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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'

#401
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.

I admit that my own feelings about this are heavily biased, because I _truly_ care about coding as a craft; not just a means to an end. For me, the inclusion of LLMs or AI into the process robs it of so much creativity and essence. No one would argue that a craftsman produces furniture more quickly than Wayfair, but all people would agree that the final product would be better.

It does seem inevitable that some large change will happen to our profession in the years to come. I find it challenging to predict exactly how things will play out.

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

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I'll grant that we could send humans to mars sooner if we really wanted to. My point is that not achieving a bigger dream doesn't make current progress a hype wave followed by a winter.

And "LLM's just make plausible looking but incorrect text" is silly when that text is more correct than the average adult a large percentage of the time.

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

#403

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?

It makes cheaper people also more productive and

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

#404
post #63

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.

George Zarkadaki: In Our Own Image (2015) describes six metaphors people have used to explain human intelligence in the last two millennia. At first it was the gods infusing us with spirit. After that it's always been engineering: after the first water clocks and the qanat hydraulics seemed a good explanation of everything. The flow of different fluids in the body, the "humors" explained physical and mental function.…

Helmholtz didn't say a brain was like a telegraph; he was talking about the peripheral nervous system. And he was right, signals sent from visual receptors and pain receptors are the same stuff being interpreted differently, just as telegraphing "Blue" and "Ouch" would be. That and the spirit of the gods have no place on this list and strain the argument.

Hydraulics, gear systems, and computers are all Turing complete. If you're not a dualist, you have to believe that each of these would be capable of building a brain.

The history described here is one where humans invent a superior information processor, notice that it and humans both process information, and conclude that they must be the same physically. The last step is obviously flawed, but they were hardly going to conclude that the brain processes information with electricity and neurotransmitters when the height of technology was the gear.

Nowadays, we know the physical substrate that the brain uses. We compare brains to computers even though we know there are no silicon microchips or motherboards with RAM slots involved. We do that because we figured out that it doesn't matter what a machine uses to compute; if it is Turing complete, it can compute exactly as much as any other computer, no more, no less.

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

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has -- if anything -- too much food. If someone is starving in America, it's 100% due to them having no interest in acquiring the free food that is widely available almost everywhere.

As an interesting aside, the US measures hunger not by metrics of starvation, but by metrics of "feeling hungry and not being able to quench that sensation". They call this "food insecurity". So you end up with a whole bunch of poor overweight people who need 4500 cals a day to sustain their mass, reporting that they have a hard time sustaining their diet. Obesity is a huge problem in lower income demographics, the s…

Ah fascinating. Yes many years of family working at food banks... There's endless healthy food. It's actually costly to get rid of it.

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

#406
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…

I hear these stories, and I have to wonder, how useful is the app really? Was it actually built to address a need or was it built to learn the coding tool? Is it secure, maintainable, accessible, deployable, and usable? Or is it just a tweaked demo? Plenty of demo apps have all those features, but would never serve as the basis for something real or meet actual customer needs.

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

#407
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is his plan to fix all the bugs that claude hallucinated in the code ?

I'm confident you have not used Cursor Composer + Claude 3.5 Sonnet. I'd say the level of bugs is no higher than that of a typical engineer - maybe even lower.

I am confident you didn't understand my comment. I didn't say anything about "level of bugs".

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> And the most important thing is that humans learn.

Implementation detail that will be solved as the price of AI training decreases. Right now only inference is feasible at scale. Transformers are excellent here since they show great promise at 'one shot' learning meaning they can be 'trained' for the same cost as inference. Hence the sudden boom in AI . We finally have a taste of what could be should we be able to not only inference but also train models at scale.

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

#409
Maybe Altman has no idea about the realities of semiconductor manufacturing, or maybe he does. Sometimes it takes an outsider to shake things up and produce the impossible. Probably some Verizon execs called Steve Jobs a "computer bro" when he walked in with a pre-production iPhone and asked for "half".

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

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans learn from seeing I don't think we are the stage of training models with videos / images dataset. We only reached the plateau with text dataset to train with.
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