telltruth

While most of the interview is boring and nothing new has been said by Toner, to me, it feels like huge political fight where sama tried to overthrow her first and then Toner went in attack mode trying to overthrow him. It's clear she was the lead instigator and accidently found Illya as sympathetic co-conspirator. Board was obviously ok and took no action when they weren't informed about release of ChatGPT. It also didn't took action when sama didn't told them about startup fund. Only after Toner's paper and sama's move, all these became important.

Overall, I genuinely believe that the board needs to get out of way. They are not the founder, they are not even technical. They should do oversight for intentional and significant wrong doings but politics and brewing up secret coups is not their job.

They aquihired 3 people who didn’t do any technical work. Nadella miscalculated big time here.

My guess is that Mustafa wanted to sell to MSFT at 10X but MSFT didn’t wanted pay that kind of money. Mustafa was ok with fire sale but VCs were greedy. Mustafa then quite in rage.

They had raised massive amount and not from good patient investors. No traction means Mustafa got fired. This is not surprising though but what is surprising is MSFT picked him up. The guy is not technical, is not even visionary and had just got lucky hanging out with Demis. I would think Satya had better taste.

It is especially horrible for new Amazon employee because of their tiered stock vests. You might have left your great job because Amazon offered you half million signing bonus but you won't last long enough to get even 30% of that.

I have tried using LLamaIndex and APIs are just aweful. It's a nightmare of class hierarchies and abstractions that only author can wrap their heads around. Comments are basically useless classic style of rewriting the function name. Just look at this example:

  def get_context(self, response: Response) -> List[Document]:
    """Get context information from given Response object using source nodes.

Most people don’t know some history. During 1990s, a group of people made a fortune out of consulting gigs where they will be called in by their CTO friends in traditional enterprises to save the late and over budget projects. One of these people was Kent Beck. Kent will use his license to kill to turn things around and eventually generalize his rescue formula and sell it to make 100X more. His crowning glory during those days was XP or eXtreme Programming.

Like with all self-help formulas, Kent will label his solution as magic bullet for all software development problems. He will advertise it as secret medicine that cures all ills. He will be at every conference, write articles after articles, publish books.

Also, like all magic self-help formulas, it wouldn’t quite work. So, Kent will invent something new. His next prescription was TDD and when I first saw it, I thought it was a joke. But people around me started drinking cool aid and if you didn’t join them then you weren’t one of them. Again, Kent and friends will go out on massive marketing spree advertising it as secret talisman. Like all overweight desperate people in need to lose weight, people will enthusiastically start new Kent Beck diet, lose few pounds and endorse the formula. But they will soon find that they had simply traded one problem for another more uglier one.

This went on for long time. For more than two decades, these group of people kept inventing these processes, selling it as magic pill and made millions upon millions in consulting gigs, books, training, certifications and so on. They came up with Agile and 17 people in that group created “agile manifesto”. Their most aggressively marketed prescription was scrum. Like their all previous prescription, world is finally coming off of night of drinking cool aid and feeling severe headache.

I think most of these people have now sort of retired after amassing massive fortunes and hopefully we will not see more of these magic processes pushed to dumb CTOs with promises of curing all ills.

The truth is Scrum was never a magic bullet and it is downright harmful for many projects. It is useful for highly predictable projects where research component is negligible, for example, CRUD websites AND where you are stuck with unmotivated tier-3 talent who failed to get job at insurance company. For everything else, it should never have been used. It is especially going to hurt creativity, originality and novelty if you are in business of making a differentiating unique novel product. It also is very very bad choice if you already had tier-1 highly motivated team.

So exercise caution!

Could someone explain why is this world changing?

Below summarizes the epidemic at many labs, especially in AI. If you want funding, GPUs and head count then you must prove yourself to be in top 5. The result is relentless pressure for the results that can create headlines.

It identified a culture where Tessier-Lavigne “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that is, postdocs who could generate favorable results) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (that is, postdocs who were unable or struggled to generate such data).”

Most people don’t know this but OpenAI is actually very dysfunctional company and only accidentally successfully because of just handful of right people having a rather lucky hunch (Schulman, Redcliff et al). However, execution wise they are really really poor. You can see this i myriad of problems such as their dataset is still stuck in 2022, plugins was a complete disaster, web browser mode sucks, app is poor, unable to release 32k and multimodal, rate limit even for paid users etc etc.

All thesis problems are now even more aggravated by their recent massive hiring spree of AI doomer crowd and Yudkowsky’s cult members instead of actually doing real research. Now the company is full of doomers whose sole job is to slow things down and be barrier to efforts. Meanwhile Bard has been making amazing progress. It’s free, doesn’t log you off all the time, it always feel latest and very close - if not better than current limited ChatGPT. Given OpenAI’s new staffing composition, they are unlikely to be leader down the road, especially when Gemini comes out. This is unfortunately sama’s second failed execution. He should probably just focus on investments.

