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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'

#531

Post by slibhb »

lucianbr wrote: post #167
ramraj07 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noam Chomsky and Doug Hofstader had the same opinion. Last I checked Doug has recanted his skepticism and is seriously afraid for the future of humanity. I’ll listen to him and my own gut than some random internet people still insisting this is all a nothing burger.

The thing is my gut is telling me this is a nothing burger, and I'll listen to my own gut before yours - a random internet person insisting this is going to change the world. So what exactly is the usefulness of this discussion? You think "I'll trust my gut" is a useful argument in a debate?

I'm convinced that the "LLMs are useless" contingent on HN is just psychological displacement.

It hurts the pride of technical people that there's a revolution going on that they aren't involved in. Easier to just deny it or act like it's unimpressive.

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

#532

Post by tester756 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #527
KK7NIL wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Funny how you didn't address my first point which completely disproves your lie about Intel sending CHIPS money to TSMC. 2) It does get more recent than that: Granite Rapids (Xeon 6 built fully on Intel processes) and Gaudi 3 (TSMC built) were announced on the 24th and will be released later this year. Maybe you shouldn't get so sassy when discussing things you know very little about.

> ...and will be released later this year You answered your own question; it's not a product on the market and therefore not released yet. > ...which completely disproves your lie about Intel sending CHIPS money to TSMC I mean, this is kinda silly right? If I get a $48,000 a year housing stipend that I can only spend on housing, that means I have $48,000 more to spend elsewhere. Also, you're arguing a strawman here.…

>I mean, this is kinda silly right? If I get a $48,000 a year housing stipend that I can only spend on housing, that means I have $48,000 more to spend elsewhere.

They didn't receive any money from CHIPS Act yet, did they?

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

#533

Post by oska »

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

The mistake isn't thinking 'scaling is the solution to AGI'.

And the mistake isn't thinking more generally about 'the solution to AGI'.

The mistake is thinking about 'AGI'.

There will never be an artificial general intelligence. There will never artificial intelligence, full stop.

It's a fun concept in science fiction (and earlier parallel concepts in fantasy literature and folk tales). It's not and will never be reality. If you think it can be then either you are suffering from 'science fiction brain' or you are a fraud (Sam Altman) or you are both (possibly Sam Altman again).

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

#534

Post by snowwrestler »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #529
snowwrestler wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer already does in seconds what it used to take many people to do. In fact the word “computer” was a job title; now it describes the machine that replaced those jobs. Yet people are still employed today. They are doing the many new jobs that the productivity boost of digital computing created. Productivity creates jobs.

I don't know why people think analogies from the past predict or prove anything in the future. It's as if a different situation applies completely to the current situation via analogy EVEN though both situations are DIFFERENT. The computer created jobs because it takes human skills to talk to the computer. It takes very little skill to talk to an LLM. Why would your manager ask you to prompt an LLM to do something fo…

My job is not to do a certain fixed set of tasks, my job is to do whatever my employer needs me to do. If an LLM can do part of the tasks I complete now, then I will leave those tasks to the LLM and move on to the rest of what my employer needs done.

Now you might say AI means that I will run out of things that my employer needs me to do. And I'll repeat what I said above: you've got to prove that. I'm not going to take it on faith that you have sussed out the complete future of business.

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

#535

Post by ninetyninenine »

snowwrestler wrote: post #534
ninetyninenine wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people think analogies from the past predict or prove anything in the future. It's as if a different situation applies completely to the current situation via analogy EVEN though both situations are DIFFERENT. The computer created jobs because it takes human skills to talk to the computer. It takes very little skill to talk to an LLM. Why would your manager ask you to prompt an LLM to do something fo…

My job is not to do a certain fixed set of tasks, my job is to do whatever my employer needs me to do. If an LLM can do part of the tasks I complete now, then I will leave those tasks to the LLM and move on to the rest of what my employer needs done. Now you might say AI means that I will run out of things that my employer needs me to do. And I'll repeat what I said above: you've got to prove that. I'm not going to t…

Future or events that haven't happened yet can't be proven out because it's an unknown.

What we can do is make a logical and theoretical extrapolation. If AI progresses to the point where it can do every single task you can do in seconds, what task is there for you left to do? And how hard is the task? If LLMs never evolve to the point where they can clean toilets, well then you can do that, but why would the boss pay you 300k to clean the toilet?

