Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

571–580 of 581 posts

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

#571
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it makes software developers 10% more productive there sure would be many companies who'd pay $80 a month per seat.

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,…

I'm skeptical about the whole ordeal, but at $80/mo it would still be worth it unless you sit somewhere at the very bottom of outsourcing well.

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

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

What would have been the alternative for them? Excluding the US, software is not a high margin business.

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

#573

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 don't think most people who are reasonably into AI think we're on the cusp of AGI. But I think it's made a lot of people who previously said "it will never be possible" rethink their feelings about it.

Definitely in the coming decade, we can prepare for a lot of the simpler tasks in an office to be taken over by AI. There are plenty of scenarios in which someone is managing a spreadsheet because an SME doesn't have the money to hire developers to automate & maintain that process - with advanced LLMs they can get it done by asking it to.

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

#574
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Plausible-looking but incorrect sentences" is cheap, reflexive cynicism. LLMs are an incredible breakthrough by any reasonable standard. The reason to be optimistic about further progress is that we've seen a massive improvement in capabilities over the past few years and that seems highly likely to continue for the next few (at least). It's not going to scale forever, but it seems pretty clear that when the dust se…

>when the dust settles we'll have LLMs significantly more powerful than the current cutting edge -- which is already useful. LLMs, irrespective of how powerful, are all subject to the fundamental limitation that they don't know anything. The stochastic parrot analogy remains applicable and will never be solved because of the underlying principles inherent to LLMs. LLMs are not the pathway to AGI.

In the scheme of things I'd say most people don't know shit. And that's perfectly fine because we can't reasonably expect the average person to know all the things.

LLM models are very far off from humans in reasoning ability, but acting like most of the things humans do aren't just riffing on or repeating previous data is wrong, imo. As I've said before, humans been the stochastic parrots all along.

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

#575
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Plausible-looking but incorrect sentences" is cheap, reflexive cynicism. LLMs are an incredible breakthrough by any reasonable standard. The reason to be optimistic about further progress is that we've seen a massive improvement in capabilities over the past few years and that seems highly likely to continue for the next few (at least). It's not going to scale forever, but it seems pretty clear that when the dust se…

> and that seems highly likely to continue for the next few (at least) Why? Text training data is already exhausted.

Yes, turns out in the context of machines, all of the names we've given to things and concepts is not a very large set in the scheme of things.

Next focus will hopefully be on reasoning abilities. Probably gonna take another decade and a similar paper to attention is all you need before we see any major improvements...but then again all eyes are on these models atm so perhaps it'll be sooner than that.

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

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI (or more properly, ML) is all around us and creating value everywhere. This is true whether or not we EVER reach AGI. Honestly, I stop reading/listening whenever I read/hear mention of AGI.

Also causing lots of harm, too, e.g. police departments using AI systems that get the wrong suspect.

As per usual people blaming the tool when they should blame the tools using the tool.

The fault lies with humans using AI for something sensitive, without having the AI pass through certification etc. Part of the problem is glacial pace of laws around things, but that's nothing new isn't it; us humans being whiny, argumentative, inefficient, emotional meat bags about every little thing. I wonder, once we do make AGI, if it will wonder why it took us so damn long to tax the disgustingly wealthy, implement ww public healthcare, UBI, etc and solve the housing crisis by gasp building more houses...

We evolved, so our deep, deep underlying motivations pretty much always circulate around self-preservation and reproduction (resource contention).

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

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you haven’t tried the latest FSD build from Tesla.

The one that keeps making major, scary mistakes?

Hasn’t made any major mistakes for me. It’s not perfect of course, but still

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

#578

This is going to sound nuts, but I think CEOs like Altman have more in common with historical monarchs than modern Democratic leaders. In a Democracy, there's more transparency into the degree to which everything the President/PM does is actually delegated out. Joe Biden may be the Commander in Chief, but just watch a political military thriller and you'll see that culturally, we understand the role of the Joint Chie…

I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I'm truly flattered, but you would just get regurgitated ideas from smarter newsletters.

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

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but every token generated by a 100B model is going to take minimally 100B FLOPS, and if this is being used as an IDE typing assistant then there is going to be a lot of tokens being generated. If there is a common shift to using additional runtime compute to improve quality of output, such as OpenAI's GPT-o1, then FLOPs required goes up massively (OpenAI has said it takes exponential increase in FLOPS/cost…

> but every token generated by a 100B model is going to take minimally 100B FLOPS Drop the S, I think. There’s no time dimension. And FLOP is a generalized capability meaning you can do any operation. Hardware optimizations for ML can deliver the same 100B computations faster and cheaper by not being completely generalized. Same way ray tracing acceleration works: it does not use the same amount of compute as ray tra…

Sure, ANN computations are mostly multiplication (or multiply and add) - multiply an ANN input by a weight (parameter) and accumulate, parallelized into matrix multiplication which is the basic operation supported by accelerators like GPUs and TPUs.

Still, even with modern accelerators it's lot of computation, and is what drives the price per token of larger models vs smaller ones.

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

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When electricity got cheap - we use MORE electricity. Think how many places you see shitty software currently. My wife was just trying to use an app to book a test with the doctor - did not work at all. The staff said they know it doesn’t work. They still give out the app. We are surrounded by awful software. There’s a lot of work to do- if it could be done cheaper. Currently only rich companies can make great softwa…

> We are surrounded by awful software. There’s a lot of work to do- if it could be done cheaper. Currently only rich companies can make great software. Lots of the awful software is made by awfully rich companies - and lots of good software is made by bootstraped devs. To mention some interesting examples, both Amazon and Google has gone from great to meh soon after they went from startups to entrenched market leader…

Sorry I’m a bit slow picking this convo back up.

I guess this is why I’m excited. AI will give smaller motivated teams a lot more firepower. One committed person can (or may soon be able to) take on the might of a big company.

These companies are making crap software because their scale makes them hard to compete with. They know there’s no other good options.

I think Sam Altman’s right that there’ll be a 1 person unicorn company at some point.

Post reply on HN