Martin Rosinski

The World’s Online Festival Founder, Entrepreneur, Cosmic Explorer; A self-aware stardust vortex improvising random adventures across the universe.

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

Sufficiently advanced engineering is indistinguishable from art

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

😬

[Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang]

Today we’ve formalized an important hiring policy at Scale. We hire for MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.

This is the email I’ve shared with our @scale_AI team.

———————————————————

MERITOCRACY AT SCALE

In the wake of our fundraise, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about talent. All of our external success—powering breakthroughs in L4 autonomy, partnering with OpenAI on RLHF going back to GPT-2, supporting the DoD and every major AI lab, and the recent $1bn financing transaction—all of it is downstream from us hiring the best people for the job. Talent is our #1 input metric.

Because of this, I spend a lot of my time on recruiting. I either personally interview every hire or sign off on every candidate packet. It’s the thing I spend the plurality of my time on, easily. But everyone can and should contribute to this effort. There are almost a thousand of us now, and it takes a lot to hire quickly while maintaining, and continuing to raise, our bar for quality.

That’s why this is the time to codify a hiring principle that I consider crucial to our success:
Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one.

Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale.

It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.

That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.

We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual.

We believe that people should be judged by the content of their character — and, as colleagues, be additionally judged by their talent, skills, and work ethic.

There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the “right” or “wrong” race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal.

Upholding meritocracy is good for business and is the right thing to do. This approach not only results in the strongest possible team, but also ensures we’re treating our colleagues with fairness and respect.

As a result, everyone who joins Scale can be confident that they were chosen for their outstanding talent, not any other reasons.

MEI has gotten us to where we are today. And it’s the same thing that’ll get us where we’re going, as we embark on our next chapter focusing on data abundance, frontier data, and reliable measurement to accelerate the development and adoption of AI models.

Alex

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

Spent the last 20 years building software & hardware companies

> Last software company sold for $100M
> Then took my company public at $2.7B

Here are my top 9 lessons learned:

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

"To be clear, 𝕏 is only trying to follow the laws of Brazil without favor or disfavor to any political candidate." 🇧🇷

一 Elon Musk

[Varun @varun_mathur]

Dear Mira and Ilya - congratulations on your coup at OpenAI. Since both of you have together never raised a penny as entrepreneurs, let me explain what happens.

Oh, and you *will* need to raise since your venture’s unit economics don’t make sense. Remember, you pay $0.30 every time someone asks a doofus question to ChatGPT. Heck, I sometimes ask the same thing 5 times.

Also, the last deal at $80 billion valuation - is as dead as the Egyptian pharaohs. Glorious to write about and visualize. But super dead, under the sand, not coming back.

Not only that - but you sideswiped your biggest partner, Microsoft. Of course publicly they will say the right thing, but you know and they know it and a random fellow like me knows it - they must be seething mad about it.

Few of your top researchers have already quit, and if there is one thing Sam Altman is especially good at, it is raising and deploying capital. Before the sign with your name and title as “CEO” and “Defacto CEO” gets emblazoned in the OpenAI offices, Sam would have a new company, $1 billion investment and offers out to all your, soon to be ex, top product people and researchers.

So you head into next week having lost your top dealmaker, top researchers, top product visionary, top partner and top investor, and with a business which has terrible unit economics.

And let’s not forget - the two of you are not entrepreneurs. Most people in your board have never held a proper tech job ever. You have never had to face the abject rejection which follows from pitching many investors, going through the process, and getting to close. Getting to close is the toughest. Sometimes investors say yes, but they don’t actually mean it. Sometimes they even sign, and still don’t wire the funds. You will need to live through all of it, the pain and rejection, and feel intense amount of pressure of having to provide for your team members - who pays their mortgages, car loans, kids school tuition - the ones whom you played with at the last company picnic.

After you are exhausted with the realities of the market - you will sell out OpenAI to Microsoft entirely, and be housed as Global Principal Product Managers in building 4 in Seattle, where it rains non-stop. Microsoft will never fire you, Satya will always say the right thing about you - because he is an honorable person.

But deep down in your heart, as you are watching the Netflix movie on OpenAI and Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s wife plays herself as a board member who fired Sam Altman over Google Meet, you will think and realize that you had it all - you could have been at the helm of a $1 trillion company. History will forget you. Sam and Greg and everyone else would have moved on and forgotten about you. e/acc would have built out fundamental OpenAI alternatives in anycase..

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@SipeedIO @skeemor @pkraszewski That sounds great. Do you have an ETA for this?

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

🧵AI will make our society incomprehensibly strange in a comparative eyeblink. None of us can even understand the effects in principle because we’re literally not smart enough, having only a primitive couple of pounds of meat to do reasoning with.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a young techie — it wasn’t creating the value. Nowadays, I often marvel at how much amazing value is present that people just don’t know about. If only there was a way to bring it to their attention…

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@tim_cook Apple has now pulled Russian state media apps from the App Store outside Russia. Now time to block it inside Russia too, and to reinstate Apps which had been previously censored in compliance with the Putin regime. Apple has the power and values to stand up to despotic states.

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@JohnPaczkowski Your efforts and moral stance is appreciated. May I suggest you go further and also disable Russian state media apps within Russia? You have the power to send a message to the Russian people in defiance of the Putin regime - now is the time to act.

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@greentheonly @zeus7f1 I would also love it if you could share this… 🙂

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@RealRossU It is absolutely criminal that this mind is locked up behind bars. I hope society will one day reconsider.

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@CanviaArt How about you do the right thing and honour crowdfunding pledges back from 2019, before atttempting to sell more units? I (pledge #501) have still not received the product, nor any reply to my repeated queries, and I understand I am not alone here.

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@stroughtonsmith @zezaozao It would also run macOS perfectly fast, if you install it via Patched Sur

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Retweeting this one more time because it is so excellent, describes nicely how the mRNA vaccines are a direct hacking of Life's assembly code for the Spike protein + all of its headers, metadata, + tweaking it to be more stable and likely to evade the immune system defenses 👌👌

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@greentheonly @teslavangelist Interesting... so why does the FSD beta seem to reliably show cars parked on the side of the road, whereas 2020.49.9 reliably misses them? Is the visualisation showing the output of different networks, or is there more filtering based on object positions / confidence scores?

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@greentheonly @teslavangelist Does this mean most of the ‘new’ stuff shown in the beta FSD visualisation (side roads, roundabout lines, vehicles not in perpendicular lanes, etc) were perceived all along for a year (but not visualised)? Or are more advanced object detectors running on 2020.40.8.10+?

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@greentheonly @teslavangelist Aha - thanks. So it seems the recent FSD beta builds more on incremental changes, but doesn’t feature any big rearchitecting of the perception NNs?

[Martin Rosinski @ZoneMR]

@greentheonly @teslavangelist 2020.40.50? Is that a thing? I thought the latest public was 2020.40.9, and the latest FSD private beta was 2020.40.8.11 as of today...