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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'

#361

Post by airstrike »

davidbalbert wrote: post #190
stackghost wrote: post #123

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.

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…

I swear I read this exact same thread in nearly every post about OpenAI on HN. It's getting to a point where it almost feels like it's all generated by LLMs

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

#362

Post by airstrike »

bdndndndbve wrote: post #75
llmfan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is one of those "controversial" topics where we're meant to be particularly careful to make substantial comments.

I think it's substantial to say that AI is currently overhyped because it's hitting a weak spot in human cognition. We sympathize with inanimate objects. We see faces in random patterns. If a machine spits out some plausible looking text (or some cookie-cutter code copy-pasted from Stack Overflow) the human brain is basically hardwired to go "wow this is a human friend!". The current LLM trend seems designed to capit…

> If a machine spits out some plausible looking text (or some cookie-cutter code copy-pasted from Stack Overflow)

This is not a reasonable take on the current capabilities of LLMs.

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

#363

Post by salawat »

jsemrau wrote: post #230
jsheard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just a thought exercise. If we would have an AI with the intellectual capabilities of a Ph.D holding professor in a hard science. How much would it be worth for you to have access to that AI? 100,000 ? 500,000 ?

0 unless what I'm interested in is that Professor's very narrowly tailored niche. It's called Piled Higher and Deeper for a reason.

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

#364

Post by dizzydes »

snowwrestler wrote: post #162
dizzydes wrote: post #72

Three things that get me about current AI discourse: - The public focus on AGI is almost a distraction. By the time we get to AGI highly-specialised models will have taken jobs from huge swaths of the population, SWE and CS are already in play. - That AI will need to carry out every task a role does to replace it. I see this a lot on HN. What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half? That's still a gigantic…

If an AI can do my job, why would my employer fire me? Why wouldn’t they be excited to get 200% productivity out of me for the marginal cost of an AI seat license? A lot of the predictions of job loss are predicated on an unspoken assumption that we’re sitting at “task maximum” so any increase in productivity must result in job loss. It’s only true if there is no more work to be done. But no one seems to be willing o…

It depends on who your employer is.

If they're high growth yes, if they're in the majority of businesses that are just trying to maximise profit with negligible or no growth then likely not.

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

#365

Post by mattgreenrocks »

sensanaty wrote: post #202
Roark66 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand how anyone can use these tools (copilot especially) to make entire projects from scratch and expand them later. They just lead you down the wrong path 90% of the time. Personally I much prefer Chatgpt. I give it specific small problems to resolve and some context. At most 100 lines of code. If it gets more the quality goes to shit. In fact copilot feels like chatgpt that was given too much context.

I hear it all the time on HN that people are producing entire apps with LLMs, but I just don't believe it. All of my experiences with LLMs have been that for anything that isn't a braindead-simple for loop is just unworkable garbage that takes more effort to fix than if you just wrote it from scratch to begin with. And then you're immediately met with "You're using it wrong!", "You're using the wrong model!", "You're…

You aren’t the only one that feels this way.

After 20 years of being held accountable for the quality of my code in production, I cannot help but feel a bit gaslit that decision-makers are so elated with these tools despite their flaws that they threaten to take away jobs.

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

#366

Post by kranke155 »

gazook89 wrote: post #310
kranke155 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Industrial Revolution was a period of massive economic growth that was coupled with decline in the quality of life of the average worker. This Economist article talks about how looking at the historical data, historians now see that the height of the average Englishman actually went down due to malnutrition. https://web.archive.org/web/20210905065401/https://www.econo... The myth that the Industrial Revolution wa…

Do people really think the Industrial Revolution was “a wonderful time”? Basically the first thought to comes to mind for me is massive migration to urban centers, along with huge amount of poverty and squalid living conditions and disassociation with your own labor. I feel like that was basically what was taught to me in High School too, not like some recently learned insight. And I agree with you. Further, the argu…

I’ve heard some people say it. That economic disruption doesn’t matter because “all the pieces fall into place” eventually and the Industrial Revolution being an example.

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

#367

Post by mattgreenrocks »

flir wrote: post #245
sensanaty wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear it all the time on HN that people are producing entire apps with LLMs, but I just don't believe it. All of my experiences with LLMs have been that for anything that isn't a braindead-simple for loop is just unworkable garbage that takes more effort to fix than if you just wrote it from scratch to begin with. And then you're immediately met with "You're using it wrong!", "You're using the wrong model!", "You're…

Just for fun, give it a function you wrote, and ask it if it can make any improvements. I reckon I accept about a third of what it suggests.

Not a bad use, though I argue being able to do that critique yourself has a compounding effect over time that is worthwhile.

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

#368

Post by dizzydes »

bob1029 wrote: post #151

It is clear to me that Sam has never set foot inside of a semiconductor manufacturing facility. Or, if he did he definitely wasn't paying attention to what was going on around him. I don't know how you could witness these things and then make glib statements about building 36 of them. It will likely take well over a decade to recoup investment on any new chip fab at this point. Chasing ~4 customers on one narrow use…

Facilities aside, I hear talent is a massive bottleneck. Especially in the US.

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

#369

Post by rurp »

binocarlos wrote: post #30
jsheard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Fairly standard greenfield projects seem to be the absolute best scenario for an LLM. It is impressive, but that's not what most professional software development work is, in my experience. Even once I know what specifically to code I spend much more time ensuring that code will be consistent and maintainable with the rest of the project than with just getting it to work. So far I haven't found LLMs to be all that good at that sort of work.

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

#370

Post by namaria »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #270
pluc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a whole industry of people who fix what AI has created. I don't know if it will be faster to build the wrong thing and pay to have it fixed or to build the right thing from the get go, but after having seen some shit, like you, I have a little idea.

That industry will only form if LLMs don't improve from here. But the evidence, both theoretical and empirical, is quite the opposite. In fact one of the core reasons transformers gained so much traction is because they scale so well. If nothing really changes in 3-5 years, then I'd call it a flop. But the writing is on the wall that "scale = smarts", and what we have today still looks like a foundational stage for L…

> In fact one of the core reasons transformers gained so much traction is because they scale so well.

> If nothing really changes in 3-5 years, then I'd call it a flop

Transformers have been used for what 6 years now? Will you in 6 years say "I'll decide if they don't change the world in another 6 years?"

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