Everyone not cynical about marriage only realize their mistake after they get put in 50% bucket of divorces couples. No one who is getting married think they will the one who end up in divorce. It's always that other couple :).

Another case in point: Musk's wife went to court for Tesla's ownership during their divorce but Tesla board had made some provision to avoid this. If Musk had written public letters like above during good days of their relationship, he will toast in the court. I am not saying Musk must deny legitimate ownership of other co-founder but someone just claiming ownership because of marriage laws without putting in blood and sweat of actual founder is just wrong.

From everything I can read, I think Jessica contributed as much as pg but I have no direct knowledge in their world and it's not my business to speculate there.

On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that Lucas, Bezos or Gates wives had same contributions in Lucas Films, Amazon and Microsoft. When I look at their cases, I feel they cashed out with massive windfall taking advantage of broken laws.

I wish pg the best but I think everyone should know how much legal liability these kind of public writings creates. A person I know closely had 25 year marriage in CA and he always believed in love and lifelong relationship. But as their kids went to college, wife's priorities changed. She started affair, started helping out her partner financially etc. Husband discovered all these accidently from her phone. After many discussions, they decided to file for divorce. She apparently claimed in court that she owned majority of his company even though she didn't played much of the part. The guy had started the company even before marriage by his own money. She produced bunch of emails among friend where he appreciated her for help. That was the end of it.

It's easy to swept away in "love" and all that but the reality is that 50% of marriages in Western world ends in divorce. Always remember that people change over time.

The data created by people should be owned by people. They should have right to decide if it can be distributed free or with charge through APIs, archrivals etc. I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.

No. The court has kindly ordered to pay half billion to her billionaire investors. Apparently they are going in prison ONLY because they screwed investors. I truly don't understand this part. These investors agreed to give money based on risk/reward. They were on the board and happily paddled along. They literally didn't cared even when issues were brought to them. They thought it is just like WeWork/Uber founder doing bullshit for exponential growth. Only when press released news and they thought they might get some mud, they pressed eject button.

No one should be going to prison because of these billionaire investors.

Balwani's story is quite amazing. The dude won startup lottery and made enough money that he wouldn't have to worry rest of the life. He had a mansions, sports cars and lived his life happily. One day this young women walks in his life and wants help with her startup. The dude throws away everything to make her startup success, burns midnight oil and torches ethics. He is much older and thinks he is in love. Only later to realize that the woman was simply using him and chewed him out as soon as his purpose was done. They became so adversarial in the end that they literally campaigned to have each other in prison.

Important Life Lesson for Everyone: If you made your money, do NOT fall in love (or, god forbid, marry without iron-clade prenup).

Google I/O was a massive ad trip. Bard is still pretty bad compared to GPT-4. If you tweak their own examples a bit, Bard basically craps out. This is pretty amazing given they have all the talent, compute and data in the world.

Wow... this is huge departure from their algo driven culture and stepping in to Microsoft/IBM style sales rep driven culture.

If GPT+Bing takes away 10% of their traffic, would their stock crash?

Here's the power of startups: Posterous.com and loopt.com, both unknown to vast majority of people, had a short life, made no material impact and no one you know uses them now. However, the founders of even these startups went on to be famous power brokers on the back of the winds of these mostly failed startups.

An alternative view could be: YC selects their CEOs from very weak startups who managed to get amazing exists nonetheless.

An alt-alternative view: YC cannot select their CEO from successful startups because they are already successful and too busy being CEO of their own companies.

I am not sure how legal argument can work unless you show that it breaks equal employment laws. DE&I actually is beneficial in many roles such as design, customer advocacy, sales, support, UX and so on. It helps achieve a better representation of population and diverse ideas in the group. Even for managerial roles, DE&I helpful to have representation for minorities at org level. So there are a lot of provable benefits of encouraging DE&I. However, for many technical roles, for example database administrator, I am not sure how DE&I will yield same benefits. One of my pet peeve is not including disabled people in DE&I group. Most big tech only mandates racial and gender minorities for DE&I targets.

At our school, 100% of teachers are women. One Hundred Percent. 97% of administrative staff is also women. In all of hair saloons in my area, 100% of staff is women. All of the nurses in our nearby hospital are women. They don't care about diversity and I do not think it is due to bias. I think they simply don't have enough men applying in their pipeline for these jobs. None of their CEOs have insisted in enforcing population statistics on to their employee statistics.

It's not left or right ideologies but CEO and their desire to be in good standing in social media. During early 2010s, there was whole barrage of books and editorial on income gap, gender gap and biases. News channels regularly picked up authors and circulated them on and on. Talk shows need someone to talk with and what could be better than these topics to energize audience to argue? This built-up a lot of resentment of being exploited and left behind in "diverse" group over short span of years which eventually exploded into me-too movement. During those days, a CEO will go out and post on Twitter how they cared about diversity and going all-in by tying the diversity targets with bonuses. Then if the next CEO doesn't do the same then they obviously looked upon as anti-diversity/racists. So, this whole thing cascaded into all big tech CEOs lining up to setup artificial diversity targets and that's where we are now. No one really cared that pipeline to funnel diversity in tech was broken at the start.

