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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

As do thousands of people say this point. You think the head of deepseek doesn't?

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.

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?

    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.

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

I'm talking from plenty of group project experience here.

Why? If you read a research paper for its content this is not especially important.

This thread is more about the people of course, and here we care, but that's not the point of a research paper.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayBOXv_SFCY&t=164s

I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.

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.

Popular entertainment and unique progress of human civilization can’t be really compared either

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.

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.

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

The existence of pay-per-view sports TV wasn't a pre-requisite for professional football - that existed way before - clubs self funded from gate receipts, local business sponsorship - they grew out of the local communities.

Sure, global TV has brought in the big money, but it wasn't required for the game to exist - but the opposite is true - pay-per-view sports TV is very dependent on sports like football.

> To become a good scientist you don’t need much classic capital, you need a good environment.

Pretty much all scientists learn their craft doing a government funded PhD in government funded labs using government funded equipment. ie governments provide the capital. People simply aren't self taught.

> And for ML you only need one computer for yourself or you can rent online

In theory - but modern AI is so resource intensive, good luck competing with the likes of Google/OpenAI, even Deepseek like that.

We need to make science more popular

We disagree on learning science and engineers, this doesn’t require physical capital, it only requires human capital

So? The point is football doesn't require this. It's not necessary for football to happen. The first Fifa world cup was in 1930.

> We disagree on learning science and engineers, this doesn’t require physical capital, it only requires human capital

Try building a bridge without any money. Try detecting the Higgs Boson without CERN. Sure Peter Higgs can come up with the idea of the Higgs Boson with little capital ( though somebody still paid for his living expenses - he wasn't a self funded gentlemen scientist ) - but that's the exception - most of the work is like CERN - and requires significant equipment and capital.

The way it works in academia is that scientists compete with each other for the limited capital ( grant funding and jobs ). Not the other way around.

> But if there are top ones famous it will bring more people to study those fields

Is the problem lack of talent in these fields or the narrow allocation of capital?

Is it really true that Noam is the only person in the world that could have done what he did or where their in fact lots of people who would have succeed given the same opportunities?

That's not to devalue what they did or the impact - and I'm all for recognising the contributions of scientists to society - but the reality is, for the most part, talent competes for capital rather than the other way around.

I'd also point out that I suspect the high profile appointments of people like Noam and John to OpenAI and Anthropic is as much to do with adding star quality to the IPO as much bringing in talent ( and that's not to diminish their talent ).

This is good.

I don’t care that some are jealous of him because they think they are as good as him in linear algebra.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo

It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.

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've seen engmisc and industryinfo, and I agree they are sometimes insufferable but having a level head would be ignoring them.

Seems like there are some insights here!

I had had a boss (from a YC-funded company, no less) that behaved in this way. Talked down on me with the g-slur, used language barriers to alienate his peers, and demanded religious sensitivity whenever we met after work. His entire life was defined by this religiously insecure identity, and several meetings were derailed by him thinking he was slighted by the rest of the team. That led to team members avoiding him, which reaffirmed his perception of being discriminated against. In reality we were all just baffled by his inability to adopt a secular work ethic.

As a queer person I could partially empathize with his behavior. Some of the smartest queer people I know are also frustrated, downtrodden and crass in protest of their mistreatment. But they're also generally grounded people that buckle down at work and get things done. They don't accuse people of being bigoted, lash out at coworkers or use slurs in the office. Perhaps it helps that queer identity isn't eschatological in nature, but that's only my best guess.

(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.”)

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247908

I explained my reasoning for avoiding the word downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591986

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.

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.

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.

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.

Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

> "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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe 15 years ago there was an option to have neither, maybe we can go back to that. As it already is in some other countries.

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.

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'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.

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine

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.

To some it still means favoring any existence of a Jewish state. The inertia isn't there because Israel wouldn't have survived the wars without outside support.

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?

> 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.

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.

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 razed Gaza to the ground. It was a genocide.

You're absolutely right, and this is antisemitic propaganda. Israel left more than 20 years ago and didn't return until 2023 due to Hamas terrorism.

They certainly didn't return:

- for five months in 2006 for Operation Summer Rains

- or again in 2006 for Operation Autumn Clouds

- or again in 2008 for Operation Hot Winter

- or again in 2008 into 2009 for Operation Cast Lead

- or again in 2012 for Operation Pillar of Defense

- or again in 2014 for Operation Protective Edge

- or again in 2018 and 2019 for incursions and special-forces actions, like that covert IDF operation in Khan Younis that got fucked up and led to a firefight deep in Gaza (but that couldn't have happened, because they left back in 2005, right?)

