Probably, FrontierCode is made by Cognition itself. The model also seems worse in every way than DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, launched today.
Also the submitter's account is very new which makes me suspicious of self-promotion.
213 karma · joined May 2, 2024
Also the submitter's account is very new which makes me suspicious of self-promotion.
Though YC started well, it has since degraded startup culture and turned founding into a short-term, status-driven, sexist boys' club, full of get-rich-quick grifters, and now PG has left the country that made him so he'll never have to reckon with what he created.
Of course he would say this because he won't reckon with the idea that there's more to life than making number go up, all your silly morals or fealties are second to almighty "growth". He's too successful to ever have to think about it.
This whole company seems to optimize for raising money and impressing VCs. Lying about their products, ignoring consumer market to target enterprise, bragging about how they work their employees like slaves, and writing these posts full of intimidating technical jargon...
The error you call out is hardly “serious”, as the whole argument is uninteresting. It is a stupid indefensible error but the argument about revenue being 20% or 30% lower than reported isn’t that central to his overall thesis. Stuff that matters is inference cost, profitability, actual training costs.
To me it seems that SpaceX probably does not intend to buy, and is paying $10 billion for access to Cursor's data and talent, more importantly, the ability to add some sparkle to their IPO.
Many people here would call Putin's assassin a hero, the important distinguishing factor is whether it's a clear societal good or bad. If it's unclear then it's assumed bad.
I am not disagreeing with you here. But platitudes do nothing to convince people. You need to actually explain why the world is a better place with X politician in it, because it does actually matter.
Who knows? It could have always ended up this way anyway. But Altman had a pretty big role in summoning his own competition.
It's believable that Meta, ByteDance, etc. can catch up too. It is not certain that scaling will meaningfully increase performance indefinitely, and if it stops soon, they surely will. Furthermore, other market conditions (US political instability) can enable even more labs, like Mistral, to serve as compelling alternatives.
Uber, TSMC, etc. have strong moats in the form of physical goods and factories. LLMs have nothing even remotely comparable. The main moat is in knowledge, which is easy to transfer between labs. Do you think all the money that goes into training a model goes into the actual final training run? No, it is mostly experiments and failed ideas, which do not have to be repeated by future labs and offshoots.
I don't necessarily think he's lying, but there's so much obvious incentive for him to lie here (if only because his employees can save face).
Some other common reasons that I disagree with, but are quite defensible:
"Well-targeted advertising is a net positive, or at least not hugely negative, for the world. Better targeting has helped many small businesses succeed where they would otherwise not been able to get customers"
"I am working on account security/React/ML/etc which is a good thing. I don't endorse all the bad things"
"It is more complicated than it seems, and most people at Meta try to do the right thing"
"I might as well work at the company and try to make it better from the inside" (while making lots of money)
Get real.
His experience at OpenAI feels overly positive and saccharine, with a few shockingly naive comments that others have noted. I think there is obvious incentive. One reason for this is, he may be in burnout, but does not want to admit it. Another is, he is looking to the future: to keep options open for funding and connections if (when) he chooses to found again. He might be lonely and just want others in his life. Or to feel like he's working on something that "matters" in some way that his other company didn't.
I don't know at all what he's actually thinking. But the idea that he is resistant to incentives just because he has had a successful exit seems untrue. I know people who are as rich as he is, and they are not much different than me.