https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...
It would be my life's dream to spend 80 hours per week coding without having to communicate with others... but no one is an island...
You really have to have a passion for coding to put in the hours and be very good at it. Incredibly rare, believe it or not. Lots of people think they are good coders but this is another level. Proof is in your commit/code review count/async comms being 10x-100x of everyone else in your org, and it's clear you're single-handedly enabling delivery of major projects earlier than anyone else could. Think of the pressure of doing this continuously.
What about he spends 4 hours a week coding cause he’s so good at coding.
Way more impressive.
https://chat.openai.com/share/c35e3fd1-d94e-477b-a331-b14384...
You have to watch out with that.. I've seen whole projects pushed through by management where no one else was involved enough to review normally, but everyone had an interaction that implied they had only seen the top of the iceberg of problems with it.
However! The best engineers I've been around do work a lot and they like it.
Being good at something lies in the result and/or appreciation of your work by skilled pairs, which also seem to be there.
Can we get a pllleeeeeeaaaase????
He’s clearly a terrible programmer and/or a terrible chairman and to be honest this news says he’s at least 1 of 2 on the above.
That's a nice insight. I have been in that place many times, I was overfitting on my own imagination.
But yeah, since Sam and Greg were apparently pushed out because they were building too good of a business any OpenAI employees that were aligned with them are likely to jump ship and join them, and OpenAI will revert to the non-profit research lab it started out as.
I don't see any comments here claiming that it's something that most people could do well.
When it comes to sports it's fairly obvious what outliers look like and well accepted that they exist. I don't see a single reason to believe, that the same would not be true in every other walk of life or thinking that OpenAI just got lucky (considering how many people are trying to get lucky right now with less success in this space).
There are extraordinarily effective people in this world, and they are sparse and it's probably not you or me (but that's completely fine with me, I am happy to stretch myself to the best of my abilities).
In my company, 80% coding for a senior SWE is rare. But if they deliver, management will give them some slack on the other evaluation axis. I have colleagues who work almost by themselves on new high impact projects. This has many benefits. No need to argue about designs, code reviews (people just approve blindly their code). The downside is that you need to deliver.
Edit: apparently ALDI VS LIDL is an urban myth. It's ALDI that was split in two ..
Apple surely doesn’t have a cluster that at all compares with the big cloud giants.
Oracle and AWS are really the only cloud left, and oracle is already renting to Microsoft for GPU compute.
If instead of work it was something else it would be seen as a problem. 100 hours per week doesn’t leave room for anything else other than basic human needs.
“They like it”, well all addicts like what they’re addicted to, it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
Most programming work in any project and company is mundane, so I do agree someone taking care of all that without whining is actually extremely valuable. I couldn’t do it.
Still doesn’t really make sense to put him on such a pedestal like many in this thread. It seems like a cultural thing in the US to overvalue individuals, and downplay the importance of good teams.
But it is your right to assume what he works on from reading his tweets and leap from that to how this is an American cultural thing tho.
I don't know this guy in particular so I have no clue though.
Apple has a lot of cash to throw at it. Question would be if Apple is even interested in it.
What also happens is regular developers (like me) want the same treatment as if they could end-to-end deliver "if they only let me", but many times can't, and actually need the structure and processes of a team. I've seen this freedom not working at all.
Could a nuclear energy company be at escape velocity to fusion because they are the best at fission? I wouldn't think so
Let's first define 'coding' before we jump into the details: 'coding' for me is sitting at your computer doing the work. It's not getting a coffee, chatting with a colleague, going to toilet or reading hacker news. So if you're reading this and claiming to do 100 hours per week of productive time, I call bullshit on that.
Being at the office for 60 to 100 hours, sure, I believe that.
When I was studying for exams at University, I did more than half of the work before noon. The rest was spread out over the afternoon and evening. At 20:00 my brain was dead. I could read a sentence, and nothing would stick. Read it again, impossible to process it.
So I always wondered how these other students could study until 2am in the morning. Well, turned out they didn't do shit in the morning. That's how they studied "all the way into the night".
Now back to my programming career: At my best I do 4 to 6 hours of concentrated coding per day. At my best, nobody seriously outperformed me. So if you claim to do more than x2 the work that I'm doing, I would love to see the output of that.
People like Cal Newport basically confirm what I've seen over the years. So do habits of the most famous authors.
Now, I can be convinced that it's actually possible. Take a look at Carmack, who claims to do 12 hours a day. He doesn't seem to be a bullshitter to me. So either he's counting time that I wouldn't count, like dungeon mastering a D&D game, or playtesting, or whatever. Or he's actually a super human work machine. Now he worked with Abrash, who seemed to do more sane hours. And in the end Carmack had high respect for the output of Abrash.
So yeah, if you know people who can actually do 14 hours of high concentrated coding 7 days out of 7, I would love to hear it and get some kind of confirmation that they're not browsing reddit and HN 50% of that time. And if you're reading this and claim to do 14 hours a day of concentrated work, I call bullshit on that you HN addict!
- an equalizer (entire team treated the same)
- a confidence booster (approval of others gives feeling of having done well)
- a way of distributing information (everyone is aware of all other team work)
You can run a team as a form of "competitive sport", and race everyone against each other; who churns out most "wins", and helpfulness, non-code-work, cross-team work are "distractors" to that objective hence undesirable and definitely not rewarded.
If the personalities in your team are "right" then this can work and by striving to best each other, all achieve highly. Have a single non-competitive person in there though... and it'll grate. Forcing a collaborative element into the work (whether by approval/review procedures, or by things like mentoring/coaching, or even just to force briefings to the team on project completion) creates a balance between the "lone crusaders" and the "power of the masses". Make the loners aware of, and contribute to, the concept of "team success", and give the "masses" insight into contributing factors of high individual performance.
