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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'

#371

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.

I appreciate skepticism and differing opinions, but I'm always surprised by comments like these because it's just so different from my day-to-day usage. Like, are we using entirely different products? How are we getting such different results?

I think the difference is people on HN are using these "AI" tools as coding assistance. For which, if you know what you're doing, they are pretty useful. They save trips to stack overflow or documentation diving and can spit out code that often is less time to fix/customize than it would have been to write. Cool.

A lot of the rest of the world are using it for other things. And at these other things, the results are less impressive. If you've had to correct a family member who got the wrong idea from whatever chat bot they asked, if you've ever had to point out the trash writing in an email someone just trusted AI to write on their behalf before it got sent to someone that mattered, or if you've ever just spent any amount of time on twitter with grok users, you should be exceptionally and profoundly aware of how unimpressive AI is for the rest of the world.

I feel we need less people complaining about the skepticism on HN and more people who understand these skeptics that hang out here already know how wonderful a productivity boost you're getting from the thing they're rightly skeptical about. Countering with "But my code productivity is up!" is next to useless information on this site.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Me too, but a more optimistic view is that this is just a nascent form of higher-level programming languages. I like this take. I feel like a significant portion of building out a web app (to give an example) is boilerplate. One benefit of (e.g., younger) developers using AI to mock out web apps might be to figure out how to get past that boilerplate to something more concise and productive, which is not necessaril…

Web apps require a ton of boilerplate. Almost every successful web framework uses at least one type of metaprogramming, many have more than one (reflection + codegen).

I’d argue web frameworks don’t even help a lot in this regard still. They pile on more concepts to the leaky abstractions of the web. They’re written by people that love the web, and this is a problem because they’re reluctant to hide any of the details just in case you need to get to them.

Coworker argued that webdev fundamentally opposes abstraction, which I think is correct. It certainly explains the mountains of code involved.

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

#373
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a whole industry of people who fix what AI has created. I don't know if it will be faster to build the wrong thing and pay to have it fixed or to build the right thing from the get go, but after having seen some shit, like you, I have a little idea.

That industry will only form if LLMs don't improve from here. But the evidence, both theoretical and empirical, is quite the opposite. In fact one of the core reasons transformers gained so much traction is because they scale so well. If nothing really changes in 3-5 years, then I'd call it a flop. But the writing is on the wall that "scale = smarts", and what we have today still looks like a foundational stage for L…

Self-driving cars have been 3-5 years away for what, a decade now?

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

#374
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the 7T number is his concept of what he can probably get a bunch of oil sheiks to give him.

The GDP of UAE is 500B, 1.1T in Saudi, and 230B in Qatar. It'd take them decades to provide that kind of money.

All the sovereign wealth funds of the entire Arab Gulf hold less than $3 trillion, saved over decades. And mostly illiquid assets where you can get a 20-30% haircut if you liquidate quickly. Even if they wanted to, they can't even give him $100b/yr for 10 years (i.e., $1 trillion). It's just not feasible or possible. They don't have it anywhere.

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

#375

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.

this attitude is so ridiculously disingenuous. Surely if a computer can score incredibly well on math olympiad questions, among other things, "a computer can make plausible-looking but incorrect sentences" is dismissive at best.

I have no idea about AGI but honestly how can you use claude or chatgpt and come away unimpressed? It's like looking at spaceX and saying golly the space winter is going to be harsh because they haven't gotten to Mars yet.

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

#376

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…

LLMs are great to go from 0 to 2b but you wanted to go to 1 so you remove and modify lots of things, get back to 1 and then go to 2.

Lots of people are terrible at going from 0 to 1 in any project. Me included. LLMs helped me a lot solving this issue. It is so much easier to iterate over something.

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried many times. Things that AI is good at: - Generate boilerplate - Generate extremely simple code patterns. You need a simple CRUD API? Yeah, it can do it. - Generate solutions for established algorithms. Think of solutions for leetcode exercises. So yeah, if that's your job as a developer, that was a massive productivity boost. Playing with anything beyond that and I got varying degrees of failure. Some of whic…

And the solutions for these already existed: - Generate boilerplate : Snippets, templates, and code generators - Generate extremely simple code patterns : Frameworks - Generate solutions for established algorithms : Libraries.

Lol seriously there are deterministic commands I can run that give me correct and verified boilerplate to stand up APIs. Why would I trust some probabilistic analysis of all code found online (while dissipating ungodly amounts of energy and water) to do it instead?

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

#378

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.

Fair, there are probably two threads to this.

New product that push that bar and can command a decent margin (and good staff salaries) as long as there's a business case/demand and feature-sets that currently command a decent margin will be available for dirt cheap prices (managed by one or two person outfits).

Your comment really got me thinking, it's time to upskill haha. Aside from biotech and robotics do you see any areas particularly ripe for this push?

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

#379

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.

I use phind which does searches to provide additional context

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 were…

I see the same way. My current strategy is what I think I should have done in the dotcom bubble: carefully avoid pigeonholing myself in the hype topics while learning the basics so I can set up well positioned teams after the dust settles.
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