OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever reportedly likes to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company.
…ok, really, what is happening over there?!
This article is pretty clearly clickbait.
If you have a team of burners, jokingly burning an effigy of the thing you are committed to combatting isn’t a “spiritual” action as much a nod to Burning Man.
At one point I worked in an open office where the sales team would cheer and throw a Nerf football to each other when they’d make a sale.
It’d be weird as shit to write an article on that behavior claiming that the sales team at that company was suddenly adopting professional sports practices.
If you want to know what’s actually going on behind closed doors there, this The Atlantic piece is excellent and in part comes from an upcoming book by one of the authors whose been researching that very topic.
The TLDR is that rapidly growing a product that’s become an unexpected success while trying to stay committed to long term research goals is a giant mess.
Yeah dude, throwing a football around a sales office is totally the same thing as burning effigies and leading rituals.
Just some fellas having a little horseplay around the office.
Some people throw footballs in celebration while others start cults to worship an advanced ai and burn effigies of it for some reason.
Yeah, the workplace is too woke these days. I can’t even burn an effigy in my cube without it becoming a whole thing.
OpenAI employees don’t really exist, everything that has been going on is just a rogue AI fucking with us!
Praise the Omnissiah!
So when you eat bread which after incantations supposed to be a body of a demigod, you are a good catholic, but when you burn effigy representing “unaligned” AI, you are suddenly a nut?
Both can be nuts
the AI told him to burn effigies, is that it
I mean… this honestly sounds a bit too cartoonish. “Burning effigies” and “ritualistic chants” with company personnel…?
Usually a good idea to take early reporting with a grain of salt. Thorough investigation to get to sound conclusions takes a long-ass time, where drama, rumors and propaganda are much, much faster.
I mean, it’s clearly a meltdown of some sort, but going to need some more corroboration here to really know wtf is actually going on. Not anonymous corroboration either, ideally.
It could be worse, and tech startups like this can have some weird practices. One company I worked at literally burned tech debt. They wrote it down and burned it. (It never really fixed the core problems either. Imagine that.)
Tech startups can be a little cultish at times. I have seen super healthy cult behavior and also super weird cult behavior. Motivating younger engineers can be a challenge, so if it works, whatever. (I never cared about that kind of stuff as long as I got free food.)
As long as nothing turns religious or harmful, I don’t care. Good engineers can be some very unique people and most likely have some kind of underlying mental disorder. (I am absolutely not being derogatory! Without a doubt, I am in that category of engineer as well, but I am much older and restrained these days.)
In my experience the engineers usually hate the motivational bullshit that managers dream up because they have too much time and no actual skills. The best thing you can do is give the engineers a bit of respect and some quiet time to do their work.
It’s wildly variable who likes that stuff or not, in my experience. If there is purpose behind it and it’s mildly healthy, it can lean more on acceptance’ish. To your point, complete outlandish bullshit does get disregarded quickly. (I have seen both scenarios but I also did a bad job of expressing that the landscape of personality types is massive.)
It was my understanding that this is just how science people act
“Always use a pink pipette tip holder to bang the glass so your polyacrylamide gel spreads evenly.”
- the postdoc Janae at my lab in the '90s
Maybe the pink ones have just the right density?
I wouldn’t know, I always used pink ones.
We are witnessing first hand the birth of technology god, tangible and all knowing, how could it not be a god?
