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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'

#421

Post by causal »

lvl155 wrote: post #65

Sam is basically a marketing person at this point. If you have the chops to be a leading AI dev, then you likely don’t need or want someone like him to skim a big chunk off of top.

There's a line between product hype and cult-like faith that I think OpenAI straddles way more than any startup I've seen. And it's pretty disappointing how shamelessly they milk that following, even trying to replicate "Her" to feed that particular fantasy in the fanboys.

Comparing the original mission as a nonprofit researching AI safety vs. a for-profit demanding the planet pour trillions of resources into its growth... Wild.

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

#422

Post by j_maffe »

churchill wrote: post #374
j_maffe wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GDP of UAE is 500B, 1.1T in Saudi, and 230B in Qatar. It'd take them decades to provide that kind of money.

All the sovereign wealth funds of the entire Arab Gulf hold less than $3 trillion, saved over decades. And mostly illiquid assets where you can get a 20-30% haircut if you liquidate quickly. Even if they wanted to, they can't even give him $100b/yr for 10 years (i.e., $1 trillion). It's just not feasible or possible. They don't have it anywhere.

Exactly. Even the US would have to dip into their savings to show that kind of money within a few years.

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

#423

Post by svara »

afavour wrote: post #248
napoleoncomplex wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo was providing 10,000 weekly autonomous rides in August 2023, 50,000 in June 2024, and 100,000 in August 2024. Not everything has this trajectory, and it took 10 years more than expected. But it's coming. Not saying AI will be the same, but underestimating the impact of having certain outputs 100x cheaper, even if many times crappier seems like a losing bet, considering how the world has gone so far.

Waymo is a great example, actually. They serve Phoenix, SF and LA. Those locations aren’t chosen at random, they present a small subset of all the weather and road conditions that humans can handle easily. So yes: handling 100,000 passengers is a milestone. The growth from 10,000 to 100,000 implies it’s going to keep growing exponentially. But eventually they’re going to encounter stuff like Midwest winters that can…

This exchange is a great example of two people arguing about whether the glass is half full or half empty! You're clearly both right, in your own way.

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

#424

Post by no_op »

slashdave wrote: post #309
no_op wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In his recent "Intelligence Age" post, Altman says superintelligence may be only a few thousand days out. This might, of course, be wrong, but skyrocketing demand for chips is a straightforward consequence of taking it seriously.

Only if you think scaling is the solution to AGI, which it almost certainly is not

Demand for compute will skyrocket given AGI even if AGI turns out to be relatively compute-efficient. The ability to translate compute directly into humanlike intelligence simply makes compute much more valuable.

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

#425

Post by rrrix1 »

rsynnott wrote: post #290
no_op wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In his recent "Intelligence Age" post, Altman says superintelligence may be only a few thousand days out. This might, of course, be wrong, but skyrocketing demand for chips is a straightforward consequence of taking it seriously.

> may be only a few thousand days out This is actually quite clever phrasing. "A few thousand days" is about ten years, assuming normal usage of 'few' (ie usually a number between 3 and 6 inclusive). Now, if you, as a tech company, say "X is ten years away", anyone who has been around for a while will entirely disregard your claim, because forward-looking statements in that range by tech companies are _always_ wrong;…

"Tech CEO declares major breakthrough is within reach, less than a handful of a billion seconds..."

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

#426

Post by namaria »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #392
namaria wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?"

If the difference between now and 6 years in the future is the same as the difference between now and 6 years ago, a lot of people here will be eating their hats.

Why? What exactly have we got for the (how many hundred) billions of dollars poured into GPUs running transformers over the past 6 years?

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

#427

Post by Foobar8568 »

croes wrote: post #420
mft_ wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; but laughing at the scale of someone’s ambition (or vision?) might just mean that one’s own is too narrow or limited. After all, there are lots of narrow-minded, un-visionary folks out there. Just because there’s an anti-Altman/-OpenAI sentiment on HN at the moment, it doesn’t mean that he’s wrong about everything, nor the people at TSMC are necessarily right.

SpaceX needed NASA money. Where does Altmann get $7 trillion dollars

From his non profit :D

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

#428

Post by tarsinge »

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…

SWE became way more productive with Email and the Internet, did that lead to a significant part of them getting fired?

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

#429

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

bdndndndbve wrote: post #10

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.

>The winter after this is gonna be harsh.

The difference is current ML already has real use cases right now in its current form. Some examples are OCR, text to speech, speech to text, translation, recommendations (for eg. Facebook Tiktok etc.) and simple NLP tasks ("was [topic] mentioned in the following paragraph"). Even if AGI is proved impossible, these are real use cases that hold billions in value. And ML research is also considered a prestigious and interesting field academically and that will likely not change even if investors give up on funding AGI.

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

#430

Post by slashdave »

no_op wrote: post #424
slashdave wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you think scaling is the solution to AGI, which it almost certainly is not

Demand for compute will skyrocket given AGI even if AGI turns out to be relatively compute-efficient. The ability to translate compute directly into humanlike intelligence simply makes compute much more valuable.

Input and output, given that they must connect with the physical world, seems to me to be the likely limiting resource, unless you think isolated virtual worlds will have value on to themselves
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