TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro' • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by skydhash » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:31 PM UTC

anon291 wrote: post #294

Jach wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM Watson was more than a couple years back. The Jeopardy event was in 2011. It's currently 2024. As for cars, I don't know what you're referring to specifically, and the hype is still ongoing as far as I can tell. It has taken 10+ years to get to present day, from the start of the "deep learning revolution" around 2010. I vaguely recall Uber promising self-driving pickups somewhere around 8-10 years ago. A main dif…

Yeah I have no idea what these people are talking about. The current gen of AI is qualitiatively different than previous attempts. For one, GPT et al are already useful without any kind of special prompting. I'd also like to challenge people to actually consider how often humans are correct. In my experience, it's actually very rare to find a human that speaks factually correctly. Many professionals, including doctor…

Yon don't ask a neurosurgeon how to build an house, just like you don't ask a plane pilot how to drill a tunnel. Expertise is localized. And the most important thing is that humans learn.

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

#332

Post by fellowmartian » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:33 PM UTC

fhd2 wrote: post #193

isodev wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is appetite for this, in big tech especially. People are looking for glamorous next big things, everyone wants to be the first in some green field thing instead of digging into "the boring stuff we've been hearing about since forever". Imagine, even Apple completely enshittified their OSes just so they're on the bandwagon of AI with zero added value.

Exactly. And now, a possibly terrifying question: What if there just is not going to be a "next big thing"? Population size is about to peak. Up until now, for as long as we know, it has been growing. Starting at the latest with colonisation, we've had more people, more resources, new markets advancing into buyers of new products. Once societies advance to a certain point, they begin to shrink, this is well studied.…

I’m not the biggest AI fanboy, but AI is the solution to this. You’re right that the population is about to peak, and we’ll stop adding biological brains that can come up with new things, but if we crack real AGI then we’ll have many more orders of magnitude of mechanical brains that can do the same.

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

#333

Post by aithrowawaycomm » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:33 PM UTC

apsec112 wrote: post #221

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP could have been more substantive, but there is no contradiction between "current AI tools are sincerely useful" and "overinflated claims about the supposed intelligence of these tools will lead to an AI winter." I am quite confident both are true about LLMs. I use Scheme a lot, but the 1970s MIT AI folks' contention that LISPs encapsulate the core of human symbolic reasoning is clearly ridiculous to 2020s readers:…

What LLM abilities, if you saw them demonstrated, would cause you to change your mind?

Let's start with a multimodal[1] LLM that doesn't fail vacuously simple out-of-distribution counting problems.

I need to be convinced that an LLM is smarter than a honeybee before I am willing to even consider that it might be as smart as a human child. Honeybees are smart enough to understand what numbers are. Transformer LLMs are not. In general GPT and Claude are both dramatically dumber than honeybees when it comes to deep and mysterious cognitive abilities like planning and quantitative reasoning, even if they are better than honeybees at human subject knowledge and symbolic mathematics. It is sensible to evaluate Claude compared to other human knowledge tools, like an encyclopedia or Mathematica, based on the LLM benchmarks or "demonstrated LLM abilities." But those do not measure intelligence. To measure intelligence we need make the LLM as ignorant as possible so it relies on its own wits, like cognitive scientists do with bees and rats. (There is a general sickness in computer science where one poorly-reasoned thought experiment from Alan Turing somehow outweighs decades of real experiments from modern scientists.)

[1] People dishonestly claim LLMs fail at counting because of minor tokenization issues, but

a) they can count just fine if your prompt tells them how, so tokenization is obviously not a problem

b) they are even worse at counting if you ask them to count things in images, so I think tokenization is irrelevant!

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

#334

Post by mrweasel » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #146

hlanders10 wrote: post #33

He may have the last laugh. His traveling around the world and threatening to build fabs in the UAE and Taiwan is a diplomatic scheme to get the U.S. hawks into action. And lo and behold, ClopenAI has already hired CHIPS act people: "To bolster its efforts, OpenAI has hired Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House lawyer, as its vice president of global policy, along with two people from the Commerce Department who worked…

> Build fabs Such a misguided take. If it were that easy to build fabs to compete with TSMC, Intel would do it. China would do it. Hardware is way harder than software.

