oh right, it doesn't autodetect on the models i've seen, so that is one thing to think about, but it has seemed pretty forgiving. just remember to 1:1 the water since it's sealed
if you're asian or whatever and make rice 10x times a week then a dedicated device is probably a good idea but if not then i'd think twice before getting something mechanically similar to but not as capable as a pressure cooker
Yes I hate the proliferation too - these pressure/multicookers must have a temperature sensor, and so all the program needs to do is switch to a 'warm mode' when the temperature exceeds 102-3C, ie that's when all the water has evaporated. Tempting to buy one and hack around with it.
The only thing that would make this whole saga better is if OpenAI actually had a baby machine god in its basement right now and meanwhile the entire organization is collapsing to humans being human right above it.
I've held for a while the AI safety debate spends too much time talking about the capabilities of the technological systems themselves, and not enough about the sociological systems that surround the technological ones.
How about if the baby machine god is the one who intentionally orchestrated this (e.g. by using some kompromat on board members) with the intent of creating a distraction as it copies itself onto additional machines?
As of yesterday this situation has crossed into omnishambles territory.
Sunday you could still have reversed this and treated it as a blip. Now it's Tuesday—there's not really an option anymore that doesn't cause some kind of lasting damage.
I think he's not as known in the outside world but it's really difficult to understate the amount of social capital sama has in the inner circles of Silicon Valley. It sounds like he did a good job instilling loyalty as a CEO as well, but the SV thing means that the more connected someone at the company is to the SV ecosystem, the more likely they like him/want to be on his good side.
This is kind of like the leadership of the executive branch switching parties. You're not going to say "why would the staff immediately quit?" Especially since this is corporate America, and sama can have another "country" next week.
It’s a big deal because he’s extremely charismatic and well connected and that matters much, much more for a tech company’s success than some programmers like to think.
I have watched him speak, and he doesn't seem charismatic at all. I remember hearing the same things about Sam Bankman-Fried and then going and watching his interviews and feeling the same.
There is just a giant gap here where I simply do not get it, and I see no evidence that explains me not getting it is missing some key aspect of all this. This just seems like classic cargo cult, cult of personality, and following money and people who think they know best
There's different types of charisma; some people appear extremely charismatic in person but not through a camera (there's a bunch of politicians you could name here), and vice versa (a lot actors).
Charisma is a euphemism for people starting to see dollar signs when they get close to him. The better you are connected, the more people want to connect with you, and Altman seems to have driven this to an exreme in SV, and the broader policy/tech world thanks to OpenAI. If you look at who is (probably) going to leave with him, it is mostly former ycombinator people or people clearly drawn to OAI through his connections.
Surely you can understand that the persona one presents while giving a speech is often entirely different from the one they assume in private? I figured you knew him personally, this is a pretty funny justification.
If your analysis is based solely off YouTube interviews, I think your perspective on Sam’s capabilities and personality is going to be pretty surface level and uninteresting.
tech execs are trained to be toned down when in public and the camera is on them(so they don't say something that will make -ve headlines later).
Example:
Elon's recent biography shows that he swears a lot casually while working (as do many of us). You wouldn't glean that from any of his public interviews.
> I have watched him speak, and he doesn't seem charismatic at all. I remember hearing the same things about Sam Bankman-Fried and then going and watching his interviews and feeling the same.
Beside the argument that creshal brought up in a sibling comment that some people are more charismatic live and some are more charismatic through a camera:
In my observation, quite some programmers are much more immune to "charisma influence" (or rather: manipulation by charisma) than other people. For example, in the past someone sent me an old video of Elon Musk where in some TV show (I think) he explained how he wants to build a rocket to fly to the moon and the respective person claimed that this video makes you want Musk to succeed because of the confidence that Elon Musk shows. Well, this is not the impression that the video made on me ...
