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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'

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Build fabs Such a misguided take. If it were that easy to build fabs to compete with TSMC, Intel would do it. China would do it. Hardware is way harder than software.

Or maybe, just maybe, TSMC has gaslit all of us to think it is much harder than it really is. If Taiwan isn't needed for its chips, what is the strategic interest of the USG?

No, TSMC is really that special. Intel has been struggling for a while now.

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

#182
post #20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Claude 3.5 Sonnet in Cursor Composer already shows huge benefits for coding. I'm more productive than ever before. The models are still getting better and better. I'm not saying AGI is right around the corner or that we will reach it, but the benefits are undeniable. o1 added test-time compute. No need to be snarky.

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…

Why do you assume they’re losing money on inference?

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

#183
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Arguing over terminology like "AGI" and the verb "to know" is a waste of time. The question is what tools can be built from them and how can people use those tools.

I'm directly responding to a comment discussing the popular perception that we, as a society, are "steps away" from AGI. It sounds like you agree that we aren't anywhere close to AGI. If you want to discuss the potential for LLMs to disrupt the economy there's definitely space for that discussion but that isn't the comment I was making.

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

#184

7 trillion is absurd. The recent advancements in AI are real, but not on the order of 7T.

they will be. Looking at the rate of progress (just tried o1mini), its inevitable.

>the rate of progress

Let's talk about that. GPT-3.5 (specifically text-davinci-003) was a massive leap over everything that came before it. GPT-4 was a massive leap over GPT-3.5. Everything since (GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o, GPT o1) feels like steady incremental improvement (putting aside multimodal capabilities) rather than massive leaps. I'm far from convinced that the rate of progress made with foundation models in 2022-2023 has continued in 2024 let alone from extrapolating that it will continue for the next several years.

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

#186

He may have the last laugh. His traveling around the world and threatening to build fabs in the UAE and Taiwan is a diplomatic scheme to get the U.S. hawks into action. And lo and behold, ClopenAI has already hired CHIPS act people: "To bolster its efforts, OpenAI has hired Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House lawyer, as its vice president of global policy, along with two people from the Commerce Department who worked…

> Build fabs Such a misguided take. If it were that easy to build fabs to compete with TSMC, Intel would do it. China would do it. Hardware is way harder than software.

Threatening to build fabs is not addressed at you but designed to trigger idiot politicians with influence to unlock CHIPS money. The politicians do not know or care if building fabs is possible.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Current LLMs fail if what you're coding is not the most common of tasks. And a simple web app is about as basic as it gets. I've tried using LLMs for some libraries I'm working on, and they failed miserably. Trying to make an LLM implement a trait with a generic type in Rust is a game of luck with very poor chances. I'm sure LLMs can massively speed up tasks like front-end JavaScript development, simple Python script…

I work in video games, I've tried several AI assistants for C++ coding and they are all borderline useless for anything beyond writing some simple for loops. Not enough training data to be useful I bet, but I guess that's where the disparity is - web apps, python....that has tonnes of publicly available code that it can train on. Writing code that manages GPU calls on a PS5? Yeah, good luck with that.

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

#188

He may have the last laugh. His traveling around the world and threatening to build fabs in the UAE and Taiwan is a diplomatic scheme to get the U.S. hawks into action. And lo and behold, ClopenAI has already hired CHIPS act people: "To bolster its efforts, OpenAI has hired Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House lawyer, as its vice president of global policy, along with two people from the Commerce Department who worked…

> We'll build plants overseas if you don't give us CHIPS Act money is a great scheme

The CHIPS act has provisions to help fund fabs in allies.

This is why Biden and Modi announced a Feb dedicated to US and Indian defense systems [0] at the QUAD summit as well as as the designation of the UAE as a "Major Defence Partner" along with India [1] which includes tech transfer conditions.

A significant portion of the CHIPS and IRA is set aside to help with subsidizing international allies tech and innovation ecosystems in order to ensure they don't lean towards China [2]

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-23/biden-mod...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harris-plans-raise-gaza-cea...

[2] - https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/agile-alliances/

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

#189
post #16

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.

Using Claude 3.5 Sonnet in Cursor Composer already shows huge benefits for coding. I'm more productive than ever before. The models are still getting better and better. I'm not saying AGI is right around the corner or that we will reach it, but the benefits are undeniable. o1 added test-time compute. No need to be snarky.

I’ll be waiting for these developer benefits to translate into tangible end user benefits in software.

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

#190
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.

I sometimes wonder if we’re just very advanced stochastic parrots.

Repeatedly, we’ve thought that humans and animals were different in kind, only to find that we’re actually just different in degree: elephants mourn their dead, dolphins have sex for pleasure, crows make tools (even tools out of multiple non-useful parts! [1]). That could be true here.

LLMs are impressive. Nobody knows whether they will or won’t lead to AGI (if we could even agree on a definition – there’s a lot of No True Scotsman in that conversation). My uneducated guess is that that you’re probably right: just continuing to scale LLMs without other advancements won’t get us there.

But I wish we were all more humble about this. There’s been a lot of interesting emergent behavior with these systems, and we just don’t know what will happen.

[1]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-10-24-new-caledonian-crows-ca...

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