alt Hacker NewsThe question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending?
It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance estimation or measurement, CUDA or ROCM or any kind of GPGPU/accelerated computing. But that is the core business of both of these companies.
I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.
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I'm on the list. I had real professional experience with HPC infra for comp bio, but that wasn't my role at Anthropic. There's a lot more to do at the company than manage infrastructure.
Tom Brown, an Anthropic co-founder who was also a YC founder, does lead compute. There were many years between his YC company and Anthropic, including time at OpenAI.
Others on the list went straight from their startup to OpenAI/Anthropic but to a team that fit them well. For example, Stefan went to a team at OpenAI where he works with startups, Lenny went to work on product (early ChatGPT), and Raza's YC startup was evals/observability for LLMs.
Maybe they're sales hires. Hiring influential folks gets them aligned with your business. It means you get their Roladex and tap into their network. They can poach good people. They can convince folks to buy into Claude. If they were able to fund Uber for dogs they could probably pitch AI just fine.
How many times have you heard a C-level person say "I was just meeting with a bunch of my C-level friends and they're all talking about how AI is the future. We should look into this Claude thing"?
The top % of YC founders are legitimately quite talented, and high agency/entrepreneurial talent goes a long way in these companies, even if its not in deep infra or research
The actual AI part of AI startups are at constant risk of commoditization. Where the companies will survive or fail is how they manage to attract customers and lock them into their offerings so they can't move away to the next competitor.
Someone with experience running a startup that has no moat probably does have some relevant experience in that area.
They are hiring HPC experts too. It’s a small community and you just don’t hear about it.
These 100 people repress a tiny fraction of the people who work at these labs. And many of the people that work at the labs are building on top of the models, not building the models themselves.
I actually have experience with that stuff, “old school” deep learning and ML as well. Is that something worth joining the fray with I wonder? Or is it as you point out really only the richly connected “locals” that are recruited?
It isn’t that long ago that AI was heavily gatekept and had some serious barriers of entry, due to its origins from academia.
I figure most of these are working on products, rather that deep frontier research.
> The question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending?
They are hiring for sales.
> I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.
Culture. The Uber for Dogs idiots will gulp down the kool-aid like they’re dying in the dessert.
Silicon Valley is not about having specialists or knowledge. It's about having connections and charisma.
Is this causing massive problems for us as a society? Of course, but no one seems to want to do anything about it, so here we are.
Probably because they want snake oil salesman
Why spend to resources to invent AGI when you can just gaslight the whole world by telling everyone that LLMs are already better than people?
People ask the same question of why YC funds yet another Uber for dogs or a button on the Touch Bar that cost $10/mo to help join a meeting faster.
They invest in people more than ideas, so you’ve got, at least in many cases, people with good pedigree and skills (age adjusted anyway) building on stupid ideas, but that are eminently employable.
Obviously there are other factors, I’m not really trying to defend anything but just point out that there are legit reasons why someone impressive enough to get into YC would also be impressive enough to get a good job. It’s not like it’s random founders off the street.