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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'

#281
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…

> 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, would you pay >$80 a month for it? I'm probably one of those "heavy users", though I've only been using it for a month to see how well it does. Here's my review: Large completions (10-15 lines): It will generally spit out near…

I find tools where I am manually shepherding the context into an LLM to work much better than Copilot at current. If I think thru the problem enough to articulate it and give the model a clear explanation, and choose the surrounding pieces of context (the same stuff I would open up and look at as a dev) I can be pretty sure the code generated (even larger outputs) will work and do what I wanted, and be stylistically good. I am still adding a lot in this scenario, but it's heavier on the analysis and requirements side, and less on the code creation side.

If what I give it is too open ended, doesn't have enough info, etc, I'll still get a low quality output. Though I find I can steer it by asking it to ask clarifying questions. Asking it to build unit tests can help a lot too in bolstering, a few iterations getting the unit tests created and passing can really push the quality up.

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

#282

Three things that get me about current AI discourse: - The public focus on AGI is almost a distraction. By the time we get to AGI highly-specialised models will have taken jobs from huge swaths of the population, SWE and CS are already in play. - That AI will need to carry out every task a role does to replace it. I see this a lot on HN. What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? That's still a gigantic…

> What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? Zero sum game or fixed lump of work fallacy. Think second order effects - now that we spend less time repeating known methods, we will take on more ambitious work. Competition between companies using human + AI will raise the bar. Software has been cannibalizing itself for 60 years, with each new language and framework, and yet employment is strong.

It's probably true, but just not for SWEs. Many roles will go the way of secretarys; the cost of making an administrative tool will decrease to the point where there is less need for a specialised role to handle it. The question is going to be about the pace of disruption, is there something special about these new tools?

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

#283
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…

Me too, but a more optimistic view is that this is just a nascent form of higher-level programming languages. Gray-beards may bemoan that us "young" developers (born after 1970) can't write machine code from memory, but it's hardly a practical issue anymore. Analogously, I imagine future software dev to consist mostly of writing specs in natural language.

No one can write machine code from memory other by writing machine for years and just memorizing them. Just like you can't start writing Python without prior knowledge.

> Analogously, I imagine future software dev to consist mostly of writing specs in natural language.

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...?

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

#284
post #70
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but 1) you only need to train the model once and the inference is way cheaper. Train one great model (i.e. Claude 3.5) and you can get much more than $80/month worth out of it. 2) the hardware is getting much better and prices will fall drastically once there is a bit of a saturation of the market or another company starts putting out hardware that can compete with NVIDIA

> Train one great model (i.e. Claude 3.5) and you can get much more than $80/month worth out of it Until the competition outcompetes you with their new model and you have to train a new superior one, because you have no moat. Which happens what, around every month or two? > the hardware is getting much better and prices will fall drastically once there is a bit of a saturation of the market or another company starts…

Gemini models are trained and run on Google's in house TPU's, which frankly are incredible compared to H100's. In fact Claude was trained on TPUs.

Google however does not sell these, you can only lease time on them via GCP.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industrial revolution didn't lay everyone off, it just made everyone's jobs worse in every possible sense.

I don't think many would switch current life with pre-industrial life. You are idealising the past and discounting the present

Not trying to value life in general at all, just the nature of the jobs. You might reply "distinction without a difference," and well, the fact that you'd think so would be one of my points about the labor ;).

Personally, preindustrial life sounds pretty rough, but its all just apples and oranges! The future will continue to happen, to critique the present and how we got here is not to exhort the past (unless, you know, you are a particularly conservative person I guess).

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok maybe I just never saw the hype, just another engineering and data challenge that was going to be solved one way or another.

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

#288
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really believe that the front-end part can be mostly automated (the html/CSS at least), copilot is close imho (microsoft+github, I used both), but really they're useless to do anything else complex without making to much calls, proposing bad data structures, using bad /old code design.

The frontend part was already automated. We called it Dreamweaver and RAD tools.

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

#289
post #20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 don't find this very compelling. Hardware is becoming more available and cheaper as production ramps up, and smaller models are constantly seeing dramatic improvements.

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

#290
post #234

It is clear to me that Sam has never set foot inside of a semiconductor manufacturing facility. Or, if he did he definitely wasn't paying attention to what was going on around him. I don't know how you could witness these things and then make glib statements about building 36 of them. It will likely take well over a decade to recoup investment on any new chip fab at this point. Chasing ~4 customers on one narrow use…

In his recent "Intelligence Age" post, Altman says superintelligence may be only a few thousand days out. This might, of course, be wrong, but skyrocketing demand for chips is a straightforward consequence of taking it seriously.

> may be only a few thousand days out

This is actually quite clever phrasing. "A few thousand days" is about ten years, assuming normal usage of 'few' (ie usually a number between 3 and 6 inclusive).

Now, if you, as a tech company, say "X is ten years away", anyone who has been around for a while will entirely disregard your claim, because forward-looking statements in that range by tech companies are _always_ wrong; it's pretty much a cliche. But phrasing as a few thousand days may get past some peoples' defences.

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