Big tech profitability does not get hurt by hiring mediocre people. They are post-talent businesses. They do not depend on tech talent to drive and keep profit margins but rather depend on established monopoly and maintaining barrier-to-entry to continue their profitability. They show their growth by simply showing more ads or hiking subscription prices or through more sales people - not by developing new ground breaking tech. Apple is likely exception here.

Puzzling thing for me is why people are split by genders. In developed countries like USA, women is as free as men. There are zero cultural aspects like in Saudi Arabia or other countries that prevents women from getting education or apply for jobs they want. Still, vast number of women gravitates to jobs like teachers, nurses, hygenists, hair saloon, waiting staff and so on. It is not that they were forced to take on those jobs. It is what they chose by their own will. Female participation in labor market is now well over 40% so almost everyone has chosen to do some job. But we still complain about lack of women in tech and we blame it on bias. I am certain bias is definitely there for women but is it the only reason, or even most prominent, why we have so few women choosing tech instead of those other very low paying jobs? I think people should be putting much more effort at incentivizing girls to pursue tech career paths than force upon artificial DEI targets on management hierarchy.

This is not how it works dude. Right now, in big tech, teams have target of 30% diversity, i.e., 1/3rd of the team. There is literally not that many "diverse" people available to hire. You would be lucky to even fill these positions with competent non-diverse candidates. If your team works on networking stack, how many well qualified female/black/latino folks are out there who will apply to your post at that point in time? VPs then come to you and tell you to hire "diverse" candidate any way with no experience in networking and ask you to train them later. They do this to protect their bonuses. Now your 30% of the team is filled with people who have no business of being there. Besides experience, most don't even have any passion for the field. They just walk-in flashing their diversity cards. This is massive drain on teams productivity. How does this team would compete with lean and mean startups? The truth is they won't. The DEI is great initiative to sunset aging big tech and replace them with new blood.

Managers are NOT free to choose who to hire. When you get headcount, they tell you to make sure not to sacrifice quality and, also in same breath, they tell you that you have no career paths if you don't make your DEI numbers. If there are no actual competent candidates in your field who also happens to be diverse, what would you do?

Everyone from CEO to line managers in all major big techs are now have DEI target that must be achieved. If it is not then don't bother applying for promos. Most people at L7+ will also see significant cut in bonuses if they don't make DEI targets. Especially at VP level, the cut becomes pretty significant. So, they constantly badger their underlings to make their numbers. There are very specific commitments you must write down in OKRs.

I have seen a situation where a manager literally ignored every single non-diverse resume and did not interviewed single non-diverse candidate because of desperation of not making his numbers. He went out of his way to get person completely stranger to work his team was doing. He finally ended up hiring a person well below expectations and this person now simply hangs out in the team as diversity token. The VP sent email to whole group congratulating in supporting diversity and be inclusive. Everyone got their well deserved bonuses for this magnificent achievement.

There is a silver lining. This DEI thing is now causing massive influx of sub-par employees in big tech. This is not because minority is sub-par but because hiring practices incentivize sacrificing quality over diversity to make your numbers and get your bonuses. Everyone winks at others and they say we don't sacrifice quality but it is not possible when you have limited window for headcount and your VP is sending you constant reminders for making your numbers and everyones bonuses are at stake. In my estimate, big tech already had 60% of employees just costing around and now this DEI will push them to almost 80% employees that are mediocre and unable to compete with the best. This is how startups like Google and Microsoft were born that toppled big techs of the day called Yahoo and IBM. A lot of talent will simply not even get opportunity to be interviewed at big tech. Guess what they are going to do?

The problem with all these self help gurus is that they end up advising exactly opposite of what they preach. This dude’s schedule looks sheer torture. He basically never turns off and lives fairly robotic life with military discipline but at the same time says that hustle culture is wrong. This reminds me of Tim Ferris who made millions by preaching 4 hour work week only to reveal later that he was basically all but maniac.

What are you talking about? Saudi were not exploited by western companies. After independence from British, they contracted out to western companies but took the healthy profits for basically doing nothing. Later, they bought out everything and now they have been exploiting the whole world for more than half century. All the oil and assets are basically a personal property of Saudi royal family. The MBS walks into marina in Europe and purchases mega yacht on the spot for $500M in all-cash same day transaction with no pre-planning just because he happen to like it when he saw it. All the while, general public not connected to royal family lives miserably. Saudi then hires managers who goes out like bull dogs to get every last cent from every possible move they can make. This results in supporting Putin to manipulating OPEC so MBS can purchase another $500M painting to hang in his bathroom.