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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#581

Post by ben_w »

thrw42A8N wrote: post #546
mnky9800n wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is going to sit and wait for a robo uber in the suburbs for ten minutes to go to the grocery store ten miles down the road. This is the main problem, America has suburbanised itself to hell and no amount of robo taxis will create the world you are suggesting. And elsewhere in the world there’s no need because most places have adequate public transit which solves the problem way more efficiently than robo taxis…

Why would you wait for 10 minutes? Robo taxis would be driving all around to be optimally available to the market.

The optimal route means picking up multiple people on the same route, and dropping them off elsewhere on the route, and then making the vehicle large enough so that they can do this comfortably, i.e. a bus.

It ends up being another form of public transport — perhaps one with no predictable timetable, or perhaps timetables are themselves a useful Schelling point, I wouldn't want to guess.

But as fixed bus routes make it possible to plan things like bus shelters, I think I'd prefer a bus over the logical progression of self-driving "taxis" that constantly move rather than finding parking spots.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#582

Post by ben_w »

foldr wrote: post #571
ben_w wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? Yes, frequently and loudly. When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors . > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much l…

> The product market fit is fantastic. > [...] > What's not obvious is how to monetise it. This is an interesting new use of 'product market fit'. I would have thought that in the absence of a path to monetisation, there is no market. Or we could talk about the 'market' for selling $10 bills priced at $5.

I phrased that badly, so that's fair.

If you follow the rest of that paragraph, my meaning may be clearer: there's a market for what they do right now — the OpenAI financial reports that have been bandied around say that if they were only offering this as a paid service, not also developing new models, they'd be making a profit — but it's not obvious how this will change going forward.

The first spreadsheets were easy to market: here's a solution to your problem, give us money and you can have this solution. But as time goes on, you need more than the original solution, because that's too easy to replicate.

ChatGPT was easy to replicate, and has been replicated.

The "needing more" to stay in the game is what I meant by the Red Queen race. What exists now is fine, it's a good fit, but the question of the long-term is still open.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#583

Post by cinntaile »

ben_w wrote: post #575
cinntaile wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I'm saying. When price goes down, robotaxis become a more viable option due to convenience and speed. You're shopping? Just put it in the trunk. Have fun with 4 grocery bags on public transport. Public transport can be faster for going from A to B, but most people live a couple of kms from A and they're not going to exactly B but somewhere in the vicinity. The "last mile" will more likely be by robotaxi.

> When price goes down, robotaxis become a more viable option due to convenience and speed. Lower prices don't make things more convenient or fast. > You're shopping? Just put it in the trunk. Have fun with 4 grocery bags on public transport. Here is "The Shops at South Town" mall in Salt Lake City: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5617162,-111.8944801,171m/da... Note that some parts of that car park are 300m from som…

> Lower prices don't make things more convenient or fast.

You are replying to a straw man, I never said anything like that. It makes for dull discussions.

> Even in my current place, still in Berlin but close to the outskirts without the advantages of density, a mere four grocery bags is easier to get through public transport than it is from one end of an American car park to the other.

It's unclear to me why you compare it to a geographically unrelated area. You should compare the public transport with a robotaxi alternative. At similar pricing, how is convenience and speed impacted.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#584

Post by sigh_again »

BrickFingers wrote: post #277
sigh_again wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even just Meta dwarfs Twitter's cluster, with an estimated 350k H100s by now.

2 months ago Jensen Huang did an interview where he said xAi built the fastest cluster with 100k GPUs.he said "what they achieved is singular, never been done before" https://youtu.be/bUrCR4jQQg8?si=i0MpcIawMVHmHS2e Meta said they would expand their infrastructure to include 350k GPUs by the end of this year. But, my guess is they meant a collection of AI clusters not a singular large cluster. In the post where they…

What's singular is putting 100k H100s in a single machine. Which, yay, cool supercomputer, but the distributed supercomputer with 5 times the machines runs just as fast anyways.

Huang is still a CEO trying to prop up his product. He'd tell you putting an RTX4090 in your bathroom to drive an LED screen mirror is unprecedented if it meant it got him more sales and more clout.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#585

Post by DennisP »

mnky9800n wrote: post #523
DennisP wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving won't take over by just being available in the new cars people are buying anyway. It'll take over when people find it cheaper to ride robotaxis than to own a vehicle at all. That's potentially a much quicker transition, requiring significantly fewer new vehicles.

