Rendered at 19:53:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
petilon 5 minutes ago [-]
Noam Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. (From Wikipedia)
Catloafdev 2 minutes ago [-]
I hope this doesn't impact Google's progress on open models.
HPMOR 19 hours ago [-]
Wow - Google paid a couple billion dollars to bring Noam back. Really impressive by OAI if this reporting is accurate!
signull is more of an anonymous sh*tposter than a known industry insider, but I think this does capture the sama contribution to OpenAI very well. At least from an outsider who follows this stuff based on vibes.
thewebguyd 1 minutes ago [-]
That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture.
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
Insanity 13 minutes ago [-]
If I had to make a guess, money played a role lol.
xnx 17 hours ago [-]
This does suck for Google. Noam will take a lot of Google trade secrets with him to OpenAi. Google's bench is deeper than this one guy though.
biffles 18 hours ago [-]
Surprised to not see more comments on this, especially given the popularity of the Anthropic/Karpathy article. What a win for OpenAI - and what a loss for Google, just 2 years after paying $2.7bn to bring Noam back into the fold. Does not bode well for Gemini long-term... Or could be a signal for how deeply they are leaning into world models.
pixelp3 11 hours ago [-]
I think nobody they acquired from Character.AI is at Google anymore.
17 hours ago [-]
starchild3001 1 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
2 minutes ago [-]
mkw5053 1 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
reasonableklout 17 hours ago [-]
Very bad news for Gemini - the brief comeback with 2.5 Pro last year looked to be driven by Noam
Insanity 14 minutes ago [-]
Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity.
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.
xnx 4 minutes ago [-]
> models have no moat
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.
root_axis 13 minutes ago [-]
And they've had some initial success with TPUs which could be a major differentiator in the future.
Insanity 12 minutes ago [-]
Yup, and they have the Apple partnership for now as well. Much better position generally than OpenAI in my opinion.
observationist 7 minutes ago [-]
I don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more.
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.
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
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.
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.