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

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381–390 of 581 posts

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

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, but companies need to see the savings on the bottom line, in real dollars, before they are going to be spending $1000/seat for this stuff. A theoretical, or actual, 1-5% of time saved typing is most likely not going to mean you can hire fewer people and actually reduce payroll, so even if the 1-5% were to show up on internal timesheets (it won't!), this internal accounting will not be reflected on the bottom line.

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

#382
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh; the Russians laughed at Musk, before he started SpaceX; too.

I doubt OpenAI will start challenging TSMC at building chips anytime soon.

Indeed; but laughing at the scale of someone’s ambition (or vision?) might just mean that one’s own is too narrow or limited. After all, there are lots of narrow-minded, un-visionary folks out there.

Just because there’s an anti-Altman/-OpenAI sentiment on HN at the moment, it doesn’t mean that he’s wrong about everything, nor the people at TSMC are necessarily right.

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

#383
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you, now I realize where I've had this feeling before!

Working with AI-generated code to add new features feels like working with Dreamweaver-generated code, which was also unpleasant. It's not written the same way a human would write it, isn't written with ease of modification in mind, etc.

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

#384
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.

> I'm more productive than ever before.

Who are you and what are you being so productive in?

These code assistants are wholly unable to help with the day to day work I do.

Sometimes I use them to remind me what flags to use with a tarball[0], so replaced SO, but anything of consequence or creativity and they flounder.

What are you getting out of this excess productivity? A pay raise? More time with your loved ones?

[0] https://xkcd.com/1168/ (addressing the tool tip, but hilariously, in regards the comics content that would be a circumstance where I would absolutely avoid trusting one of these ‘assistants’)

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

#385

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 t…

There's a big difference between those two examples.

Mars is hard but there are paths forward. More efficient engines, higher energy density fuels, lighter materials, better shielding, etc, etc. It's hard but there are paths forward to make it possible with enough time and money. We have an understanding of how to get from what we have now to what makes Mars possible.

With LLMs, there is no path from LLM -> gAI. No amount of time, money or compute will make that happen. They are fundamentally a very 'simple' tool that is only really capable of one thing - predicting text. There is no intelligence. There is no understanding. There is no creativity or problem solving or thought of any kind. They just spit out text based on weighted probabilities. If you want gAI you have to go in a completely different direction that has no relationship with LLM tools.

Don't get me wrong, the work that's been done so far took a long time and is incredibly impressive, but it's a lot more smoke and mirrors than most people realize.

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

#386
post #80
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I get where your fascinaton comes from... > I'm more productive than ever before. You realize that another way to read that sentence is "I am a really bad coder".

Maybe I am, but I'm getting pretty rich doing it, so there is that. :)

"I'm getting paid so I don't really care" is the most destructive instance a human can take. Why do you think we're about to disrupt the Holocene climate optimum that gave birth to modern civilization?

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

#387

Based. The more I read about TSMC, the more I like them.

indeed, that's about the most sane take on sam's plans i've seen so far from players in this craze

if this house of cards collapses, it will be magnitutes bigger than any bubble (be it hype or fraud) we've seen so far.

what a waste of resources and focus, i really can't take vc players seriously any more (from what is left after the crypto hype run)

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

#389
post #90

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…

Just like robo-taxis are supposed to be driving us around or self driving cars. Not to mention the non-fiat currency everyone can easily use to buy goods nowadays.

In the first case there are inherent safety constraints preventing it and thus its not available to public to freely use. It's highly regulated. With GPT to writing code, it is already generally available and in heavy use. There are no such life-and-death concerns in the main.

In the second case there are inherent technical challenges to using non-fiat currency and the fx volatility with fiat is wild. There are also barriers and inconveniences to conversion. With GPT writing code, the user can review for quality and still be many x more productive and there is far fewer fees and risk of loss.

It's risky to take two failed or slow innovations and assume that all innovations will be failed or slow.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When I heard people talk about writing specs in natural language, I want to ask them if they want fuzzy results too. Like 10x10=20 or having you account debited from x+e money where x is what you ask and e is any real number. Or having your smoke detector interpreting it’s sensor fuzzily too.
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