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TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

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Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#271
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no accounting for taste, but keep in mind that all of these services are currently losing money, so how much would you actually be willing to pay for the service you're currently getting in order to let it break even? There was a report that Microsoft is losing $20 for every $10 spent on Copilot subscriptions, with heavy users costing them as much as $80 per month. Assuming you're one of those heavy users, wo…

I would pay hundreds of dollars per month for the combination of cursor and claude - I could not get my head around it when my beginner lever colleague said "I just coded this whole thing using cursor". It was an entire web app, with search filters, tree based drag and drop GUIs, the backend api server, database migrations, auth and everything else. Not once did he need to ask me a question. When I asked him "how lon…

Yeah AI can give you a good base if its something thats been done before (which admittedly, 99% of SE projects are), especially in the target language.

Yeah, if you want tic-tac-toe or snake, you can simply ask ChatGPT and it will spit out something reasonable.

But this is not much better than a search engine/framework to be honest.

Asking it to be "creative" or to tweak existing code however ...

Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only as good as its training data. Step outside of building basic web/CRUD apps and its accuracy drops off substantially. Also almost every library it uses is old and insecure.

That last point represents the biggest problem this technology will leave us with. Nobody's going to train LLMs on new libraries or frameworks when writing original code takes an order of magnitude longer than generating code for the 2023 stack.

With LLM's like gemini, which have massive context windows, you can just drop the full documentation for anything in the context window. It dramatically improves output.

Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#273
I read the NY Times article that someone else linked to in the thread.

I've been in semiconductor / chip design for almost 30 years at 8 different companies including 2 that owned their own fabs. I've also worked on 2 different AI accelerator chips.

Altman sounds like someone who has no idea about the industry. The numbers in the article are laughable.

This quote summed it up.

> It is still unclear how all this would work. OpenAI has tried to assemble a loose federation of companies, including data center builders like Microsoft as well as investors and chipmakers. But the particulars of who would pay the money, who would get it and what they would even build are hazy.

He's trying to get a bunch of diverse companies including Microsoft to fund this but it's unclear what kind of chips he actually wants. Many of the big companies including Microsoft are designing their own custom AI chips.

But the article mentions Nvidia. Does OpenAI have any plans to design their own chips or do they just use Nvidia? It may be difficult to get Nvidia competitors to want to join his effort.

> TSMC makes semiconductors for Nvidia, the leading developer of A.I. chips. The plan would allow Nvidia to churn out more chips. OpenAI and other companies would use those chips in more A.I. data centers.

Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand how anyone can use these tools (copilot especially) to make entire projects from scratch and expand them later. They just lead you down the wrong path 90% of the time. Personally I much prefer Chatgpt. I give it specific small problems to resolve and some context. At most 100 lines of code. If it gets more the quality goes to shit. In fact copilot feels like chatgpt that was given too much context.

I hear it all the time on HN that people are producing entire apps with LLMs, but I just don't believe it. All of my experiences with LLMs have been that for anything that isn't a braindead-simple for loop is just unworkable garbage that takes more effort to fix than if you just wrote it from scratch to begin with. And then you're immediately met with "You're using it wrong!", "You're using the wrong model!", "You're…

The other day I decided to write a script (that I needed for a project, but ancillary, not core code) entirely with CoPilot. It wasn't particularly long (maybe 100 lines of python). It worked. But I had to iterate so much with the LLM, repeating instructions, fixing stuff that didn't run, that it took a fair bit longer than if I had just written it myself. And this was a fairly vanilla data science type of script.

Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#275
post #16

The current AI hype wave has really hit a nerd soft spot - that we're steps away from AGI. Surely if a computer can make plausible-looking but incorrect sentences we're days away from those sentences being factually accurate! The winter after this is gonna be harsh.

Using Claude 3.5 Sonnet in Cursor Composer already shows huge benefits for coding. I'm more productive than ever before. The models are still getting better and better. I'm not saying AGI is right around the corner or that we will reach it, but the benefits are undeniable. o1 added test-time compute. No need to be snarky.

Do you think AI companies will be able to afford running massive compute farms solely so coders can get suggestions?

I do not claim to know what the future holds, but I do feel the clock is ticking on the AI hype. OpenAI blew people's minds with GPTs, and people extrapolated that mind-blowing experience into a future with omniscient AI agents, but those are nowhere to be seen. If investors have AGI in mind, and it doesn't happen soon enough, I can see another winter.

Remember, the other AI winters were due to a disconnect between expectations and reality of the current tech. They also started with unbelievable optimism that ended when it became clear the expectations were not reality. The tech wasn't bad back then either, it just wasn't The General Solution people were hoping for.

Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#276
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but does your colleague even fully understand what was generated? Does he have a good mental map of the organization of the project? I have a good mental map of the projects I work on because I wrote them myself. When new business problems emerge, I can picture how to solve them using the different components of those applications. If I hadn't actually written the application myself, that expertise would not exi…

AI assistants are also quite good at helping you create a high level map of a codebase. They are able to traverse the whole project structure and functionality and explain to you how things are organized and what responsibilities are. I just went back to an old project (didn't remember much about it) and used Cursor to make a small bug fix and it helped me get it done in no time. I used it to identify where the issue…

> I just went back to an old project (didn't remember much about it) and used Cursor to make a small bug fix and it helped me get it done in no time.

That sounds quite useful. Does Cursor feed your entire project code (traversing all folders and files) into the context?

Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an AI can do my job, why would my employer fire me? Why wouldn’t they be excited to get 200% productivity out of me for the marginal cost of an AI seat license? They’d be excited at getting 100x of 100% output out an AI for 20 dollars a month and laying you off as redundant. If you aren’t scared of the potential of this technology you are lying to yourself.

Again: I’m only made redundant if there is no more work that my employer needs me to do. Why should I be scared of technology that makes me more productive?

This assumes that the bottleneck to profitability is the limit of software engineers they can afford to hire.

If they’re happy with current rate of progress (and in many companies that is the case), then a productivity increase of 100% means they need half the current number of engineers.

Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#278
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it makes software developers 10% more productive there sure would be many companies who'd pay $80 a month per seat.

Maybe there are people out there working in coding sweatshops churning out boilerplate code 8 hours a day, 50 weeks a year - people who's job is 100% coding (not what I would call software engineers or developers - just coders). It's easy to imagine that for such people (but do they even exist?!) there could be large productivity gains. However, for a more typical software engineer, where every project is different,…

A 1% time saving for a $100k/yr position is still worth $83/month. And accounting for overhead, someone who costs the company $100k only gets a $60k salary.

If you pay Silicon Valley salaries this seems like a no-brainer. There are bigger time wasters elsewhere, but this is an easy win with minimal resistance or required culture change

Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do we call the Middle East then?

West Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Asia Southwest Asia: https://www.britannica.com/place/Southwest-Asia

I agree in principle. But that still leaves it called Far East, it's just Far East Asia.

Re: TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you do something that is extraordinarily hard, sometimes it takes longer than you expect. But now we're here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/20/waymo-is-now-giving-100000...

To be fair, is waymo "only" AI? I'm guessing it's a composite of GPS (car on a rail), some high detailed mapping, and then yes, some "AI" involved in recognition and decision making of course but the car isn't an AGI so to speak? Like it wouldn't know how to change a tyre or fix the engine or drive some where the mapping data isn't yet available ?

Where did I say that it's AGI? I was addressing the parent's comment:

> "Reminds me of autonomous vehicles a couple of years back".

I don't think any reasonable interpretation of "autonomous vehicle" includes the ability to change a tyre. My point is that sometimes hype becomes reality. It might just take a little longer than expected.

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