President & Co-Founder @OpenAI
Joined July 2010
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Your intuition is a hyperoptimized supercomputer, trained over hundreds of millions of years to ensure your well-being & survival. Explains why instinct so often trumps logic.
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Most impactful lecture from college—matrix determinants:
Low road: define formula, prove zero iff invertible
Middle road: define as function that is zero iff invertible, prove it is unique, derive formula
High road: construct via exterior product space
Seek better abstractions.
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Key skill to building a complex system that they don't teach you in school: how to add enough breadcrumbs — logs, metrics, alerts, etc. — for operators to understand what happened for events of arbitrary weirdness. Best way to learn is to do it wrong enough times.
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Nice property of software: when you've finished perfecting your creation, you click save and it's preserved forever. Could never be a chef because someone instead literally eats the creation you've poured your heart into.
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One benefit of marriage I did not fully understand in advance: there is now a person who is even more invested in your day-to-day happiness than you are. Means that someone is actively finding ways to improve your energy, which is a huge boost in productivity & creativity.
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Optimization has a way of triggering all the right dopamine centers in your brain. Wild to watch the same process that was taking minutes to run execute in seconds. Rare to see such objective payoff of your work entirely within the confines of your computer.
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Those who have made their name by proclaiming doom have great incentive to see it around every corner.
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My convention for loglines is to format as:
>>> print(f"Static msg: k1={v1} k2={v2}...")
Very simple, but putting all dynamic data on the right makes it much easier to skim through logs. Format is also more machine-friendly; many log indexing systems will parse them properly.
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Collaborative art depicting collaborative art:
"Humans and machines creating a beautiful mural together" (#dalle2 with @_dschnurr's inpainting/expansion trick)
Could have gotten better/more consistent results (e.g. re: person sizes, more robots) by varying prompt, but it's a ton of fun just expanding on images naively.
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Many people apply DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) dogmatically to avoid code duplication, but there's a real tradeoff to unifying multiple codepaths that have some shared logic but aren't fundamentally doing the same thing. Often better to repeat yourself 5 times; only then abstract.
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Impossible subscription cancellation flows as an analogy for an unaligned AGI — company is simply following its reward function, leaving sad humans in its wake.
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When I was 18, I read that Erdős would do mathematics while at the symphony.
I tried an experiment: for two weeks I did math exclusively listening to music. Didn't notice a difference — but then I stopped, and couldn't concentrate anymore.
To this day, can only program to music
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Respect to those operating complex systems. At too many companies, less glory & recognition than building new things. But always doing critical work to actually making those things work in practice — an underrated skill that is especially important in machine learning.
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