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Not about money, but knowledge. The frontier of the field is no longer accessible through arXiv or research papers only.

One thing is that the companies are holding on because of competitive advantage, and I think another is that AI is such a politically polarizing topic that actually being open about everything is risky for the companies, wanting to avoid controversy.

by LatencyKills12 hours ago|

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I worked for MS and Apple for 20 years and heard that opinion constantly; i.e., "People only work there for the money."

I have no idea if Andrej "sold out" but perhaps he realizes that if he wants to work on the cutting edge alongside talented people, with a seemingly endless budget, Anthropic is a good choice.

I chose my employers for the same reason; the compensation was secondary.

by surgical_fire12 hours ago|

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MS and Apple. Infinite resources, plenty of smart people that consider compensation to be secondary (I remain skeptical, but choose to entertain the idea nonetheless), and the software output is incredibly, unbelievably, comically bad.

There's some poetry there that I am unable to capture with words.

by Barbing12 hours ago|

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Apple’s software defects can be comically bad. Software overall though, you may overstate.

by LatencyKills10 hours ago|

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I understand where you are coming from, but at least when I was there, we were still trying to develop solutions that had never been implemented at that scale before (just like Anthropic today). I helped create the first version of Visual Studio (Boston). People tend to forget that even by the 90s we still didn't really understand how to solve a lot of the main technical problems. That's what I loved about the work. Everything seems easy/obvious after the fact.

When I left MS, a full Windows build was about 18M LOC. The fact that 18 million lines of code, written by tens of thousands of engineers, worked at all was a mini miracle.

With regard to compensation: like Karpathy, I had already earned enough to be comfortable for the rest of my life. Once money stopped being the primary driver, I was able to focus on what made me happy. Building things, even if you don't like them, brought me happiness and fulfillment. I hope Andrej finds the same at Anthropic.