- or lastly, before October 7, in 2021 in Operation Guardians of the Walls.

None of those large named operations could have happened, let alone anything smaller than named operations, like special forces or commando raids, because those things are purely Hamas propaganda, and not formal IDF operations.

Right?

Hamas thinks it can destroy Israel with force. It can't anymore than native Americans can destroy the US. And Hamas trying and failing over and over and over and over has made the lives of Palastinians much worse. Hamas gleefully kills any Palestinians that point this out or oppose them in any way.

Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.

You're right. It -is- exhausting. Because I never said a word about the merit, or lack thereof, of Israel's actions or reactions, or Hamas'.

I just commented that Israel has spent multiple years in Gaza "since they left".

HOWEVER, you absolutely stated, and get bent out of shape multiple times in this thread alone, at anyone even hinting Israel set foot in Gaza since 2005:

Someone comments saying this exact thing, "Israel has been operating in buffer zones", etc., etc. and you?

"Israel left... Stop telling obvious lies."

Also, it might not be permanent occupation but when you're back there nearly every year for 3-9 months, it might not feel like you ever really left.

It's true that Nazism lacks the religious aspect, and Zionism lacks the pagan aspect.

I hope you can agree that these are aesthetic differences.

Both movements advocate for one ethnicity having the right to live on a particular part of the land, ime. ethonationalism (Nazis: "Blood and soil" vs. Zios: "The chosen people who god promised the land to"), both movements are expansionist (N: "Lebensraum" vs. Z: "Buffer zones" and "Greater Israel"), both movements subjugate another ethnicity that they deem lesser and evil (N: Jews, Black people, Roma, vs. Z: Palestinians, Arabs).

Both movements have commited genocide against the other ethnicities.

So, are Nazis pigs? If they are, then the label fits Zionists as well.

20% is an interesting number, though. The percentage of Palestinians who were Arabs in 1918 was around 90%. I wonder if that might have something to do with why the Arabs are upset?

Oh right, Israel _has_ destroyed nearly all the entire Arab society that lived in Palestine. As opposed to your claim that "Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah _want_ to destroy Israel in the name of Islam".

You think a hypothetical backlash to an ethnic cleansing is worse than the ethnic cleansing itself?

It seems you're the one who seems to be ignoring the factual crimes against humanity that Israel commits, and only care about imagined ones that Israel would be victim to.

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.

  My only emotion is exhaustion at hearing the same lies told over and over.

it was actually Likud's official election slogan in the 70s and 80s just as ... oh, let me check, Netanyahu, was getting involved in all of this, formally becoming Likud's leader in 1993.

And the destruction of Israel is the explicit goal of Hamas as stated in their charter.

"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it" and called for holy war to establish an Islamic state across historic Palestine.

Look, to be very clear: Hamas is absolutely a terrorist organization who has caused constant harm to both Israelis and the average Palestinian they purport to represent (there have been no elections since 2006, Hamas are the only people with weapons in Gaza, and the average citizen might as well be a hostage - and frankly they’d turn against Hamas a lot more if Israel didn’t steadily inflict collective punishment against them like turning off their electricity or even drinking water for days or weeks for actions of Hamas. All that is doing is making sympathizers of them).

A non-zionist Israel would be one where all peoples had the same right, e.g.

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.

The Palestinians are the people who lived there. The Zionists expelled half of them and razed 500 villages to the ground in 1948. It was an ethnic cleansing. They denied them the right to return.

There was a Palestinian identity and there was a Palestinian society. They revolted against the Ottomans, and the British promised them sovereignty. The British betrayed them and caved to the Zionists, and the rest is settler colonialism and apartheid.

Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.

The Palestinians were the only people living on the land before the settlers came. That included Jews and Christians, because Palestinians are not a homogeneous group.

The Zionist settlers are not indigenous, they had no right to settle there. They also took the UN resolution and just started a war where they razed 500 villages. I'm sure if the Palestinian side had won, they would have expelled the settlers. But that is only natural. And beside the point, because the Palestinians didn't start the war, and of course uou expel invaders.

And native americans were living in Canada, US, and Mexico before settlers came. The Palestinians are hardly unique in losing land in a war. In fact this is basically the norm in human history. What is almost unique is how Palestinians have made their lives much much worse pathetically trying to get the land back when they have absolutely no chance of doing so, anymore than Native Americans do.

The jews living in Israel in 2026 are indigenous in the sense they are NOT leaving so any scenario where they do is a stupid fantasy. the Palestinians DID start the war, they rejected their own sovereign state in favor of gambling for everything and lost. But they have spent 78 years just refusing to accept reality while Israel has grown rich and powerful.

