooters: 2013 and 2015 UK insurance reports found riders better motorists than drivers, as did a 2014 UK police chiefs survey.
Ridiculous and trivially provably false. (maybe Danish are different)
Go to any intersection in SF or LA. Set up a camera. Count the number of cars and cyclists that break a traffic law. Cars will be 5-10% breaking the laws. Cyclists will be 95-97% breaking the laws.
That's what a bunch of researchers did in Florida and found cyclists more compliant:
> According to the study, bicyclists were in compliance with traffic laws 88 percent of the time during the day and 87 percent of the time at night. The observed compliance rate for drivers who interacted with participants was slightly lower, at 85 percent during the day. (There weren’t enough nighttime driver observations to report a compliance rate.)
My apartment overlooks a three way intersection. Drivers block the box almost every light cycle in rush hour. The most common traffic offense I see bikers make is riding on the sidewalk, which they obviously do because they fear being killed by drivers.
Please go do it then. I've done this in San Diego, it was 19/20 failing to stop for cars, the one who did failed to stop behind the painted line. There were only 2 cyclists and they also slowly rolled through the intersection.
Yeah, it's not like drivers text while driving, go over the speed limit, fail to signal, fail to fully stop at stop signs, run red lights, tailgate, or park in the bike lane, right?
Those rules exist because of cars. Before cars, we didn't have red lights or stop signs, and we didn't need them.
If we got rid of the cars, we could get rid of the silly requirement that everyone needs to come to a complete stop at every intersection, which only makes sense in a world where people drive 2000 pound death machines.
The creator of the well known METR time horizon graph was recently poached by OpenAI [1], there exists intellectual/social/financial overlap between the SV AI Labs and METR, and METR needs to maintain good relations with the labs to continue these sort of collaborations so it doesn't seem too far fetched to believe their relationship may be closer to symbiotic than adversarial.
I wouldn't go quite so far personally based on available evidence, but that sort of arms-length credibility laundering through "independent" research non-profits is/was common in fossil fuel industry, Big Tobacco, etc.
The article claims that the finances fall apart because OpenAI won't hit the growth it wants. It's an interesting thing to say when using their product to write 100% of the article.
This article is so blatantly, obviously, painfully AI generated. The real "worrying trend" is this getting upvoted to the frontpage in the first place. If you want "proof" just chuck it into pangram.
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