Sam Altman Slams Meta's AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

Oh, they're actually the bad guys, just folks haven't thought far enough ahead to realise it yet.

AI only got big, especially for coding, because they were able to train on a massive corpus of open source code. I don't think it is a coincidence.

Your ability to use a lesser version of this AI on your own hardware will not save you from the myriad ways it will be used to prey on you.

Dont make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Mark Zuckerberg. He didnt open source anything because he's a "good guy", he's just commoditizing the complement.

The "good guy" is a competitive environment that would render Meta's AI offerings to be irrelevant right now if it didnt open source.

Most of Meta's models have not been released as open source. Llama was a fluke, and it helps to commoditize your compliment when you're not the market leader.

There is no good or open AI company of scale yet, and there may never be.

A few that contribute to the commons are Deep Seek and Black Forest Labs. But they don't have the same breadth and budget as the hyperscalers.

That is just an act of corpo-ceo bulshitting employees and press about high moral standards, mission, etc. Don't trust any of his words.

Missionary (from wikipedia):

A missionary is a member of a religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary

Post coup, they are both for-profit entities.

So the difference seems to be that when meta releases its models (like bibles), it is promoting its faith more openly than openai, which interposes itself as an intermediary.

Honest answer*:

I think building super intelligence for the company that owns and will deploy the super intelligence in service of tech's original sin (the algorithmic feed) is a 100x worse than whatever OpenAI is doing, save maybe OpenAI's defense contract, which I have no details about.

Meta will try to buoy this by open-sourcing it, which, good for them, but I don't think it's enough. If Meta wants to save itself, it should re-align its business model away from the feeds.

In that way, as a missionary chasing super intelligence, I'd prefer OpenAI.

*because I don't have an emotional connection to OpenAI's changing corporate structure away from being a non-profit:

I'm not very informed about the coup -- but doesn't it just depend on what side most of the employees sat/sit on? I don't know how much of the coup was just egos or really an argument about philosophy that the rank and file care about. But I think this would be the argument.

I'd bet 100 quatloos that your comment will not have honest arguments below. You can't nurture missionaries in an exploitative environment.

An honest argument is that cults often have missionaries.

100% agree. You are hearing the dictator claim righteousness.

This is just a CEO gaslighting his employees to "think of the mission" instead of paying up

No different than "we are a family"

That's absolutely incredible. Can you please point us to the article where he got hired for that huge amount?

I would love to learn everything about this! How to even achieve 1000th of what he accomplished here with OpenAI would be incredible!

I think this deserves lessons in universities, textbooks and economy. Gaming yourself up this high, I can't even fathom $6.5 billion US-Dollars... what a LEGENDARY Carreer-Move!

I poached 3 baconators and the last 2 frosties away from an elderly couple at wendys last night and oh boy was I discovering some market forces this morning

It's only bad when other people do it.

"Apostates who turned to darkness" vs "Converts who saw the light".

Open source could also be a bait and switch.

ie - Zuck has no intention to keep opening up the models he creates. Thus, he knows he can spend the money to get the talent. Because he has every intention to make it back.

Allegedly they were offered 100m just in the first year. I think they will be fine

OpenAI’s only goal isn’t building AGI. It is to build it first and make money off it.

Nope AGI is not the end goal - https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

> OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.

IMO, AGI is already a very nebulous term. Superintelligence seems even more hand-wavy. It might be useful to define and understand limits of "intelligence" first.

The other side of it: some statements made internally can be really bad but employees brush over them because they inherently trust the speaker to some degree, they have additional material that better aligns with what they want to hear so they latch on the rest, and current leaders' actions look fine enough to them so they see the bad parts as just communication mishaps.

Until the tide turns.

Okay, but I've also heard insiders at companies I've worked completely overlook obvious problems and cultural/management shortcomings issues. "Oh, we don't have a low-trust environment, it's just growing pains. Don't worry about what the CEO just said..."

Like, seriously, I've seen first-hand how comments like this can be more revealing out of context than in context, because the context is all internal politics and spin.

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

This is so true. And not confined to HN.

> Btw Sam has tweeted about an open source model. Stay tuned... https://x.com/sama/status/1932573231199707168

Sneaky wording but seems like no, Sam only talked about "open weights" model so far, so most likely not "open source" by any existing definition of the word, but rather a custom "open-but-legal-dept-makes-us-call-it-proprietary" license. Slightly ironic given the whole "most HN posters are confidently wrong" part right before ;)

Although I do agree with you overall, many stories are sensationalized, parts-of-stories always lack a lot of context and large parts of HN users comments about stuff they maybe don't actually know so much about, but put in a way to make it seem so.

I agree with the sentiment.

Having been behind the scenes of HN discussion about a security incident, with accusations flying about incompetent developers, the true story was the lead developers new of the issue, but it was not prioritised by management and pushed down the backlog in place of new (revenue generating) features.

There is plenty of nuance to any situation that can't be known.

