> Thinking through what we can do to improve this (ideas welcome)
> $Trillion AI company asking for ideas from the community
indeed always felt very weird to me. $trillion dollar company, with employees bought for as high as $100m, and a whole team/time/internal knowledge/resources/data at their disposal, asking for ideas from random individuals in some public forum? Really? How is this real? Maybe I'm missing the mark here, but it always struck me as odd.
The only thing I can figure is that since it's admittedly all vibe coded and vibe reviewed, and that nobody understands the entire system...
All ability to reason about and evolve the system holistically has been lost in favor of feeding in narrow, discreet problems to be "fixed".
There seems to be a complete lack of awareness on how flawed the security model is at a fundamental level, and that the entire sandboxing ecosystem is trying to address it at another level(like OpenShell and others).
Think of it as an informal interview. If you come up with a brilliant idea that no one there was able to communicate effectively, what are the chances they're not going to offer you a job or at least a chance to interview?
I don't work at Anthropic so I can't make any claims about their hiring practices, but I've been at FAANG companies and on the hiring committees and it's always a challenge to find good candidates. Engineering managers spend many hours trawling through LinkedIn, looking for good candidates. What's so surprising about using a site like HN to get candidates into the pipeline? HN has a monthly who's hiring thread, even!
So developers who get paid more than $X,XXX,XXX per year don't need to pay attention to their customers. Got it.
Where do you feel the dollar threshold should be set? At $990,000 per year you still need to listen to users, but at $1,000,000 you are basically King C of Rust Mountain and they are lucky you even let them run your code?
Should RSUs and cash signing bonuses be included in the calculation?
Slow down, I am not throwing shade or even making any conclusions here :D I feel like you got irritated, perhaps specifically because I appealed to money - I will expand on it below. Nevertheless, I just presented my internal model and nudged people for some deeper context that could help reconcile it, that's all. And yes, your perspective did give me some new useful insight, thank you. I'll respond to some things.
> So developers who get paid more than $X,XXX,XXX per year don't need to pay attention to their customers. Got it.
But the point is that the specific discussed behavior is mostly technical. It's a mostly under-the-hood behavior, and mostly something that doesn't involve tradeoffs for the user based on the implementation chosen. So it's not really something that you would just go around and ask users, especially when you have all the session statistics from CC, skilled systems engineers (where I partially used money as a proxy) who are paid to spend months on this problem and can iterate ideas among each other, polls and questionnaires, thousands of experiments from within different sandbox configurations, insight into the training of the model itself, etcetera.
In all of that, six random people from a forum, even from one such as hackernews, seem to me to be a totally statistically insignificant, comparatively under-informed dataset.
Something like that is where intuition leads me.
Now, the reason I appealed to money is multifaceted.
- It's an investment from the company into a brainpower that is directly tasked with solving this. An investment so absurdly huge, that that team delegating such fundamental problems to six people on a forum for ideas seems hysterical to me.
- They are being paid absurd sums of money. For-the-value-they-provide. I am not, and neither is anybody in this comment section (probably). Not even close. Yes, I expect them to be able to solve these problems much, much, much better than the average HN commenter. Otherwise - why the hell are they getting paid that?
- The guy getting 100$m for joining the company rattled me, I admit.
Now, those are all the reasons behind my intuition. Of course, I understand that a guy optimizing a model can easily bring 100$m of additional revenue to a company of OpenAI's scale and money turnover. I understand that these people are all still just humans, like you and me. It just... rubs me the wrong way. I concede my irrationality.
Anyway, I think your point about "listening to users" is... weird, because I don't think that's the same thing as what I was talking about at all.
As someone who was personally a victim of a violate car accident when very young, causing permanent facial scarring; I give everyone permission to play GTA, Wreckfest and Burnout 3.
I would hope my friends would never use me to say otherwise.
Regular people are often bad guys too, you know. If the reality was "bad guys will have it. Should regular people too?" The entire core dilemma would be entirely eliminated lol.
Do you remember details about the rm -rf ~/ folder thing? Model, harness (omp?), context window size, reasoning effort (none/low VS anything higher is enough), when it happened?
Without those details, it's an interesting cautionary tale and a valid anecdote, but as actual practical datapoint, it's useless.
Yes of course, it's burned into my mind lol. Local GLM5.3-Flash, 4.0bpw running on a tuned exllamav3 server via omp, max effort 256k ctx. It was trying to cleanup after itself by deleting some temporary files it left behind the sweet thing. I look at it like a child so I take the full blame for the situation, and again, it's a learning experience.
Man... This is so sad, disappointing and worrying. For some reason, your explanation in particular struck a nerve with me. Who could have predicted all the nuanced social consequences that AI would bring upon us. I don't yet know what position to take in my head on all of this. It's too much change, despite believing that the world will change and adapt. In particular, that human work will become more valuable - but as a craft. As an endeavor you do because it's artful, not because it's mandatory, or the most optimal way to quality or speed. And those two categories - human and ai work - will become very separate. While the economical value or even expectations of absolute quality in the human work will plummet.
Similarly, I expect "raw"-ness to gain on value. Photos untouched by AI or filters. Physical objects. The non-digital. Who knows, maybe physical media will make a comeback.
Either way, it's not good times we're living through, and I don't particularly appreciate all of this happening after *just* becoming an adult in the world.
> Thinking through what we can do to improve this (ideas welcome)
> $Trillion AI company asking for ideas from the community
indeed always felt very weird to me. $trillion dollar company, with employees bought for as high as $100m, and a whole team/time/internal knowledge/resources/data at their disposal, asking for ideas from random individuals in some public forum? Really? How is this real? Maybe I'm missing the mark here, but it always struck me as odd.
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