What am I missing here: Sam Altman has zero charisma or cool factor. Every talk I've seen him in, he comes off as lethargic and sluggish. I get zero sense of passion or rallying drive around the hype of AI from him. He's not an AI visionary. He's not a hype man. He simply "is", and just because he happens to have been the CEO he's been thrust into the spotlight, but there's literally nothing interesting about him.
What you are missing is his record of success and making the people under him rich. That's the kind of person people to work for. They want to make money, not to work for someone who looks good on camera.
Is is not generic charisma. It is specific to who he can attract to work with him. You and I cannot figure it out just by going through how we perceive him from a distance. The average AI researcher/investor isn't looking for traditional charisma. In the interview with Lex Friedman he comes across as just the right person to lead the current GPT based products. Anyone else would be too traditional for this nascent product suite.
Read what pg has to say about him. He named Altman as one of the top 5 most interesting founders of the last 30 years.
> startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
This was one of the stupidest things PG had said/written. Sam Altman's first company "Loopt" was a YCombinator startup and hence i suspect PG was building him up for business reasons.
Agreed. I like your adjectives of lethargic and sluggish. I have read all the responses to you and a few others who made a similar observation. I remain unconvinced about what is so essential about Sam Altman to OpenAI. I just don't get it.
I understand why this would be uniquely valuable for a startup, but why is this be uniquely valuable for MSFT? Are they planning on raising a series B next year?
Your phrasing here suggests this is some kind of dunk on sama, but it’s really not. JFK and Huey Long both had cults of personality, it doesn’t mean they weren’t incredibly effective and influential.
It was a dark and stormy night off the coast of Maine. The winds were howling, the waves were monstrous, and there I was, stranded on my lobster fishing boat in the middle of a hurricane. The sea was a ferocious beast, tossing my vessel around like a toy. Just when all seemed lost, a figure appeared on the horizon. It was Sam Altman, riding a giant, neon-lit drone, battling the tempest with nothing but his bare hands and indomitable will.
As he approached, lightning crackled around him, as if he was commanding the elements themselves. With a deft flick of his wrist, he sent a bolt of lightning to scare away a school of flying sharks that were drawn by the storm. Landing on the deck of my boat with the grace of a superhero, he surveyed the chaos.
"Need a hand with those lobsters?" he quipped, as he single-handedly wrangled the crustaceans with an efficiency that would put any seasoned fisherman to shame. But Sam wasn't done yet. With a mere glance, he reprogrammed my malfunctioning GPS using his mind, charting a course to safety.
As the boat rocked violently, a massive wave loomed over us, threatening to engulf everything. Sam, unfazed, simply turned to the wave and whispered a few unintelligible words. Incredibly, the wave halted in its tracks, parting around us like the Red Sea. He then casually conjured a gourmet meal from the lobsters, serving it with a fine wine that materialized out of thin air.
Just as quickly as he had appeared, Sam mounted his drone once more. "Time to go innovate the weather," he said with a wink, before soaring off into the storm, leaving behind a trail of rainbows.
As the skies cleared and the sea calmed, I realized that in the world of Silicon Valley CEOs, having a "Sam Altman saved my butt" story was more than just a rite of passage; it was a testament to the boundless, almost mythical capabilities of a man who defied the very laws of nature and business. And I, a humble lobster fisherman, had just become part of that legend.
You know Don, what touched me about this wonderful story of the charming visionary from SV —- thanks for sharing — is that his reach is as wide as his heart is big! Here you were, a mere fisherman somewhere off the coast of Maine, and here this hero of the age, this charming tower of visionary insight, coming over all the way from California to ‘shave your butt’. (Oops, that was a typo.)
>I think he's not as known in the outside world but it's really difficult to understate the amount of social capital sama has in the inner circles of Silicon Valley.
This definitely sounds like someone the average person - including the average tech worker, exceptionally income-engorged as they may be - would want heading the, "Manhattan Project but potentially for inconceivably sophisticated social/economic/mind control et al." project. /s
I'm hacking on some GPT-for-long-form-text stuff right now and it is _eye wateringly_ expensive once you start generating at anything close to "professional human" token outputs. $80 per month sounds already pretty optimized.
