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yes but this aligns with the initial statement in the post that top 1 doesn't happen as much and top 15 is more common.


Very scary...


I just want Apple to release RCS already


You're implying that you knew how to hire and identify smart architects and provided them the right vision to build a good building.

There wouldn't be a counterfactual in your hypothetical scenario, but I'm confident that the difference between someone that got lucky and hired "smart" architects versus a visionary doing the same task would be drastic.

Money can only get you so far.


Is there an indication that Altman has a special talent for this over others?


Yes, the accomplishments of OpenAI represent that in action. It's an exceptional outcome to say the least.

If everybody could do it, they would be doing it. Altman's abilities are every bit as rare as that of a 10x software developer. The same was true of Jobs, and the same is true of Musk (regardless of whether someone likes him or not; who cares if he's likable, it's an infantile emotional derangement to obsess so much over likability).


> Yes, the accomplishments of OpenAI represent that in action. It's an exceptional outcome to say the least.

What specifically backs that up? Didn't others create the technology? Is it that hard to hire and organize when you've got a top researcher that everyone wants to work with? By many accounts, he was just using OpenAI to further other businesses and investments.


> Is it that hard to hire and organize when you've got a top researcher that everyone wants to work with?

Hire a top researcher? Ok, you could get lucky with a few. But keep? Good luck if you are an incompetent manager. If Sam Altman was the "know-nothing" that so many on HN claim him to be, then the top researchers would leave and go to Meta, Google Brain, etc. It makes no sense that this core research team has been so stable. Is this not evidence enough for you?


this core research team has been so stable

OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei and a bunch of others left three years ago and started Anthropic.

Ilya Sutskever reportedly told the board before the coup that he’s so unhappy with Sam he was thinking about leaving. He might be out now.

I don’t know if Sam is the right leader for OpenAI - he might be. But it’s good that he’s being watched closely right now.


That's extremely easy. There are awards and magazines and Wikipedia. Smart architects are smart because they're able to come up with the "right vision" all on their own.

We know it's possible for someone with no technical ability to look like genius just by having lots of money. I knew people who believed Musk was going to bring about an AI revolution all on his own because of his very special brain, but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101. What makes you convinced all the rich "geniuses" who haven't revealed themselves to be idiots are actually smart for real this time?


> but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101

Honest question: why? Just because your bubble denounces him and he's doing things differently than other big tech, in a way that upset developers / managers that doesn't mean he's automatically wrong.

Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great). Probably if we didn't have a board of do-nothing for years twitter could have turned into the Line of the west. Maybe it could have captured all the profits which ended up on patreon and onlyfans.

If it wasn't for his anti remote stance and general disregard for life-work balance I'd love to work for him. Finally, an organisation when things get done with few hard working people, and not hundreds of drones collecting a paycheck and slowing me down and complaining all the time.


Do you have a source for saying the monetary outlook is good? As far as I'm aware, advertising dollars has always been the lion's share of revenue, and he's tanked that and the valuation of the site has readily dropped.


>Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great)

I'm generally a fan of Musk, I'm glad he bought Twitter, I drive a Tesla etc. but this looks like delusion to think this.

Twitter is not doing well. Musk cut too fast and too deep, and it shows with the number of outages and problems Twitter has had. It wasn't a few months ago that they had to rate limit everyone from scolling their feed for a day, they had hours of downtime this last month alone.

This is not good for a company that makes its money by serving ads, which it also has seemed to be bad at. Running a blogging site isn't that hard, but runnign your own adnetwork is, and Twitter is doing a pretty bad job.

They are losing quite a lot of moeny according to Musk(!!!).


I wonder how comparable this will be to MidJourney and I'm excited to try it out.


One thing I immediately noticed was the text, which doesn't seem to be something I can get MidJourney to do.


If you want text, checkout https://ideogram.ai

The quality is good and is free currently.


There's only a small handful of examples, which very well could be cherrypicked, but yes I am excited about text, that's one thing most models struggle at currently.


Pedantic but FYI the J isn't capitalised, it's just Midjourney.


The cartoon with the text wouldn't be possible in Midjourney. Also Dall-E 3 seems to have very good text comprehension, which was an area where Dall-E was always relatively good at compared to other models with better image quality.


400,000+? I don't mean to question this but that's a crazy high number assuming it's not Amazon or Walmart.


At a guess there's at least 20 companies with head counts that high, and most of them aren't tech and retail.


Was that a guess? It was an impressive one. There seems to be 21 companies with 400k+ people.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-o...


Huh, it was but I can't take credit for being clever about it, just simple order of magnitude estimation with a factor: e.g. I thought of a handful I was pretty sure were 500k+, rounded up to 10, then doubled as I know I don't know much about the space.


Much much more than that in case OP is not in the US.


Globally there are many large companies of this size.


Amazing!


I'm actually curious what the Chess.com statement would be - they seem to have some bombshell that's coming soon. Also curious how Hans' will react to all of this.


we should all mourn this tragedy but do not paint this guy as a good man. He is a historical revisionist.


Would you like to expand your criticism?

I see a lot of vague hate for him here and biased links being posted.

What exactly is your issue with him? Without using buzzwords like "historic revisionist" or "far-right, ultra-racist".

- edit -

Mainly people are saying he's racist because he visited Yasukini Shrine that honors the dead from Japan's wars when he resigned to "inform the spirits".

It's not like visiting a "Nazi elite general" grave like another user made an analogy of.

This is all ridiculous and you people are despicable and disgusting for making slanderous claims especially at a time like this. Terrible.


