> In 2017, Amodei hired Page Hedley, a former public-interest lawyer, to be OpenAI’s policy and ethics adviser. In an early PowerPoint presentation to executives, Hedley outlined how OpenAI might avert a “catastrophic” arms race—perhaps by building a coalition of A.I. labs that would eventually coördinate with an international body akin to NATO, to insure that the technology was deployed safely. As Hedley recalled it, Brockman didn’t understand how this would help the company beat its competitors. “No matter what I said,” Hedley told us, “Greg kept going back to ‘So how do we raise more money? How do we win?’ ” According to several interviews and contemporaneous records, Brockman offered a counterproposal: OpenAI could enrich itself by playing world powers—including China and Russia—against one another, perhaps by starting a bidding war among them. According to Hedley, the thinking seemed to be, It worked for nuclear weapons, why not for A.I.?

Brockman and his wife were the biggest donors to Donald Trump's Super PAC, MAGA Inc., in 2025 with each of them donating US$12.5 million. Brockman and his wife also donated $50 million to Leading the Future, a super PAC dedicated to AI deregulation that he helped found with Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356776

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41406175

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I think the analogy of the brain as hardware devices ("neural processor", "I/0 devices", etc) is misleading. I think I understand the very strict mind-matter dualism you're alluding to here. But so far attempts at using actual computer hardware to reproduce human-like cognition has gotten nowhere close, despite consuming order of magnitude more energy and data.

But how can you get credible probability distributions from the LLMs? My understanding is that the outputs specifically can't be interpreted as a probability distribution, even though superficially they resemble a PMF, due to the way the softmax function tends to predict close to 100% for the predicted token. You can still get an ordered list of most probable tokens (which I think beam search exploits), but they specifically aren't good representations of the output probability distribution since they don't model the variance well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40240982

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

>> P(next_word|previous_words)

So the "next_word" is conditioned on "previous_words" (plural), which I took to mean the joint distribution of all previous words.

But, I think even that's too reductive. The transformer is specifically not a function acting as some incredibly high-dimensional lookup table of token conditional probabilities. It's learning a (relatively) small amount of parameters to compress those learned conditional probabilities into a radically lower-dimensional embedding.

Maybe you could describe this as a discriminative model of conditional probability, but at some point, we start describing that kind of information compression as semantic understanding, right?

I initially was leaning to this being a high possibility of a delusion springing from a mentally unstable person, for all the reasons other commentators are mentioning. But, two things in particular struck me that changed my mind:

1. She apparently mentioned the abuse to her mother as a child.

2. She describes childhood behaviour consistent with someone who has experienced sexual abuse (i.e. thoughts of suicide, weird night behaviour like taking baths, body issues as she got older).

A small child doesn't have any incentive to make accusations, or to pretend to have been assaulted. If true, this should be taken seriously. Her mother is still alive, and there may be doctors, relatives or others that would be able to substantiate these points.

Finally, why has this post (and previous related posts) been repeatedly flagged? It's very troubling, I expect this from some HN users, but would have thought the HN moderators would have unflagged (or reposted) it upon consideration of the seriousness, importance of the subject matter, and undeniable relevance to the tech industry. At minimum, you would think someone would have unflagged them to avoid the appearance of bias and favorable treatment to the former YC president. At this point HN looks really sleazy.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295163

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181408

Points: 202

# Comments: 159

However, I think there is a quantifiable benefit from making the monitor light directly dependent on environmental light, which forces our perception to adjust to a more, low contrast, diffuse environmental context.

Part of the problem is that "brightness" in the context of monitors is different from how "brightness" is used in science of light, where it is defined as the subjective perception of light that changes relative to differences in light levels[1]. So you can see your way to the washroom in the middle of the night with no lights, but can't see your way back after you turned on the washroom light, because your subjective perception of light (brightness) has changed, even though objectively the amount of visible light (illuminance) has not changed.

Therefore, having a screen lit by the environment, would shift your perception of light to better see duller, low-light conditions, which is better for our eyes, since more uniform, diffuse light causes less strain than strong, directed light.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightness

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficiency_function

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37326960

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I'm always surprised the degree to which this kind of anti-journalism rhetoric ignores the role of journalism holding powerful governments and corporations accountable.