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Why I Joined OpenAI

brendangregg.com

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Re: Why I Joined OpenAI

#221

Post by manuelmoreale »

UltraSane wrote: post #217
manuelmoreale wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s honestly just sad. Not the fact you doing it, but rather the fact you have nobody to talk to about those things.

When I say nerdy and/or obscure, I mean things like "are quantum fluctuations ergodic and how does this affect affect the probability of a quantum fluctuation triggering a new big bang?"

Call me weird, I know absolutely nothing about what you just wrote but I'm super intrigued now and would love to know more, ah. But that's just because I'm generally curious about pretty much everything.

But I can see why it can be hard to find people to talk about that. Heck it might be hard to find people who even know about that topic in general.

Re: Why I Joined OpenAI

#222

Post by mirekrusin »

raincole wrote: post #103
petterroea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a 25% reduction in resource usage will probably not be enough, AI datacenters are still a huge resource sink after all

If you reduce energy consumption of training a new model by 25%, OpenAI will just buy more hardware and try to churn out a new model 25% faster. The total consumption will be exactly the same. And they're 100% justified to do so, until they hit another bottleneck (when there is literally not that much Nvidia hardware to buy, for example.)

Not only that, every optimization gain makes it more attractive and creates even more demand, ie. effective energy usage will not decrease or stay the same - it will increase.

It's like with electric cars - if you make them more efficient, it doesn't mean less electricity will be used but more as it'll become more attractive, more people will switch to electric cars.

Re: Why I Joined OpenAI

#224

Post by cheesepaint »

Banditoz wrote: post #4

> ...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet There's something that doesn't sit right with me about this statement, and I'm not sure what it is. Are you sure you didn't just join for the money? (edit: cool problems, too)

For me, it just sounds like a ChatGPT-generated sentence. Especially, it likes to write sentences like "it's not just about... - it's about ..." and it first sounds legit, but it doesn't really make much sense when you start to think about it.

Re: Why I Joined OpenAI

#225

Post by watwut »

webdevver wrote: post #200
foltik wrote: post #193

It’s so jarring to hear this reality-detached writing style coming from someone who’s otherwise a great systems thinker. This is like my worst nightmare as a systems engineer: that years of navigating bureaucracy at a place like Intel slowly brainrots me into prioritizing politics and self-promotion over the technical truth. I hope this is just PR reflex and not an actual loss of grounding.

imo the engineers who stay in their nuts-and-bolts lane - those are the ones who are at a real risk of 'brainrot', who sometimes at the ripe age of 50+ continue to misunderstand what motivates management, the executives, seemingly unable to model anyones minds other than their own (or that of a very predictable entity, like a computer.) infact, you could argue that politics is in some sense the biggest, most complex…

None of what you wrote is contradiction to what OP wrote. They found self delusion, emptiness of claims and outrught lies of certain class of people to not be worth of respect.

Just explained it can be fun and involves trade offs. Well ok, but these claims of saving world are still empty bullshit. It is perfectlt fine to be aware of that fact.

We dont have to pretend grandiose claims of Musks and Altmans and Bezos and whatever management trues to please them are reflections of their search of positive impact.

Re: Why I Joined OpenAI

#226

Post by specialist »

Hi Brendan. Thanks for the update. Ignore the haters.

WRT "AI saving the planet", obviously.

We need ungodly amounts of machine learning. Weather modeling, forecasting, resilience planning, risk mgmt, planning, etc.

To implement virtual power plants (aka P2P distributed grid), everything needs to get smart. Just this transformation alone is a generational project.

There's dozens more of "must have" stacks we need to tackle climate crisis. Replace industrial heat. Decarbonize agriculture. Build out geothermal. Find and stop methane leaks. Pretty much everything needs a makeover, really.

OpenAI is as good a place (for you) to start as any.

Happy hunting.

Re: Why I Joined OpenAI

#227

Post by MonkeyClub »

torlok wrote: post #207
Thaxll wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI train is going with or without you, if you can be part of it and improve the situaton, why not.

Same thing was said about crypto.

Same thing is said about peddling drugs. Profit doesn't push ethical problems aside, though, or at least shouldn't.

At least nobody peddling drugs tried to convince anyone they're doing it to "save the planet".

Re: Why I Joined OpenAI

#228

Post by MonkeyClub »

ulnarkressty wrote: post #100
perf99999999999 wrote: post #69

Brendan, I'm a big fan of your book, and work. I don't have a problem with you joining OpenAI; best of luck there! However, I'm not sure your analysis is quite correct, in this case. If OpenAI can mobilize X (giga)dollars to buy Y amounts of energy, your work there will not reduce X or Y, it will simply help them produce more "tokens" (or whatever "unit of AI") for a given amount of energy. So in a sense you're helpi…

Was going to say the same thing, but I'm pretty sure he already knows that. Smart people can convince themselves of everything.

Anyone can convince themselves of anything, the only thing that varies is the complexity of the rationalization.

Re: Why I Joined OpenAI

#229

Post by jimmydddd »

robby_w_g wrote: post #44
Banditoz wrote: post #4

> ...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet There's something that doesn't sit right with me about this statement, and I'm not sure what it is. Are you sure you didn't just join for the money? (edit: cool problems, too)

Reminds me of when I was younger and thought of companies like Google and Tesla as a force for good that will create and use technology to make people's lives better. Surely OpenAI and these LLM companies will change the world for the better, right? They wouldn't burn down our planet for short-term monetary gain, right? I've learned over the years that I was naive and it's a coincidence if the tech giants make people…

I saw this video where this gen z girl was saying she preferred working for boomers who just wanted her to show up on time, get her work done, and maybe stay a little late from time to time. She said it was exhausting working for millenials who wanted her to think her job was "saving the world."

Re: Why I Joined OpenAI

#230

Post by UltraSane »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #221
UltraSane wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I say nerdy and/or obscure, I mean things like "are quantum fluctuations ergodic and how does this affect affect the probability of a quantum fluctuation triggering a new big bang?"

Call me weird, I know absolutely nothing about what you just wrote but I'm super intrigued now and would love to know more, ah. But that's just because I'm generally curious about pretty much everything. But I can see why it can be hard to find people to talk about that. Heck it might be hard to find people who even know about that topic in general.

Not many people without at least a masters degree in physics know what "ergodic" means.
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