He is, like many other Japanese, hell bent on rewriting Japanese history with a positive spin, completely ignoring or at best downplaying their colonisation atrocities before and during WW2. Wasn't he the one who went to a shrine to a "WW2 hero" who also just happened to be a war criminal?

Historic revisionism is an apt description, not a "buzzword".


Yasukuni Shrine isn't only for WW2 criminals, but also for who died on previous wars. As a Japanese, I don't think it's bad to go to the shrine unless denying historical fact or praising criminals. It's uncomfortable that foreign countries blames about that. Maybe WW2 criminals shouldn't be buried at the shrine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine


[flagged]


There's a difference between not addressing the past, and actively considering retracting official apologies and statements on the matter, and starting a trade war over it. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/04/shinzo-abe-japan-south-...

> Abe’s revisionism is not exactly a secret. He has expressed admiration for his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, who was imprisoned after World War II on the charges of being a Class A war criminal. Abe was a special advisor to the group Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), which claims Imperial Japan should be lauded for liberating Asia from Western colonial powers, the Tokyo war crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and war crimes such as the Rape of Nanking in 1937 were exaggerated or fabricated. (In 2014, 15 out of 18 cabinet members in the Abe administration were Nippon Kaigi members.)

> In 2007, during his brief first stint as prime minister, Abe personally disavowed the 1993 Kono Statement that apologized to the World War II-era victims of systematic sexual abuse by the Japanese army, dishonestly claiming a lack of evidence. When Kan made the centennial speech accepting responsibility for Imperial Japan’s annexation of Korea, Abe yelled, “Idiot!” at Kan on live television. Upon taking office again in 2012, Abe wasted no time in showing the world where he stood on the history issues: He openly flirted with officially retracting the 1993 apology to the so-called comfort women and visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Japan’s war criminals, over strong criticisms from both South Korea and the United States.

> All of this drove South Korea-Japan relations to the brink, and then Abe’s most egregious misstep marched the relationship off the cliff.All of this drove South Korea-Japan relations to the brink, and then Abe’s most egregious misstep marched the relationship off the cliff. In order to settle the historical score, he weaponized the two countries’ trade relationship. In October 2018, South Korea’s Supreme Court issued the long-delayed opinion that Japanese corporations that used slave labor from Korea during World War II must pay reparations to surviving slave laborers. (The delay was in part because since 2013, Japan’s foreign ministry had been issuing barely disguised threats for the South Korean government to “respond appropriately” to the pending case, and the quasi-authoritarian Park Geun-hye government acquiesced and pressured the Supreme Court to delay the ruling in contravention of the most basic principles of separation of powers.)

> In response to the court’s opinion—which ordered the reparation of $89,000, a negligible amount for Japan’s largest corporations—Abe declared a trade war. The Abe administration announced export control against South Korea for three critical chemicals used in high-end display and semiconductor manufacturing, immediately after the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in which the prime minister called for a free and fair trade. When confronted with the criticism that Japan was using trade for political purposes, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga (the front-runner to be the next prime minister) vaguely cited national security concerns as the reason for the export control, even as he dangled the idea that South Korea “did not offer a satisfactory solution over the issue of former workers.” So flimsy was the justification that some experts observing the issue noted that Japanese officials “haven’t provided any evidence” and “have not named companies or said how supplies may have been mismanaged.” Others went further, calling Tokyo’s excuse “duplicitous” and saying it was behaving “spuriously.”


Ideally, He could have kept a low profile regarding WW2-related issues and events just like the previous emperor. It's not a must to pay a visit to such shrines. I wonder what would happen if a politician regularly visits a church that worships Adolf Hitler and other war criminals.


The equivalent would be the PM of Germany denying the Holocaust and paying respects annually at the graves of Nazi elites.


Yep.

> graves of Nazi elites

The Allies were smart with that one, most of the big ones were cremated and their ashes were spread, that way there are no shrines.


As another user said:

> Yasukuni Shrine isn't only for WW2 criminals, but also for who died on previous wars. As a Japanese, I don't think it's bad to go to the shrine unless denying historical fact or praising criminals. It's uncomfortable that foreign countries blames about that. Maybe WW2 criminals shouldn't be buried at the shrine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine


He did deny historical fact, he led the society for revising Japanese textbooks to downplay the extensive war crimes.

Plus, visiting the shrines can be a personal matter, but as a politician he knows exactly the connotations of his visits.


people said that about Honey (just a chrome app store solo dev project) and look how much they got acquired for. Don't underestimate them.


Hindsight is always 20/20. Is Superhuman comparable to Honey? From a tech perspective, maybe??? I.e. could a talented solo dev replicate 80% of Superhuman and then publish it via the chrome app store. Yeah. But from a product perspective? Absolutely not. Honey has a vastly wider market than Superhuman, and almost anyone can use Honey and get something out of it. We can sell Honey as a 'money-saver', in contrast to Superhuman which markets itself as a 'time-saver' (albeit, for an eye-watering subscription). I've seen many people step over dollars to chase pennies, and Honey taps into that behavior, offering a much stronger value proposition than Superhuman (so much so that the two are basically incomparable).

This product is very niche. From my own experience, performing a single mildly unorthodox keyboard shortcut in front of an average Joe sort of freaks them out. Getting regular people onboard with something like this would be a total nightmare. This alone probably filters down Superhuman's market dramatically (enough to make a VC-backed 100-employee effort seem absolutely ridiculous).

Regarding the merit of Superhuman's ability to actually save time is another conversation others have argued to death about. I'd be interested in what others have to say about this, but I don't think the discussion has been very productive so far.


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