Israelis are not indigenous (there are rare exceptions of Mizrahis or Jerusalem Palestinians with some form of citizenship), they are colonists.

It doesn't matter if Israelis are indigenous or not because 7 million people are not going to leave.

The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, so it's not "rare" at all.

If you mean citizens of the State of Palestine, that’s a political matter, and zero Jews have that citizenship.

If you mean something along the lines of “unbroken lineage of ancestors who never left Palestine", that would also exclude many people who we all consider Palestinian, such as Arafat himself who was born in Cairo.

Right, like stomping around the comments claiming that anything less than pretending Israel didn't set foot in Gaza between 2025 and October 7, 2023 is filthy Hamas propaganda, the existence of at least six formally named IDF operations being just a pesky bit of reality that can be easily run over by a Merkava Mk V main battle tank.

Or, who am I kidding, of course it won't.

More specifically there are 0 Jews living in areas under control of the Palestinian Authority, or in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen.

Thank you for providing a perfect example of how the word zionist has become a replacement for kike among jew-haters.

Let's compare figures like, say Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker.

Fuentes regularly spouts vile anti-semitic rhetoric, painting up a picture of Jews as greedy schemers.

Piker always makes it clear he is talking about Israel, not Jews. Painfully so.

I have not seen a single self-odentified leftist say anything anti-semitic IRL. But I have seen right-wingers do this.

And this same story is reflected in politicians statements as well. The right is anti-semitic.

The ADL claims that the left is, but that is because the ADL wants to conflate Israel with the entire ethnic group of Jews. Which is an obvious and silly bad faith trick. You're also doing the same thing.

"God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam"

That doesn't follow. Not even a little bit.

And it's not really about religion. It's about Palestinians specifically, who are indigenous to Palestine, and are under Israeli apartheid.

The Palestinians who have been exiled by Israel, and their children, cannot live where their grandparents lived (even though they should have a right to return, under UN resolutions that Israel has accepted), but any Jew from, let's say Brooklyn, does.

Also, Islam is the only faith in Israel which is not allowed to self-organize. It is singled out among all religious communities as the only one who is not given this right. Which is of course incredibly discriminatory.

There isn't a single jew living in Gaza. Why is that?

It is very much about religion. Hamas is an explicitly Islamic supremacist organization that calls for the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation.

If you had the option to live as a full citizen in Israel, being told you're part of the dominant ethnicity that's treated as human beings; or staying in Gaza, where you are being bombed to death by the IDF, I wonder which you would choose?

Your argument is essentially stating the conditions of apartheid as negative for dominant ethnic group. I didn't know someone could be so divorced from reality.

Otherwise this is just the good old "Anyone who criticizes Israel is Hamas" trope.

Although I can't fathom why we'd want to? Like what is the advantage of giving tools sentience?

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!

Not really.

Altman couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.

Noam is OTOH and IIUC the real deal.

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 ?

Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)

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

should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?

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.

The Attention is all you need paper has Google logo, not character.ai

Do you know what a motion to dismiss is, by the way?

>> 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.

---

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?

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.

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?"

https://youtu.be/v0gjI__RyCY?is=nz77XP4KiJy7L1AX

What is exiting about this?

Google is a different place today than even 5 years ago.

His raw skills are likely atrophied by now from delegating and operating at higher levels. His entire value is mostly political now.

If he can’t play the political game and win, he’s useless. He would probably just go to some other organization where people aren’t immune to his lore.

Google bought him back (with lots of money) and made him one of the leads of Gemini.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo&ra=m

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 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.

1: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

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?

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.

LOL.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilk-76W9rE&t=60

"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...

Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.

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.

But I'm sure for at least some folks, this is true, given recent valuations.

Based on what?

Do they really? What does it cost them if they're wrong?

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.

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.

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 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.

Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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...

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.

Do you have any specific examples of where dang or another moderator posted in that way?

> 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.

“an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm”

Source:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snark

Indignant definition:

“feeling or showing anger because of something unjust or unworthy”

Source:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indignant

So just based on these definitions that comment seems neither snarky nor indignant? There’s no anger because he’s a moderator calmly stating one of the rules of the site. And there don’t seem to be anything mocking, irreverent or sarcastic about him calmly stating the site guidelines?

Karpathy to Anthropic, now Noam to OpenAI.

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.

What is going on at Google?

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

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....

He could raise and build his own company. But the ability to attract the level of talent that Google/Anthropic/OpenAI have is a different story.