No idea if the real story here is better or worse than the public speculation though.

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

Some topics (and some areas where one could be an expert in) are much more prone to this phenomenon than others.

Just to give a specific example that suddenly comes to my mind: Grothendieck-style Algebraic Geometry is rather not prone to people confidently posting wrong stuff about on HN.

Generally (to abstract from this example [pun intended]): I guess topics that

- take an enormous amount of time to learn,

- where "confidently bullshitting" will not work because you have to learn some "language" of the topic very deeply

- where even a person with some intermediate knowledge of the topic can immediately detect whether you use the "'grammar' of the 'technical language'" very wrongly

are much more rarely prone to this phenomenon. It is no coincidence that in the last two points I make comparisons to (natural) languages: it is not easy to bullshit in a live interview that you know some natural language well if the counterpart has at least some basic knowledge of this natural language.

I totally agree that most articles (pretty much all news/infotainment) is devoid of any information.

At the same time all I need to know about Sam is in the company/"non-profit's" name, which is in itself is now simply a lie.

Sounds like someone is upset they didn't get poached.

This is a strangely defensive comment for a post that, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to say anything particularly damning. The fact that you're rushing to defend your CEO sort of proves the point being made, clearly you have to make people believe they're a part of something bigger, not just pay them a lot.

The only obvious critique is that clearly Sam Altman doesn't believe this himself. He is legendarily mercenary and self serving in his actions to the point where, at least for me, it's impressive. He also has, demonstrably here, created a culture where his employees do believe they are part of a more important mission and that clearly is different than just paying them a lot (which of course, he also does).

I do think some skepticism should be had around that view the employees have, but I also suspect that was the case for actual missionaries (who of course always served someone else's interests, even if they personally thought they were doing divine work).

> I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public.

To most people I'd think this is mainly for entertainment purposes ie 'palace intrique' and the actual facts don't even matter.

> The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context.

That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).

> What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident.

What conclusions exactly? Again do most people really care about this (reading the story) and does it impact them? My guess is it doesn't at all.

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in.

This is a well known trope and is discussed in other forms ie 'NY Times story is wrong move to the next story and you believe it' ie: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

Little Miyazaki knock offs posting on the Nazi Hellsite former known as Twitter isn't really helping how the "public" feels about OAI either.

Your comment comes across dangerously close to sounding like someone that has drunk the kool-aid and defends the indefensible.

Yes, you can get the wrong impression from hearing just a snippet of a conversation, but sometimes you can hear what was needed whether it was out of context or not. Sam is not a great human being to be placed on a pedestal that never needs anything he says questioned. He's just a SV CEO trying to keep people thinking his company is the coolest thing. Once you stop questioning everything, you're in danger of having the kool-aid take over. How many times have we seen other SV CEOs with a "stay tuned" tweet that they just hope nobody questions later?

>if you had actually been in the room for more of the conversation you'd probably feel different

If you haven't drunk the kool-aid, you might feel differently as well.

SAMA doesn't need your assistance white knighting him on the interwebs.

They have majority of the attention and market cap. They have runway. And that part is the most important thing. Others don’t have the users to grand test developments.

> how do they prevail through all of this and become a sustainable frontier AI lab and company?

I doubt that OpenAI needs or wants to be a sustainable company right now. They can probably continue to drum up hype and investor money for many years. As long as people keep writing them blank checks, why not keep spending them? Best case they invent AGI, worst case they go bankrupt, which is irrelevant since it's not their own money they're risking.

If they can turn ChatGPT into a free cash flow machine, they will be in a much more comfortable position. They have the lever to do so (ads) but haven't shown much interest there yet.

I can't imagine how they will compete if they need to continue burning and needing to raise capital until 2030.

The biggest problem OAI has is that they don't own a data source. Meta, Google, and X all have existing platforms for sourcing real time data at global scale. OAI has ChatGPT, which gives them some unique data, but it is tiny and very limited compared to what their competitors have.

LLMs trained on open data will regress because there is too much LLM generated slop polluting the corpus now. In order for models to improve and adapt to current events they need fresh human created data, which requires a mechanism to separate human from AI content, which requires owning a platform where content is created, so that you can deploy surveillance tools to correctly identify human created content.

Good analysis, my counter to it is that OpenAI has one of the leading foundational models, while Meta, despite being a top paying tech company, continued to release sub par models that don't come close to the other big three.

So, what happened? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the culture and/or infra at Meta? If it was just because Zuckerburg bet on the wrong horses to lead their LLM initiatives, what makes us think he got it right this time?

OpenAI has no shot without a huge cash infusion and to offer similar packages. Meta opened the door.

I think they understand that it's all performative

Even more blatantly and directly, "Don't you dare use our model, trained on other people's work, to train yours".

How do you figure? If you assume that Meta gets the state of the art model, revenue is non-existent, unless they start a premium tier or put ads. Even then, its not clear if they will exceed the money spent on inference and training compute.

What are they like? since you recommend not browsing this site?

