The brine thing is just a way to shut down conversation and let people feel superior for claiming there are no solutions to our problems except to reduce our standard of living.

It’s obvious you can safely put salt back into the ocean with enough dilution. I bet a middle schooler could design a system to do it.

Yeah, middle schooler with middle school understanding can design anything. There are plenty of middle school solutions in the comments around. The problem is when they meet real world, beyond their high school level understanding of the issue.

100% of their code is written by compilers. But they never say that."

I’m actually neutral on this so far but my main question is are they changing the rules permanently or just one time?

I’ve always wondered if someone could start a company that removes all this stuff. It seems like it would be in high demand.

Sounds like a lot of room for human bias.

How would it have responded to these claims in the past:

THALIDOMIDE is safe

CIGARETTES are safe

ASBESTOS is safe

MERCURY is safe

DDT is safe

LEAD in gasoline is safe

Why do we want to build intelligence if it just confirms what we already think we know?

I believe this condition is called parosmia. I had a mild version for four years. It’s finally resolving (except shampoos and some sodas smell really strange)

It's weird hearing about this now, because I've always had a mild version each time I had a cold - mint would taste strangely kind of... floral? hard to describe, and orange juice would just taste sour, for a couple weeks after.

It's strange how much these things are hard to discuss without the immediate context - I remember what it was like, but the translation without ready access is surprisingly challenging.

As far as I know, anosmia would be the inability to smell. Parosmia would be scents smelling like other things, or the inability to identify certain smells.

And since taste and smell are so closely related, I haven’t been able to drink colas for about 3 years. Dr Pepper is fine though, so I’m okay.

For the first year I had no idea this was a real condition and my family thought I was crazy when I said things smelled wrong. It was a relief when I stumbled upon reddit group and found others.

He should have done his own lab. He seems like someone capable of it and might bring some unique ideas.

If you don't actually have the desire to build, lead, and manage a large organization, this is a terrible idea for technical geniuses. A guy like him will instantly raise $1 billion which means hiring dozens of people, which means tons of interviews, management, performance review, planning, board meetings, etc etc.

It's good that there are avenues today for people to make tens or hundreds of $m in salaried positions at companies so that they don't have to do that stuff to get paid their value if they don't genuinely want to.

I’m seeing founders being encouraged to run their business with AI and cut out the etc etc

Sure, that’s capitals’ dream but how does that actually work out in practice

Two years ago I’d agree, now he probably wants access to the immense capacity they have where if he were to start a lab from zero now, the ramp up to frontier pushing would require a lot more time. I don’t he needs the money as it is, and wherever he were to go would certainly make it worthwhile financially. Some people may just be cool with a couple hundred million dollars in their lifetime

> He should have done his own lab

Which raises the question: what can he do at Anthropic that he couldn't on his own?

Seems to me that you need incredible amounts of money to be competitive in the frontier model arena. I don't know how much money Karpathy has to spend, but I'd imagine that the money needed would almost certainly mean investors with deep pockets.

And then there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?

I don't know. If you can land some exceptional gig at the big firms, maybe the financials are good enough to not start your own lab. Minimizing risk, and all that.

EDIT: Assuming such a startup would focus on frontier models.

> you need incredible amounts of money to be competitive in the frontier model arena

This is my assumption.

> there's the uncertainty, will the AI "wars" be some winner-takes-all situation? Will the smaller labs eventually be acquired by the bigger ones, will they simply wash away if there's a crash?

He's Andrej Karpathy. He could wait to let the winner surface. Obviously better to get in with the winner earlier. But worse to get on the wrong team versus on the right team late.

He can be at the frontier while just having a regular job. Every other option is a lot more work.

Make a lot of money.

Access to a million GPUs?

It’s not enough to have unique ideas. You need capital, compute, people, distribution, customers… There’s huge appeal to joining a place that has all those things and lets you pursue your unique ideas without worrying about all that.

I'm pretty sure Karpathy can have billions of capital if he wanted to.

Mo money, mo problems. Just let the dude work, he’s not starving and he’s probably enjoying his life not completely wrapped up in the stress that running a company in this market must be.

Sure, he seems like he's focused only in research, so this is the easiest way for him to do it.

I am not entirely sure you understand how expensive it is to train these models

GOOD POINT by my wife: it’s too early in the AI cycle to already have winners especially with sky high valuations. It’s like betting on ibm to win the pc race.

It took tremendous effort by IBM to lose the PC race. They succeeded eventually - but it took some tries to get there.