Nobody is going to sit and wait for a robo uber in the suburbs for ten minutes to go to the grocery store ten miles down the road. This is the main problem, America has suburbanised itself to hell and no amount of robo taxis will create the world you are suggesting. And elsewhere in the world there’s no need because most places have adequate public transit which solves the problem way more efficiently than robo taxis…

So people are not willing to wait for a robotaxi, but they are willing to wait for buses and trains?

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#586

Post by DennisP »

ben_w wrote: post #581
thrw42A8N wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you wait for 10 minutes? Robo taxis would be driving all around to be optimally available to the market.

The optimal route means picking up multiple people on the same route, and dropping them off elsewhere on the route, and then making the vehicle large enough so that they can do this comfortably, i.e. a bus. It ends up being another form of public transport — perhaps one with no predictable timetable, or perhaps timetables are themselves a useful Schelling point, I wouldn't want to guess. But as fixed bus routes make…

That's optimal for the vehicles, but less optimal for the people, who have to walk to stops. I used to live in Germany which had fantastic public transport, but walking a mile to the nearest stop was something we took in stride. That's great for health, but didn't prevent Germans from being quite fond of their personal automobiles, and there didn't seem to be noticeably less traffic than in the US.

Meanwhile I think plenty of people find Uber perfectly convenient, just a bit expensive.

As far as physical efficiency goes, Tesla's plan is more efficient than their competitors'. Their dedicated robotaxis are either small two-seaters, or decent-size buses.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#587

Post by sensanaty »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #89

Maybe a weird question, but how does a capitalist economy work where AGI-performed-labor is categorically less expensive than human-performed labor? Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?

The whole plan for most of the AI sycophants is to earn a trillion dollars off of selling AI, and whatever happens to the plebs is an afterthought (really, not a thought at all).

I suspect and hope there's gonna be a lot more Luigi Mangione's coming about soon, though.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#588

Post by sillyfluke »

thrw42A8N wrote: post #533
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought everyone wanted him back, Ilyia Sutskever who was the chief Scientist of the company and honestly irreplacable in terms of AI knowledge left after Altman returned.

He also apologized and said he was wrong.

That was only after it was apparent that a majority of employees would back Altman's return I believe. A majority of which who had spent less time with him than Ilya had in all likelihood.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#589

Post by kelseyfrog »

slibhb wrote: post #467
kelseyfrog wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say health; you did. I said mortality which is synonymous with death. Misquoting someone to prove a point is intellectually bankrupt. Take a breath and calm down. Why don't you try stealmanning instead?

"Negatively impacts mortality" doesn't mean "kills" or "causes to die". "Bad for health" is a better interpretation. Do you really believe that unemployment + bankruptcy = death? If you don't believe that, then why are you writing sentences like this: > Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?

Yes. The all-cause mortality hazard ratio for unemployment is 1.85[1]. Nearly doubling mortality is an incredible result. Reducing my argument to a guarantee of death in order to prove it wrong is absurd.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4677456/

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#590

Post by ben_w »

cinntaile wrote: post #583
ben_w wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When price goes down, robotaxis become a more viable option due to convenience and speed. Lower prices don't make things more convenient or fast. > You're shopping? Just put it in the trunk. Have fun with 4 grocery bags on public transport. Here is "The Shops at South Town" mall in Salt Lake City: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5617162,-111.8944801,171m/da... Note that some parts of that car park are 300m from som…

> Lower prices don't make things more convenient or fast. You are replying to a straw man, I never said anything like that. It makes for dull discussions. > Even in my current place, still in Berlin but close to the outskirts without the advantages of density, a mere four grocery bags is easier to get through public transport than it is from one end of an American car park to the other. It's unclear to me why you com…

>> Lower prices don't make things more convenient or fast.

> You are replying to a straw man, I never said anything like that. It makes for dull discussions.

If you didn't mean that, why did you say "When price goes down, robotaxis become a more viable option due to convenience and speed"?

> You should compare the public transport with a robotaxi alternative.

The alternative being "do I put these four bags in a trunk, or on the seat next to me?"

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