That's true with every Tech company employees. They all want $1 M TC and work 10 hours / week

Off topic, but the existence of this teamblind.com site escaped my notice till now.

Is there a particular reason to hate it (aside from it being social media)?

Ironically, Altman's statement wasnt all that wrong, in a sense.

He just mixed up who the "Missionaries" and who the "Mercenaries" were.

Yeah it's a tough spot he's found himself in. How do you convince people who know more about this stuff than anybody that you're barreling towards something that's an improbability? It seems that most of them have made their choice to turn more towards reality, the material reality, and register their skill with an organization that holds that in higher regard. I can't blame them, and neither can he, but he also can't help himself when it comes to reiterating the hype. He might be projecting about that 'deep-seated cultural issue' he's prescribing to meta, and lashing out against those who don't accept it.

I think it’s more of the latter. We’ve already seen others beat them in their own game. Only for them to come back with a new model.

In the end, this is the same back and forth that Apple and Sun shared in the late 90s or Meta and Google in 2014. We could have made non-competes illegal today but we didn’t.

Ehh, this take feels ungenerous to me. You don't have to believe a private firm is a holy order for it to benefit from a culture filled with "we believe this specific project is Important" people vs "will work at whatever shop drops the most cash" people.

Mercenaries by definition select for individual dollar outcomes, and its impossible for that not to impact the way they operate in groups, which is generally to the group's detriment unless management is incredibly good at building group-first incentive structures that don't stomp individual outcomes.

That said, mercenary-missionaries are definitely a thing. They're unstoppable forces culturally and economically, and that could be who we're seeing move around here.

In our times, every narcissist sees himself as a saint and a messiah on a mission to save the world, while doing the complete opposite of that. And they get very angry when they see other narcissists trying to do the same.

Meta's real AI product is actually even worse than that and insidious: They try to run over companies who are (in contrast) successfully advancing AI with money they made by hooking teens on IG, and then just use the resulting inferior product as a marketing tool.

We're talking about a few hundred people here, globally. The entire goal is to suppress everyone else's wages to zero.

90% of the reason Spain and Portugal explored the new world was for wealth (spices, gold/silver, sugar, brazilwood). The rest of the reason was to spread their religion and increase their national power. Missions only popped up 30 years after they first began colonization.

The Dutch, British, and French were initially brought to the new world because they'd heard how rich it was and wanted a piece of the pie. It took them a while to establish a hold because the Spanish defended it so well (incumbents usually win) and also they kept settling frozen wastelands rather than tropical islands.

The religiously persecuted groups (who were in no way state-sponsored) came 120 years after Spain's first forays.

The motive for settling the colonies in New England was emphatically not to make money.

In what way did the Spanish lose out to the Dutch or the Brits? Did you only think of North America and forget everything south of the rio grande (and a good deal north of it)?

I believe Portuguese got there looking for a shorter route to India (money) and eventually settled the land for gold, silver, brazilwood, diamonds and sugarcane (money).

No no no don’t you get it they have this multi entity “non profit” and something something “capped profit” yet everyone is employed by the for profit. But they just want to give AGI for free right

Religion delivers a recurring revenue model that isn't taxed and where criminal confessions can't be used in court if made to a high-ranking company officer. It's the perfect business.

The product is a model that takes knowledge and puts it in a form that can act on it without a human doing the acting.

You sell it to people who don't want to pay other people while getting the same productivity.

Religions and cults are actually extremely lucrative.

For many investors the product is the hype.

They have product that they derive revenue from.

The most popular religions are super wealthy and lucrative

Capitalists don't like markets, or at least not the markets that we're told capitalism will bring about. Those markets are supposed to increase competition and drive down prices until companies are making just barely enough to survive. What capitalist wants that for himself? He wants decreased competitions and sky high prices for himself, and increased competition and lower prices for his competitors and suppliers.

The perfect corollary is that Altman is as mercenary, if not more, than Zuckerberg, given all the power grabs he did in OpenAI. Even the "Open" in OpenAI is a joke.

He just has less options because OpenAI is not as rich as Meta.

> "But we have the core right in a way that I don't think anyone else quite does"

Translation from corpospeak: "I think my pivot to for-profit is very clever and unique" :)

look around - CA - missionaries have the best real estate. And another related note on connection between strong promotion of devotion to ideas and it is being a good business - the Abrahamic monotheism was a result of the successful marketing campaign "only the donations made here are donations to the real god" of that Temple back then against several other competing ones. (Curiously that the current historic stage of AI, on the cusp, be it 3 or 30 years, of emergence of AGI is somewhat close to that point in history back then. Thus in particular a flood of messiahs and doom sayers would only increase.)

But if they give you tens of millions of reasons to go there . . .

For Sam to seemingly claim that Meta is hiring mercenaries while OpenAI is hiring missionaries seems a bit counter to OpenAI's mission of having closed weight models vs an open weights at Meta.

I could definitely see those who are 'missionaries' wanting to give it away. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