Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 581 posts

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

#541

Post by ksec »

lizknope wrote: post #273

I read the NY Times article that someone else linked to in the thread. I've been in semiconductor / chip design for almost 30 years at 8 different companies including 2 that owned their own fabs. I've also worked on 2 different AI accelerator chips. Altman sounds like someone who has no idea about the industry. The numbers in the article are laughable. This quote summed it up. > It is still unclear how all this would…

>Altman sounds like someone who has no idea about the industry.

I think it also sums up a lot about what I am seeing from software developers in general. Very little understanding of hardware. And even more so about hardware industry itself.

HN itself is a very good example and evidence.

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

#542

Post by sobani »

tetris11 wrote: post #485
petee wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most cars had cassette players, many still had 8-tracks; vinyl or or tape at home. Not that they were great options, but there was alot of existing media available, and hardware was common, so an expensive bulky device to play fragile media at lower quality than vinyl, was how it was viewed by many initially. Edit: just checking, the Sony Walkman came out in 1979, CDs in 1982, but the Walkman dominated the 80s & 90s,…

Data cassette tapes look like they could have held up to max 600 MB[0], but CDs came out at out of the gate in 1980s with 650 MB. I guess in terms of storage I can't quite grasp why he thought that CD wouldn't take on. (Hindsight 50/50, of course.) 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Data_recording

If someone comes up with a new port that had 10% more throughput than USB, do you think that will be enough to make it a viable competitor, or do you think it won't be worth the hassle of replacing your peripherals (cassettes) and computers (cassette players)?

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

#543

Post by tetris11 »

sobani wrote: post #542
tetris11 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data cassette tapes look like they could have held up to max 600 MB[0], but CDs came out at out of the gate in 1980s with 650 MB. I guess in terms of storage I can't quite grasp why he thought that CD wouldn't take on. (Hindsight 50/50, of course.) 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Data_recording

If someone comes up with a new port that had 10% more throughput than USB, do you think that will be enough to make it a viable competitor, or do you think it won't be worth the hassle of replacing your peripherals (cassettes) and computers (cassette players)?

Good point

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

#544

Post by mft_ »

croes wrote: post #420
mft_ wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SpaceX needed NASA money. Where does Altmann get $7 trillion dollars

Again, that it sounds ridiculous rooted in the conventional reality of today, doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong in his vision.

Again, the Russians laughed at Musk. The legacy space companies didn’t produce reusable boosters when they clearly could’ve, and people laughed at the idea until it was working. Etc.

(I’m not sure what relevance the NASA comment has; of course small underfunded startups need money to realise their goals? SpaceX needed NASA’s money to develop various projects faster, and NASA needed SpaceX to a) reduce launch costs and b) reduce their reliance on Russia for human launches.)

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

#545

Post by croes »

mft_ wrote: post #544
croes wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX needed NASA money. Where does Altmann get $7 trillion dollars

Again, that it sounds ridiculous rooted in the conventional reality of today, doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong in his vision. Again, the Russians laughed at Musk. The legacy space companies didn’t produce reusable boosters when they clearly could’ve, and people laughed at the idea until it was working. Etc. (I’m not sure what relevance the NASA comment has; of course small underfunded startups need money to realis…

NASA paid so SpaceX could follow it's vision.

Who will by pay $7 billions so Altman can follow his?

SpaceX costs were much lower and there goal was to become cheaper.

OpenAI will cost more even with all the chips Altman wants. Those chips need energy.

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

#546

Post by llm_trw »

anthomtb wrote: post #464
Rinzler89 wrote: post #3

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

I have always taken both Taiwanese and TSMC culture to be fairly reserved. So if you see language like "podcasting bro" slipping out, it really means something like "f cking bullsh t con artist".

Taiwanese culture has also never understood software which is why they are stuck in the lower margin business of hardware.

AMD and NVidia are important now because someone else struck gold on their property. Within 5 years they won't be because both are fucking up monumentally for different reasons: AMD for being AMD [0] and NVidia for expecting 10x markup to continue indefinitely.

People hate success but LLM swarms are the next wave of improving output and they consume compute on par with training for inference.

[0] https://twitter.com/__tinygrad__/status/1839219312952766942

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

#547

Post by llm_trw »

croes wrote: post #545
mft_ wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that it sounds ridiculous rooted in the conventional reality of today, doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong in his vision. Again, the Russians laughed at Musk. The legacy space companies didn’t produce reusable boosters when they clearly could’ve, and people laughed at the idea until it was working. Etc. (I’m not sure what relevance the NASA comment has; of course small underfunded startups need money to realis…

NASA paid so SpaceX could follow it's vision. Who will by pay $7 billions so Altman can follow his? SpaceX costs were much lower and there goal was to become cheaper. OpenAI will cost more even with all the chips Altman wants. Those chips need energy.

Nuclear power will finally make sense.

Sam Altman - savior of humanity.

HN comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATCrco_V-24

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

#548

Post by svantana »

cml123 wrote: post #401
svantana wrote: post #249

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.

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…

I suppose the craft/art view of coding will follow the path of chess - machines gradually overtake humans but it's still an artform to be good at, in some sense.

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

#549

Post by rldjbpin »

as someone working in AI, if i had access to 7T USD, i would never put it all in AI research, forget in one moonshot alone to put it best.

in retrospect, press media was much more critical of meta and the whole metaverse schtick. it took long but all the money poured on the research has brought more meaningful results with the orion prototype.

we are giving this AI company too much air time. let them do their bidding by themselves.

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

#550

Post by ben_w »

nicolas_t wrote: post #336
scruple wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My experience is that it varies a lot by model, dev, and field — I've seen juniors (and indeed people with a decade of experience) keeping thousands of lines of unused code around for reference, or not understanding how optionals work, or leaving the FAQ full of placeholder values in English when the app is only on the German market, and so on. Good LLMs don't make those mistakes.

But the worst LLMs? One of my personal tests is "write Tetris as a web app", and the worst local LLM I've tried, started bad and then half way through switched to "write a toy ML project in python".

Post reply on HN