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It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

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Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#171

Post by nemothekid »

JohnMakin wrote: post #157
nemothekid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's right on the AI stuff? How do you figure that? As far as I can tell, OpenAI is still operating. It sounds like you agree with him on the AI stuff, but he could be wrong, just like how he was wrong about remote work. I'm actually more inclined to believe he's wrong if he gets so defensive about criticism. That tells me he's more focused on protecting his ego than actually uncovering the truth.

The fact that OpenAI is still operating and the argument that it is completely unsustainable are not two incompatible things.

Wether or not OpenAI is sustainable or not is only a question that can be answered in hindsight. If OpenAI is still around in 10 years, in the same sort of capacity, does OP become retroactively wrong?

My point is, you can agree that OpenAI is unsustainable, but it's not clear to me that is a decided fact, rather than an open conjecture. And if someone is making that decision from a place of ego, I have greater reason to believe that they didn't reason themselves into that position.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#172

Post by ACCount37 »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #135
karel-3d wrote: post #83

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

I like reading Zitron’s output, but this remark stood out to me as him weighing in on a domain he’s basically clueless about. Spread across 4 years, there’s way more than $1tn in available private capital. Berkshire Hathaway alone has 1/3 of that sitting in a cash pile right now. You don’t have to look at many balance sheets to see that the big tech companies are all also sitting on huge piles of cash. I don’t person…

Isn't that every domain?

The dude is a living embodiment of "overconfident and wrong". He picks a side, then cherry picks until he has it all lined up so that his side is Obviously Right and anything else is Obviously Wrong.

Then reality happens and he's proven wrong, but he never fucking learns.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#173

Post by bigyabai »

tptacek wrote: post #113
thereitgoes456 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was wryly communicating, "your argument was so stupid I don't even need to engage with it". In my experience he has a horrible response to criticism. He's right on the AI stuff, but he responds to both legitimate and illegitimate feedback without much thoughtfulness, usually non-sequitur redirect or ad hominem . In his defense though, I expect 97% of feedback he gets is Sam Altman glazers, and he must be tired.

Is he right on the AI stuff? Like, on the OpenAI company stuff he could be? I don't know? But on the technology? He really doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.

> But on the technology? He really doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.

That puts him roughly on-par with everyone who isn't Gerganov or Karpathy.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#174

Post by impossiblefork »

yubblegum wrote: post #41
kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

> Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driver model. I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say Ora to Ingress) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not…

It's reasonable to question it, but there's a fun Chinese paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15855) where they attempt to create a system of prompts that can be used with commercial LLMs to solve hard maths problems.

It turns out that they can use the same prompt system for all of them, with no changes and still solve 5/6 IMO problems. I think this is possibly iffy, since people might have updated the models etc., but it's pretty obvious that this kind of thing is how OpenAI are doing their multi-stage thinking thing for maths internally.

Consequently if prompt systems are this transferable for these hard problems, why wouldn't both they and individual prompts, be highly transferable in general?

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#175

Post by ACCount37 »

remich wrote: post #140
B56b wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectably...what?? Ed at this point is one of the most well read people on Earth for this topic. Of course he knows the difference between the companies and the technology. He goes in depth both on why he think the companies are financially unviable AND why he's unimpressed by LLM's technologically alllll the time.

Having a large audience does not imply being the most well informed or correct.

"Saying what a lot of people want to hear" is not a good proxy for truthfulness or correctness.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#176

Post by llbbdd »

dgfitz wrote: post #165
llbbdd wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a stronger case for world hunger being bottlenecked than healthcare. World hunger is a logistics problem now, but no amount of money lets you print doctors.

With a little bit of lag time (school) we could have a metric fuckton of doctors. We have a metric fuckton of shitty lawyers. Doctors are artificially gated in the US What’s the joke? “What do you call the person who graduated last in their class from med school? A doctor.”

Sure, I think that helps my point. You can't create "good" doctors out of thin air with money, just "more" doctors, and it takes forever.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#177

Post by tim333 »

karel-3d wrote: post #97
lkrubner wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In late 2021, Ed Zitron wrote (on Twitter) that the future of all work was "work from home" and that no one would ever work in an office again. I responded: "In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear their processes to handle external workers. Now that the companies have invested in these changed processes, they are finding it easier to o…

I generally don't agree with him on much; it's just nobody really talks about how much money those companies burn, and are expected to burn, in bigger perspective. For me 10 billion, 100 billion and 1 trillion are all very abstract numbers - until you show much unreal 1 trillion is.

It helps if you divide by the world population. Say ~10bn for this purpose so that's $1, $10 or $100 per head roughly.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#178

Post by lm28469 »

tptacek wrote: post #116
jaredcwhite wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ed Zitron may be many things but he is no grifter. He writes what he believes and believes what he says, and I basically agree with all of it. The chattering class in SV has been wildly wrong for years, and they'll really look foolish when the market crashes horribly and these companies collapse.

He's saying more than that the companies are going to collapse; he's making pronouncements about the underlying technology, which are claims that are much harder to defend. I'm not entirely sure he understands the distinction between the companies and the technology, though.

Lecun pretty much says the same things, as most experts actually. Only the execs and marketing teams keep yapping about AGI

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#179

Post by georgebcrawford »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #98
pjmlp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worked great, Web is ChromeOS Platform for all practical purposes, with Firefox meagre 3%, and Safari only being relevant thanks to iOS, and the whole Electron crap as "native apps".

Whats more, every single child here in Australia is learning on a school issued Chrome Book. To my kids, a spread sheet is google sheets and a power point is google slides. (We were joking about it just last week because my partner asked my eldest what was the Power Point he was working on and he said, "Whats Power Point?")

> every single child here in Australia is learning on a school issued Chrome Book

Many? Most? Possibly, but absolutely not every single one.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#180

Post by mschuster91 »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #168
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI WANTS 1 trillion dollars. They do not need it. Arguably no one needs it. I am at best luke-warm on LLMs, but how are any sane people rationalizing these requests? What is the opportunity cost of spending a billion or even a hundred billion dollars on compute instead of on climate tech or food security or healthcare or literally anything else?!

Well, it's the rich's money, dedicated to replacing as many people as possible in the Great war on labor. I easily see the rich betting a trillion dollars especially if it's not their money and they start employing government funds in the name of a fictitious AI arms race. They smell blood in the water. Reducing everyone to as minimum wage as possible. Capital is already concentrated, aligned along monopolies and car…

> Well, it's the rich's money, dedicated to replacing as many people as possible in the Great war on labor.

A lot of "the rich's" money is actually backed by the pension funds, 401k and similar investment vehicles.

That's the dirty secret in most of today's world. A lot of ultra-large companies would absolutely deserve getting broken up just for being way too powerful, the problem is any such attempts would send the stonk markets and, with them, people's pensions tanking.

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