Can you drop me a line at michael.schade@openai.com with more info and your account email? I'll take a look. And yes, that bot has to go—many improvements coming on that front!
Does OpenAI block Saudi or does Saudi block ChatGPT? When I lived there, many many websites were blocked by Saudi, particularly anything to do with Islam. If OpenAI is blocking Saudi, it may be legal compliance as OpenAI is likely not yet confident in their ability to filter conversations about religion in regions where that would be effectively banned.
Saudi is currently working very, very hard to limit the spread and influence of extremism within their borders, so they're careful about which resources for learning about islam are available.
Both Saudi and OpenAI seem to be ultra-aggressive about blocking VPN's such as Mullvad. There are other options for getting your own servers/VPNs that you can put OpenVPN on. When I lived in Saudi I did that, and it got around 100% of the most aggressive internet filters.
OpenAI does not offer its services in Saudi Arabia. Saudis are blocked from registering. It's not a government block which works entirely differently and shows you a page explaining that it is blocked.
If it's blocked for political reasons I'd like to understand why, so we can understand their values that allow all those countries on the list but not Saudi.
I was able to register with a US phone number and VPN, but I'm also blocked from actually paying to get an API key.
I find the worry about compliance a thin excuse since a larger company like Microsoft that does have presence in the country offers Bing without issue. Same with SnapChat which has signifianct Saudi investmnet.
I believe it's some kind of misguided political activism.
You've insinuated that any block done by OpenAI would be for political reasons, but would you accept that perhaps they feel they would be breaking law in Saudi Arabia? So, "legal reasons", rather than political.
Does Bing offer their chat AI in Saudi? Or just search results. Search results are easy to filter and have a whole framework for compliance in GCC countries that is relatively straightforward to follow.
My insinuation of a political reason come after a glaring exclusion and complete silence when asked. Answering the question would help clarify their position.
Yes I'm talking about Bing's chat AI. There is absolutely no indication or precedent for legal concern.
I know people who work at Saudi Authority for Data and AI. They have no idea why we're blocked, while UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman can use it.
They've been holding regular AI talks and hackathons to grow the local talent. But we don't have access to GPT4 API and it's holding us back.
Having lived there, and lived in the homes of Saudis, I'd personally dispute that the dominant version of Islam there is extremist. I'm non-religious though both my parents were raised Christian and occasionally the Bible was read at my dinner table at home in the Midwest.
By and large, the Saudis I talked with were all very opposed to political/religious/militaristic violence. There was, however, a noticeably strong bias towards homophobia, especially if the context was religious discussion. I did meet a few people with extremist religious views, but they were <1% from my experience.
Overall I've met a higher % of fellow Americans who, unprompted in casual conversations or professional settings, share extremist views with me like "We should nuke ____ and wipe out every last person in the country" or "Shia Muslims are universally the most evil people on the planet", etc. Even extremist Saudis have not expressed similar sentiments to me except occasionally against Zionist Israelites (after poking, they'll always reduce it to just the zionists, not pro-palestinian / anti-zionist Israelis), and sometimes the royal families of the GCC countries.
I was located in Dhahran / Al-Khobar / Dammam / Bahrain / Abu Dhabi / Dubai / Oman.
Don't state things like that factually unless you have some knowledge in that field or at least first hand experience. Regurgitating your impression from second hand stories and media narratives is how you stereotype and other people.
Looks like they really upped their production quality with this release! Excite to see their team is still at it.
Also pumped to see them officially releasing a Chrome extension to send to reMarkable. Long overdue. It doesn't look like it's out yet, so here's a link to the unofficial version I made last year (used by over 700 other reMarkable owners):
This is fantastic. I started Stripe's support team, built out our version of an internal tools team, and have since advised a bunch of mid-range startups on how to scale operations. Every company I've talked to is trying to figure out how to improve response times, but really lacks visibility into when load is coming in -- and especially any visibility into when it will come in.
The technical solution to modeling this out and providing more advanced forecasting is super interesting, and the product itself looks delightful to use (more than the spreadsheets our early support team used to be buried in navigating, at least :)
Thanks for the kind words! We've definitely seen a ton of small companies that started out with spreadsheets and internal tools. That's why we wanted to mimic the ease of use of Google Sheets while providing out-of-the box features that support teams usually ask for, like forecasting.
If it's helpful context, Home has been around for two years and People (its precursor) was made in 2014. We now have a team helping shepherd it along -- you're right that an staple is curating so it doesn't become bloated. We intend to continue to share updates as we learn more, so hopefully others can learn from what works (and doesn't!) as well.
We don't think of Home that way, but there is an element of helping people know each other. We intentionally haven't built any liking, following, or even posts on Home. Home excels at taking information Stripes produce elsewhere -- in code, documents, and so on -- and surfacing that up through common interfaces to improve access for all; on the people side, Home excels at helping folks learn about others they might not have otherwise met (we're a distributed company and so it's not as easy as seeing someone in the hall). This part of the post attempts to speak to that:
> Home can’t paint the complete picture of the person behind the page, but it helps break the ice. Outside Home, we encourage people to meet in person—one of our more structured approaches involves a chat bot that helps schedule lunches among Stripes who are least likely to know each other (more than 5,000 lunches have been facilitated since it was set up!).
