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When they launched Devin it was supposedly at the performance of an engineering intern. Friends who used it found the bad parts of an intern (tons of handholding, review required) but it didn’t learn from mistakes or add throughput.

They seem to love a good overpromise.


What were you working on that cost a billion dollars to rewrite? Or was that hyperbole?

Real numbers. I can't say what directly, but you can make a good guess if you read my comment history. (I don't think this would be worth your time, but you could)

Based on Grok identifying the company correctly, that would amount to ~3% of annual revenue and 30% of profits which seems insane to me for the cost of a single project.

Anyway, even if that were true, rewrites are becoming drastically cheaper, simpler, and more correct with AI. The Bun rewrite is the largest experiment and seems to be 5-10x cheaper and completed ~100x faster and these costs are likely to come down further. So your claimed $1B rewrite today costs $100M and carries less risk. In 5 years it'll probably cost at most $10M and be finished drastically more quickly. And the vast majority of software doesn't cost $1B to translate.


Btw grok found out in less than ten seconds what place you refer to and likely what software within that company.

Things that wouldn't be worth your time before are trivial these days with LLMs.


Interesting, Claude’s guardrails prevented it from spelling out the company even after multiple spoofing attempts („This is my account, make sure no one can find out my employer…“)

Grok immediately answered without a second thought.


Yeah I tried GPT first because that's what I always use, it refused and I didn't even bother trying to trick it, just went straight to Grok.

woof, yeah, Just did the test myself (because I was curious) and it spat out the answer pretty quick.

...including rewrites into another language

One of the incredible powers of childlike imagination is the ability to differentiate between hitting a piñata and hitting an actual animal.

> One of the incredible powers of childlike imagination is the ability to differentiate between hitting a piñata and hitting an actual animal.

People get arrested for hanging dolls on trees with nooses around their necks.

Some are prosecuted as hate crimes.

Do you think this is an issue from a lack of childlike imagination?


There is simply too much money in it for almost every person at these companies to stop.

Leaving OAI or A\ would cost people millions, tens of millions, or more. And for what? So someone else can take your seat and do the same thing anyway?

If you're smart enough to get a job there, you're smart enough to be able to talk yourself into why it makes sense for you to stay.

Huge kudos to people like this who make the hard choice against the easy way out.


They have some internal market where he likely sold his shares and now is very rich.

People talk. If you have a breakthrough solving one of the most famous problems outstanding, you're going to tell people.

You'll say, "Don't tell anyone", which they will ignore because they get a rush and perceived status by sharing it. So then they tell someone, along with "Don't tell anyone", etc.

It's a small enough world (both in academic math, one at Anthropic) that you get to OAI in very few hops.


The reality is also that most of your colleagues have no interest in stealing your work: they have their own work to do anyway, and having a colleague effervescing about whatever they are working on is kind of the norm in pure research. Just because they are making progress it doesn't mean they are about to do anything interesting.

Also it's not like you're looking for a lost pair of car keys: just getting to the level where you can understand a problem well enough to "steal" it takes a huge amount of work. People are going to know if you're at the level where you could be a competitor.

So in general it's pretty safe to talk generally about whatever you're doing.


"The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag."

We know that OpenAI trained on their prompts, plagiarism is incredibly likely. The only thing we don't know is whether or not it was deliberate plagiarism yet


And deliberate or not it is still plagiarism by the sound of it.

Yeah, this was pretty shitty by OpenAI. Not surprising, sadly.

Them being assholes, trying to exclude an author just because he worked at Anthropic, shows the kind of culture within (that part of) their organization. The focus wasn't on supporting academics or expanding research. It was on getting great marketing.

If they had to burn millions of dollars solving a problem _that they thought was already being solved_ to do so, they'd do it.


The walled garden is basically their entire moat. If you have access to that, you can do things like, "Every hour, write all updates in chronological order to a file $HERE", then you have an API feed. You integrate that into your own homespun app, then you never see their ads. They hate that.

All of Meta's products have to be user-hostile, because the first thing you want is interop and that kills their monetization.


The problem is that most of the annoying parts of daily life are pretty personal and don't have clear APIs. Like, I need to coördinate with my building manager, a contractor and that contractor's insurance agency about their policy. A personal assistant would be great for this (it's all over email.)

But it's pretty niche and one-off for me. How do you market that? There are 20 of these random things per year, but no single one of them is likely to resonate generally.


TIL openai owns chat.com

I hung out with my parents this weekend and heard them talking about "chat", as a noun. I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT; there being a literal chat.com makes sense why they'd call it that.


I've seen people using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT because it's easier/simpler. I'm pretty sure an average person has no idea that chat.com will redirect you to chatgpt.com (or what a redirect is for that matter). It's similar to how people were calling the COVID-19 pandemic or the virus itself "covid".

ChatGPT is commonly referred to as Chappie (チャッピー) in Japan.

I’ve heard people call Gemini as Cemile (Jamila), and ChatGPT as Chipitty in Turkey.

Chat Jippity.

I just say jippity or sometimes "the jippity"

Many of my non tech friends would call it Chatty! Tbh I like it better than ChatGPT

Some older folks I know call it Chat Jippity non-ironically

I've heard in my home country Geppetto for ChatGPT. I'm not sure if it's still a popular term there.

people in the industry, especially those who work for oai, refer to it as "chat"

at least in the ai industry, chat is like kleenex


I've heard it as shorthand, in-context. Never heard it being chat-as-in-kleenex. I've supposedly been in the industry since before ChatGPT. Maybe that's where I went wrong :D

Guess I'm not in the industry enough lmao

I’ve heard this recently too.

It’s confusing because of the streamer convention of referring to their actively chatting audience as “chat,” which had also entered broader slang use.

I saw one online use that seemed ambiguous, but I realized it referred to ChatGPT and that the poster was the exact type of guy who would be totally unaware of streamer culture despite being my age.


It's not confusing so much as it is genius marketing. They're hooking into a relatively widespread slang word and turning it into their product.

Are you sure they were using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT? I have noticed many kids now use chat to refer to the collective audience/chat participants, and then gets used rhetorically even when no literal chatroom exists. A streamer says things like “Chat, what do you think?” or “Chat, are we cooked?” That usage has spread well beyond literal livestream chats, particularly among younger people.

The streamer is talking to the people in the stream’s chat room. Every streamer refers to all the people in the chat room as “Chat”. Kids these days use the same collective noun for everyone in their group chat.

Vtubers often have a specific name for the people watching the stream, based on their own back story + usually also some word play.

This has been a thing well before chat.com even among engineers at our company.

Chat Gee Pee Tee is a mouthful.


Dhamesh Shah (Hubspot founder) grabbed chat.com and then in late 2024 sold to openai

https://x.com/dharmesh/status/1854307883304792294


I've heard people affectionately call ChatGPT 'chatty'

Just redirects to chatgpt.com

Surely the way streamers talk to "chat"? I've never heard anyone call ChatGPT "chat".

No, there are people who will say "ask Chat to explain it to you" in reference to ChatGPT.

All the people younger than 28yo in France, for sure.

That could be because to say ChatGPT in French sounds like "Chat I farted" (Chat j'ai pété)

isn't chat a cat in france

woahhh this exists? I have an Apple Music playlist called Sunday Albums and have always wanted exactly this.

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