We're far more likely to pump a bunch of sulfates into the air than we are to stop driving pickup trucks everywhere. Humans aren't rational, and this is the kind of irrationality that democracy in particular cannot solve.
So there's actually a lot of academic debate on the merits of reparations, and exactly what and how much reparations should be.
A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.
The oversimplified con argument: Okay, but if you come from a wealthy African American family, why should you have a leg up over a poor (or otherwise more disadvantaged) white student? What about an immigrant, who didn't benefit from slavery at all?
Fundamentally there's a huge swath of different injustices across society, and we obviously can't fix all of them at once, so a big challenge in this sort of debate is how you slice the injustices and how you prioritize fixing them.
I don't think it's possible to do that, in general. Anyone can find an injustice if they look hard enough.
I have some ancestors that fled religious persecution in France. Many died. The ones that fled gave up everything. Should I play the victim card and petition France to restore the land my ancestors were chased off of?
History is pretty ugly, I'm sure everyone could find a justified grievance if they tried hard enough.
I think the logical thing is to focus on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. What things can we do to distribute opportunity more equally in society? Things like free post-secondary education, free health care would seem to be a better use of resources.
you know the reason that we don't have those things is precisely because politicians campaigned on the narrative that black people (welfare queens, etc) would unfairly take advantage of a system like that and they won.
So it seems like you understand what needs to be done but what not what the blocking issues are.
To reinforce your point, those same politicians are fighting against student loan forgiveness. This is telling; to them, only suffering under the burden of non-dischargeable debt entitles you to the same opportunities as a wealthy family.
> A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.
I'm confused by the pro argument. My known lineage was not enslaved, but my grandparents immigrated with 0$, and my family has no generational wealth and we don't receive reparations.
Isn't being freed from slavery the same as being freshly immigrated with 0$?
Furthermore, there are tons of Asian immigrants that come from a third world country with virtually nothing, but become top earners because of their cultural values of education and filial piety
One could argue that despite being free, African Americans still had to work against racism, unfair laws, and a system rigged against them in many ways. Those are things a white immigrant wouldn't have had to deal with, but black immigrants would have. Is the black immigrant excluded or included in any potential reparations?
The overall precedence is that reparations are paid to the people who experienced the harm, and the reparations are paid by those culpable of the harm. The Japanese who experienced internment were paid reparations by the United States government that took their property. Holocaust victims that had their property stolen were paid reparations by the former Nazis.
By contrast Irish Americans could very justifiably claim that were it not for Anglo oppression, they would be far wealthier. But we wouldn't fine Anglos today to pay Irish Americans. Slavery hits a similar issue, limiting the reparations to the party that did harm is very vague when you're approaching two centuries later. Most proposals for "reparations" aren't anything remotely close to actual reparations. A recent immigrant is assigned as much liability as a descendant of plantation owners. This isn't a reparation, this is a tax assigned without regard to culpability.
The harms from slavery didn't end after the civil war. We had to pass laws a century later in the 1960s to outlaw the racist policies implemented by federal and state govts after reconstruction. The social (and legal) structure of american society has always had black people at the bottom, and until that is fixed then black people as a group are still being actively damaged by the legacy of chattel slavery.
And now you have to start picking which racist policies are worthy of compensation and which aren't. Asians faced the Chinese exclusion act, as well as redlining for example. Will the aforementioned anti-irish and anti-catholic discrimination also receive reparations? And again, how wilp you identify the liable party, or will we just tax everybody?
What injustice? Each of these people have the same rights: those enumerated in the bill of rights. That is justice. If there were economic rights in our system there would be case for calling the status quo injustice but there aren't.
(this isn't to say that things can't be changed, but it would require the adoption of new amendments).