LOVE Donut!!! We're too busy to use it effectively though... do you think it could auto schedule 1:1 meetings with the people in the donut conversation?
When we used to before, it only worked for people who joined a certain slack channel.
Besides, despite what the name will tell you, this isn’t some sort of powerful, all controlling AI enforcing coffee dates on everyone. It would be set up by a company that would want to use and and would either talk about it and/or have faced the “issues” with introverts.
What a strange and somewhat patronizing answer. I'm pretty sure craftyguy realizes there's no Skynet controlling people's lives and forcing them to have coffee. It's giving the tools to companies to allow them to "face the issues with introverts" that is alarming to those of us who want to preserve serenity in our free time.
We regularly discuss this :) I'm not sure yet how valuable open sourcing it will be in the long run. Part of what makes Home work well for us is how tied it is to how we actually work day-to-day -- that regularly changes as we grow and learn. As an open source project, we'd feel a commitment to keep it working for the existing user base, which might perversely hold back progress on Home and be a net negative for the community as Stripe itself tries new ways to operate.
For now, we intend to continue sharing the lessons we learn from Home and similar tools so that others can benefit from that, and to keep open sourcing it in the back of our head as we design the underlying APIs and infrastructure so we have optionality if it makes sense down the line.
Actually a good example is Blueprint CSS framework from palantir (https://github.com/palantir/blueprint). It's fully tailored around their design philosophy and they are not beholden to anyone else.
However you have to remember that your scale, we will follow you (and fix your bugs) rather than demand you serve us.
Look at, say, Circle CI open sourcing their front end. Just because you release the source doesn’t mean you have to make any commitments around it. You get to decide what commitments you make.
This seems like a weak argument for not open sourcing. Just because it is open source doesn't mean you need to accept any community suggestions, and it doesn't mean you can't make radical changes because you want to. Even by doing this, you're still giving back because people can learn from it -- kind of like how a patent gives back.
You are the project owner after all, and if someone doesn't like the way you are going they can just fork it and continue on their own.
I think you're making a weak argument for how easy it is to "open source" something. Sure, publicly releasing the source code might be easy, but that's not what 'open sourcing' means to most people.
You're right tho that they could do everything you describe, i.e. publish the source code and not actually participate in any 'open source' community projects that might spring up around the code. I'm guessing that's not really that attractive to Stripe, or lots of other people. It's work just to remember to push commits to the public repo, even if you're otherwise ignoring all public communications about the project. (And ignoring all the public communications, e.g. blog posts complaining about the company not collaborating with the community, is work too.)
> Sure, publicly releasing the source code might be easy, but that's not what 'open sourcing' means to most people.
Still, if they are upfront about it, I don't see how it's an issue. If one of the first lines of the readme is something along the lines of "Because we believe in open source, we are making the source code publicly available for this product. We hope you may learn from it as much as we have, and perhaps adapt and use it in your own organization. However, there are currently no resources allocated towards making this a plug 'n play product for others (we are not your software development team) and therefore we will not accept pull requests or issues."
Perhaps that sounds a bit harsh in its current form, but this is just a draft of what it could say. I think the vast majority of people would understand that it is indeed unreasonable to expect them to spend money on your whims and wishes for no good reason.
I don't think most maintainers of open source projects would agree with your optimistic expectations about the reasonableness of the vast majority of people.
Hey @michaelschade, how do you guys sync the system with new hires? Does home hook up to some sort of HR system in the backend like Zenefits or ADP to sync?
Good question! HR system on the backend is the source of truth for people, their teams, and the org structure; we normalize that into an API, which Home functionality and other internal tools integrate against.
does stripe support personal bank accounts? I have a U.S personal bank account but I don't live in the U.S. nor do I'm a U.S. citizen, in my country there isn't anything as awesome as Stripe, the bank infrastructure here is pretty bad and non existent for online payment processing of credit cards. All my clients will reside outside the U.S. but I want to use U.S/Stripe as a proxy for getting paid.
While we include a new bank account when you incorporate through Atlas, you can update your Stripe account to use a different bank account—like your personal account—if you prefer. That said, using a checking account over a personal bank account might make more sense for your business; you'd want to get advice on this to decide the best setup for you.
Make sure to consider exchange rates and costs for wire transfers if you want to go that route. I think Stripe charges an additional 2% for transactions in foreign currecies, and US banks will charge another 3% (or more) when you transfer that money to a foreign curreny. And there are lots of hidden fees for international wire transfers -- on a recent tranfer that I received, around 7% was missing and I had no clue where it had gone. Additionally, fluctuating exchange rates might eat a lot of money.