Personally, I find it much easier to get lost in time and focused when I am working on something challenging. Time just flies by.
If I have to work on something boring / routine / repetitive I find it much hard to focus and time goes by so slowly.
Then my brain decides to look for ways to automate what I am doing. Perhaps a DSL or .. or .. o .. No work, remember work, but I could hmm if I write a Perl script i, No work you need to work, but it woud be work if i cold only
(I am diagnosed with ADHD)
See: >>38312704
The topic at hand is “how did a high level engineer got to focus on programming”. And I am saying that the reason has to do more with his influence and role within the organization, rather than other reason.
For a certain definition of "software": when only doing one training run costs an 8 digits sum (requiring hardware one order of magnitude more expensive than that to run) I kinda dispute the "all they do is software".
It's definitely not "all software": a big part of their advantage compared to actually free and open models is the insane hardware they have access to.
The free and open LLMs are doing very well compared to OpenAI once you take into account that the cost to train them is 1/100th to 1/1000th what it costs to train the OpenAI models.
This can be seen with StableDiffusion: once the money is poured in training the models and then the model made free, suddenly the edge of proprietary solutions is tiny (if it even exists at all).
I'd like to see the actually open and free models trained on the hardware used to train OpenAI: then we'd see how much of a "software edge" OpenAI has.
And my guess is it'd be way less impressive than you make it out to be.
I understand that sometimes is worth it, to create a great product, solve something important or just for fun. But beware
If I know what to write, and I just have to crunch out pretty straightforward code, I can do more hours (nowhere near 12 hours though, maybe 8 at best).
I can imagine the work your dad did, didn't include juggling a big complex system in his head, which seems to require a lot of mental energy.
That's basically also what Carmack states, that you can reach 12 hours if you plan your work to include some easier tasks for that day. But then again, I was never able to really apply that strategy.
Thanks for you take on it! :)
So basically, my brain is lazy and try to find a way to keep it in that state.
What I’m trying to say is that it is an addiction like any other and should be treated as such, not glorified.
It would seem like you're talking about what "software edge" OpenAI has in the future, when others have caught up, while parent is talking about the existing "software edge" OpenAI has today, which you seem to implicitly agree with, as you're talking about OpenAI maybe not having any edge in the future.
You will see the distance to be travelled and say let's build a airplane.
but incentives in most companies demand "progess" hence most projects start by piling the car high and driving off. it's when they are attaching floats to the car and paddling across the atlantic shouting progess reports back to shore that the value of automation comes to mind
don't worry about the ADHD - embrace it. (my hint - of the boring has to be done, make it the only thing, have nothing else).
Because most 10x engineers recognized by management as such are characterized chiefly by building out shoddy software extremely quickly that only they can understand.
In a similar dynamic, Doctors that are scored highly by patients often have pretty bad medical outcomes.
It’s ok to not enjoy it yourself. Different strokes for different folks.
I don’t think it should be culturally championed but I don’t see it as an immediate red flag especially in the case of a bleeding edge company like OpenAI.
I asked him whether as a boy he had speculated much about his gift. Had he asked himself why he had this special power? Why he was so bright?
Dyson is almost infallibly a modest and self-effacing man, but tonight his eyes were blank with fatigue, and his answer was uncharacteristic.
“That’s not how the question phrases itself,” he said. “The question is: why is everyone else so stupid?”
I do not wanna be flippant here: Obviously having easy access to money and a good standing with the right people is making things A LOT simpler, but other people could have reasonably convinced someone to give them money to built the same software. That's what VCs do, after all.
Regarding the rest: Feels very much like a different topic. I'll pass.
Management and leadership of a team has a way bigger impact than any single individual contributor could ever have. Humans are generally limited not by intelligence but by motivation and vision. Directing people to achieve what you want is what allows the scaling of innovation.
Hero worship is a very human thing, but unscientific.
1) Moves fast, flexes their authority to sweep small stuff under the rug until it is out of scope and can be "fixed real quick" later. Often leverages many subject matter experts through effective and persistent communication and learns quick enough to get PRs through the door (that sometimes need "quick" fixes later). Enjoys selecting items that benefit their career the most, at the expense of others on their team. Mentors only enough to onboard and increase his team's yield, not to aid their careers. Fueled by the recognition and validation of peers through PR/project completion.
2) Gets shit done, is the SMI themself. Solo code cannon, but PRs go in clean, beautiful to look at. May not get along well with some but not necessarily abrasive to work with especially being part of their direct team. Can be a great altruistic mentor if they spare 5% of their time. Enjoys what they do, and the technologies they work with. Fueled by personal satisfaction in their achievements, and in uplifting their team.
Surely all addicts love the thing they’re addicted to, but that doesn’t make it ok, even in the case where their addiction doesn’t ruin their lives short or mid term.
I don’t like nonsense PR stories or myths about people’s extraordinary prowess.
I just respond badly to BS and these statement have obvious BS if you stop for even a second to think about them.
On some level too, it offends me when I see right minded intelligent people in my community lapping it up.
So a couple of things.
Say I were to tell you that he was the President of openAI but he also did 80 hours of janitorial work per week.
Would you say that was a good use of his time?
Would you say that maybe he should be spending his time on being president of the company and not mopping up? You would be right.
Now substitute programming for janitorial work.
Now be a little more critical about things you see online.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/21/why-apple-co-founder-steve-w...
My take: He’s the Keanu Reeves of tech (or Keanu is the Woz of the film industry). The world can use more of this.
The best they can do is out-bid their competitors, for the competitors hardware. I'm sure apple doesn't want to pay Google for GCP resource to train an AI. Again, there may not be enough companies renting out GPUs at all.
OK now back to my 12 hour day. Not burnt out yet so I'm going to keep going. And yes, I LIKE IT!