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Microsoft’s original source code

(www.gatesnotes.com)
617 points EvgeniyZh | 1 comments | 03 Apr 25 21:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jwnin ◴[03 Apr 25 22:35 UTC] No.43576292[source]▶
Some luck, and willingness to take risks paid off in ways that could never be anticipated. Not sure I'll see something like the pc era in my lifetime. Perhaps mobile phones, or the Internet.
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wrobelda ◴[03 Apr 25 22:53 UTC] No.43576442[source]▶
I mean… The AI?
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Izikiel43 ◴[04 Apr 25 01:34 UTC] No.43577452[source]▶
That came out of millions of dollars and man hours of investment by Google and OpenAi.

VS

Some college students selling software they didn't have and getting it ready from 0 to sellable in 2 months which led to a behemoth that still innovates to this day.

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jonas21 ◴[04 Apr 25 01:57 UTC] No.43577562[source]▶
It doesn't sound that different from Alex Krizhevsky training AlexNet on a pair of gaming GPUs in his bedroom, winning ImageNet, and launching the current wave of deep learning / AI.
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Izikiel43 ◴[04 Apr 25 02:08 UTC] No.43577625[source]▶
Great point, I was thinking more on the Transformer architecture, but I stand corrected.

Google started similarly with PageRank as far as I remember.

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1. musicale ◴[04 Apr 25 03:03 UTC] No.43577926[source]▶
Grad students, but yeah. CUDA was also basically invented by a grad student.

Many undergrad examples as well in the web era, from Excite to Facebook to Snapchat.

(Note the unanticipated consequences aren't always good.)