emmett
THE MOST IMPORTANT UNSOLVED PROBLEM IN AI IS THE MOST POWERFUL OF ALL CAPABILITIES: ALIGNMENT.
Hi, I'm Emmett. You may know me as the founder of Twitch (YC S05), and as the (extremely) interim CEO of OpenAI.
I believe the question of how AI systems learn to understand themselves and others is one of the most consequential technical problems of our time. If we get it right, the agents we build today will become our friends and collaborators tomorrow. And the infrastructure required to train agents that are good at working in teams and societies will be extraordinarily valuable.
Softmax is building large-scale multi-agent, multi-policy environments that will benchmark AI agents – both our own and others – on their capacity for theory of mind, adaptive goal setting, and teamwork. We’re looking for the engineers who will make that possible.
The work is unusually hard. The problems are ambiguous and challenging. High autonomy, high expectations. You'll work directly with me and the rest of our small but mighty team.
If this sounds exciting, I’m looking forward to meeting you. E
——————————————————— Hiring: Software Engineer https://softmax.com/jobs/softwareengineer Mention “HN Who’s Hiring” in the "How did you hear about this” field ———————————————————
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016...
Warren Buffet runs Berkshire Hathaway which is acts as a PE firm. Here's a list of everything they own and have owned for decades: https://finmasters.com/berkshire-hathaway-subsidiaries/#cons...
There are plenty of other examples.
PE is just "ownership not through the public stock markets" which is like...the default, actually.
However when I read your post it sounds to me like perhaps the issue is not a failure to be sufficiently grateful for what you have. It sounds like there is some desire, deep within you, that is going unmet. You have checked off everything from your list of Stuff You Thought You Wanted and yet something is still missing. It seems likely to me that that something is in fact missing.
You say "it's never enough", you "want more". But what exactly is it that you're wanting? What's the "enough" that it isn't? If you can look closely at that feeling with real curiosity and some gentleness...maybe there's a clue there as to what's going on. What's the reality that is going on (eg. "I'm often feeling deep failure and shame", a fact) vs. what's the narrative you're telling yourself ("Nothing is ever enough for me", a judgement you're making)?
"If the Company issues any Subsequent Convertible Securities with terms more favorable than those of this Safe (including, without limitation, a valuation cap and/or discount) prior to termination of this Safe, the Company will promptly provide the Investor with written notice thereof, together with a copy of such Subsequent Convertible Securities (the “MFN Notice”) and, upon written request of the Investor, any additional information related to such Subsequent Convertible Securities as may be reasonably requested by the Investor."
https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2021-batch-stats/
* 50% are based outside the US * 70% are not B2B/Enterprise * 43% of the batch is white (less than half)
So…your impression is simply incorrect. YC doesn’t fund the companies you think it does.
"Zeno Power is developing small-scale nuclear power systems to provide clean and resilient power in austere environments." He's literally funding clean energy.
And even if this year's list didn't have that in the list, let's celebrate someone doing good instead of lobbing stones from the sidelines about how they didn't do it the exact way we would have.
Not all returns pay out in cash. To think otherwise is to financialize your whole life, to know the value of money but nothing else.
Of course, Scott could be wrong about this thesis. It's possible that maybe believing that pro-life conservatives don't care at all about fetuses doesn't actually indicate that you have a trapped prior that will prevent you from ever hearing new arguments on the abortion issue. But that is the argument that Scott is advancing, not that you can't form opinions about the truth or falsehood of someone's political views at all.
This is about examining your own beliefs to root out dogma, and avoiding pushing your dogmas into others. Not about being a self-perceived victim of some other group oppressing you.
Warning: it’s not an easy solution, just an effective one. The main idea is “memorize more” and “practice more”. Judging by his blog posts, it seems to work.
That might be because having a high IQ causes people to perceive you as less effective.
It also might be because having really high IQ makes you more likely to be promoted, and is independent of other traits (like charisma or conscientiousness) which impact perception of effectiveness and therefore the population of people promoted without really high IQ tends to score higher on those other traits on average. Selection bias, in other words.
Based on the evidence presented, we just don’t know. Everyone arguing over why very high IQ “causes” the effect we are seeing might just be making stuff up, because we don’t know if there is a causal relationship at all.
What's the value of sneering at someone else's work like this? Why the mean tone?
I do believe you were asked graph traversal algorithms in the interview. I might have asked the question myself, though by the time we had pivoted to Twitch we had mostly stopped asking those questions. It was very early on and we were still pretty bad at interviewing though, so I wouldn't be surprised.
Additionally, if someone told you 90% of our employees came from an Ivy league background, they were lying to you. I'm actually very proud of the fact that we've hired broadly across the educational backgrounds. That's simply untrue, and I have no idea who would have said it.
There are definitely large contracting companies which abuse the H1B process in this way, but at Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc I have never seen an H1B holder make any less than their counterpart born in the US.
Doesn't mean I don't agree the H1B system needs serious reform, but it's unfair to tar all employers with that brush.
(Best reform idea I've heard: the limited H1B slots go to whoever is paying the most for the job. Inherently prioritized the most economically impactful immigrants and also creates upward pressure on wages. Win/win!)