These are all logical conjectures on a possible future. The problem here is that if AI continues on the same trendline it's traveling on now I can't come up with a logical chain of thought where YOU or I keep our 300k+ engineering jobs.

This is what I keep hearing from not just you, but a ton of people. That analogy about how technology only created more jobs before with no illustration of a specific scenario of what's going on here. Yeah if LLMs replace almost every aspect of human intellectual analysis, design, art and engineering what is there left to do?

Clean the toilet. I'm not even kidding. We still have things we can do but the end comes when robotics catches up and is able to make robots as versatile as the human form. That's the true end when the boss has chatGPT clean the toilet.

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

#536

Post by anon291 »

threeseed wrote: post #510
anon291 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a) Given how geopolitical semiconductors and AI are right now. Why he is running around the world running his mouth seemingly without the cooperation of the US government. As an American citizen you don't need to cooperate with the US government to talk to other people.

> Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United State…

TSMC is not the Taiwanese government, and besides, according to American foreign policy, the Taiwanese government is not a government either.

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

#537

Post by dreamcompiler »

tim333 wrote: post #507
dreamcompiler wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One time long ago there were people living on an island who had never had contact with anybody else. They marveled at the nature around them and dreamed of harnessing it. They looked up at the moon at night and said "Some day we will go there." But they lived in grass huts and the highest they had ever been off the ground was when they climbed a tree. One day a genius was born on the island. She built a structure tal…

Impressive stepladder.

...or perhaps unimpressive trees

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

#538

Post by FireBeyond »

leobg wrote: post #503
FireBeyond wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn't there from the beginning. PayPal was trademarked and was at MVP stage when they merged. He was the biggest shareholder, absolutely. His operational input to PayPal was four months in 2000, before being fired. Since then his involvement was "collecting shareholder dividends". He wasn't the marketing guy. He was the guy who got fired because his tenure as CEO was "I don't understand this Java stuff, and I wan…

You worked there at the time?

No - this is all from Max Levchin (who actually did build the MVP of PayPal) in Founders at Work.

Musk made some amusing comments that he thought were insightful about this that showed how little he really knew:

He also suggested that PayPal should have written its front end in C++ (because C++ in 2000 was an excellent choice for front-end web development?!?), and later cited Blizzard writing WoW in C++ as proof that this was the correct decision that Max and the board never understood.

(Oh, and "Microsoft has a DLL library for anything you could possibly ever want to do, but you can't get Unix libraries for anything.")

He also said that Max "never really understood this" despite Musk's efforts to educate him, and that these decisions are also why PayPal "hasn't been able really add any new features".

He then complained about the Board's decision to fire him as making him "more careful about who he allowed to invest in his companies in the future": 1) he was the largest shareholder, but it was not "his" company, he only held a fraction of it, and 2) the idea wasn't even his! Really what he means here is "I want to make sure to hand-select a bunch of yes-men so I get what I want regardless of whose idea it is, how good the idea is, and what I want to do with it."

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

#539

Post by nhnske »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #414
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.

One time long ago there were people living on an island who had never had contact with anybody else. They marveled at the nature around them and dreamed of harnessing it. They looked up at the moon at night and said "Some day we will go there." But they lived in grass huts and the highest they had ever been off the ground was when they climbed a tree. One day a genius was born on the island. She built a structure tal…

but we reached the moon, didn't we?

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

#540

Post by ksec »

calf wrote: post #508
lizknope wrote: post #273

I read the NY Times article that someone else linked to in the thread. I've been in semiconductor / chip design for almost 30 years at 8 different companies including 2 that owned their own fabs. I've also worked on 2 different AI accelerator chips. Altman sounds like someone who has no idea about the industry. The numbers in the article are laughable. This quote summed it up. > It is still unclear how all this would…

He's a Steve Jobs type C-level manager. The actual knowledge people are scientists such as Ilya Sutskever et al., many of whom left their company over the past year. The question is whether LLMs are going to plateau. Either OpenAI and the tech industry system can keep progress going, or else more basic science is needed, in which case a government-project level of coordination is needed instead.

>He's a Steve Jobs type C-level manager.

Steve Jobs actually knows a lot more about many things than most people realise.

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