Luca is spot on here. And it's the reason why most good crypto founders burn out. There's no genuine community. It's just a rag tag group of self-interested speculators. You can make millions for somebody and they'll still fud you if you don't do it again.
Alec Radford has 190,000+ citations, no PhD, no master's degree, and 34,000 Twitter followers. Sam Altman called him an Einstein-level genius. Wired compared his role at OpenAI to Larry Page inventing PageRank. He still prototyped most of his work in Jupyter Notebooks.
The resume is staggering when you list it out. GPT-1: first author. GPT-2: first author. CLIP: primary author. Whisper: co-author. DALL-E: co-author. DCGAN: co-author. Contributing researcher on GPT-3, GPT-4, and DALL-E 2/3. Multiple U.S. patents owned by OpenAI. He joined in 2016 with a bachelor's degree from Olin College, a school founded in 1997 with fewer than 400 students.
His first experiment at OpenAI was training a language model on 2 billion Reddit comments. It failed. But the organization gave him room to keep going. Two years later he built GPT-1 alone, based on what colleagues described as pure technical intuition. He couldn't fully explain how it worked at the time. He just knew it would.
At NeurIPS 2024, Ilya Sutskever singled out two people as responsible for the pre-training era: Radford and Dario Amodei. All four original authors of the GPT paper have since left OpenAI. Radford left in December 2024 to do independent research.
His last tweet was in May 2021. A reply explaining why GPT-1's layer width was set to 768.
The person who built the foundation of a $300B+ industry communicates less publicly than most interns. That ratio between impact and visibility is the strongest signal of who actually does the work versus who narrates it.
I hope I'm wrong.
But tonight feels like some sort of invisible line has been crossed that we didn't even know was there. The last time I felt like this was 9/11 when it was clear, without knowing the how and the what, that the world was about to change forever.
Like the rules of the game had been permanently altered and there was simply no going to back to the innocent, peaceful past.
I didn't feel like this when an attempt was made on President Trump's life. If I had to rationalise why I didn't, I guess it's because several US Presidents have been shot at and even assassinated. Somehow it was within the realms of the possible, no matter how awful.
But to murder a young father simply for doing debates and mobilising young people to vote for a party that represents half of America? This is something else.
Charlie's death is a tragedy for his wife, his children and his family. I don't pray often. I am praying for them tonight.
But I fear his murder will be a tragedy for all of us in ways we will only understand as time unfolds.
I hope I'm wrong.
one of the sadder things about Charlie Kirk death is that whether you agreed with him or not, he championed open debate
open debate between ideas is the main currency of a democracy
if you're now being shot for that, this incentivizes less of that and more of shooting
hmm, actually it might be the other way around: you get politics precisely when a decentralised system hits massive pmf (not implying Ethereum is yet there tbh). When billions of dollars & critical (global) applications depend on the platform, the stakes for governance & future directions skyrocket ofc. Thus, if you ask me, in that context, intense/messy debate isn't a failure in itself. It's a _natural consequence_ of success & growing value in a system without a central authority in charge.
Roger Ver was there for me when I was down and needed help. Now Roger needs our support.
No one should spend the rest of their life in prison over taxes. Let him pay the tax (if any) and be done with it. #FreeRoger