Which is also why it made good sense for TSMC to dismiss Altman. Some software/crypto/podcast/AI-hype bro shows up and asks for 36 fabs to be build, with no plan for monetizing them. Intel is struggling with their fab business as is, it's a difficult business to be in. Asking for 36 fabs, worth 7 trillion dollars is just absurd. Even if TSMC got the money up front, they'd still be holding those fabs and paying for their upkeep or dismantlement when/if OpenAIs predictions turn out to be wrong.

It's just an insane risk to take on.

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

#335

Post by thebigspacefuck » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

Maybe the board was right to kick him out

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

#336

Post by nicolas_t » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

scruple wrote: post #267

layer8 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s absolutely not my experience. I struggle to find tasks in my day to day work where LLMs are saving me time. One reason is that the systems and domains I work with are hardly represented at all on the internet.

I have the same experience. I'm in gamesdev and we've been encouraged to test out LLM tooling. Most of us at/above the senior level report the same experience: it sucks, it doesn't grasp the broader context of the systems that these problems exist inside of, even when you prompt it as best as you can, and it makes a lot of wild assed, incorrect assumptions about what it doesn't know and which are often hard to detect…

In my experience, AI for coding is having a rather stupid very junior dev at your beck and call but who can produce the results instantly. It's just often very mediocre and getting it fixed often takes longer than writing it on your own.

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

#337

Post by joeybloey » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #15

So many weird things going on with this. a) Given how geopolitical semiconductors and AI are right now. Why he is running around the world running his mouth seemingly without the cooperation of the US government. b) What does Microsoft have to say about OpenAI building a parallel cloud. c) OpenAI has zero competence in designing and building their own end to end stack but yet they are going to jump straight to $7T wo…

They are smart enough to know that none of this will happen, and will have cashed out long before it all crashes and burns

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

#338

Post by Workaccount2 » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #161

hiddencost wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is doing 100k paid driverless trips a week with significantly better safety than humans in matched conditions.

On a small subsection of US roads, British roads for example don’t make any sense. However, generally I think being a software developer might be not a career in 10 years which is terrible to think about. Designer too. And all of this is through stealing peoples work as their own.

These models are not repositories or archives of others work that they simply stitch together to create output. It's more accurate to say that they view work and then create an algorithm that can output the essence of that work.

For image models, people are often pretty surprised to learn that they are only a few gigabytes in size, despite training on petabytes of images.

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

#339

Post by roenxi » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:38 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #241

H8crilA wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is reasonable from his point of view - you guys sink the capital, I will have more compute. And if it doesn't work out and orders stop coming in then well that's not my problem, is it?

> It is reasonable from his point of view If he wants to actually accomplish his objectives, he needs to get inside the minds of the executives that run these companies. Empathize with their concerns and then develop a strategy for walking them towards a path to build even one additional factory. Throwing out a cartoonish figure and then hoping to be taken seriously is not something I'd expect from the CEO of somethi…

You say that, but to me the Americans have a stereotype of making outrageous demands and then getting big wins because sometimes people say yes. And if he doesn't ask for what he wants he certainly won't get it.

Empathy is a good practice when managing others and have control over what they do, but in business negotiations it is often productive to just make your wants and budget clear.

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

#340

Post by aithrowawaycomm » Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 2:39 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #312

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP could have been more substantive, but there is no contradiction between "current AI tools are sincerely useful" and "overinflated claims about the supposed intelligence of these tools will lead to an AI winter." I am quite confident both are true about LLMs. I use Scheme a lot, but the 1970s MIT AI folks' contention that LISPs encapsulate the core of human symbolic reasoning is clearly ridiculous to 2020s readers:…

I guess it depends on what we mean by "AI winter". I completely agree that the current insane levels of investment aren't justified by the results, and when the market realises this it will overreact. But at the same time there is a lot of value to capture here by building solid applications around the capabilities that already exist. It might be a winter more like the "winter" image recognition went through before m…

I think the upcoming AI bust will be similar to the 2000s dotcom bust - ecommerce was not a bad idea or a scam! And neither are transformers. But there are cultural similarities:

a) childish motivated reasoning led people to think a fairly simple technology could solve profoundly difficult business problems in the real world

b) a culture of "number goes up, that's just science"

c) uncritical tech journalists who weren't even corrupt, just bedazzled

In particular I don't think generative AI is like cryptocurrency, which was always stupid in theory, and in practice it has become the rat's nest of gangsters and fraudsters which 2009-era theory predicted. After the dust settles people will still be using LLMs and art generators.