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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'

#561

Post by lizknope »

ksec wrote: post #541
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…

>Altman sounds like someone who has no idea about the industry. I think it also sums up a lot about what I am seeing from software developers in general. Very little understanding of hardware. And even more so about hardware industry itself. HN itself is a very good example and evidence.

I see people on HN approach their lack of knowledge with a little more humility than the way Altman sounds in the article. He seems to be one of those people who thinks "I'm an expert in my area therefore I am an expert in all areas." The really smart people know what they know and also what they don't know and surround themselves with people that have the knowledge they lack. Someone he trusts should be telling him his ideas for fab expansion are crazy.

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

#562

Post by kranuckle »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #353
znpy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had similar experiences: 1. Aasked ChatGPT to write a simple echo server in C but with this twist: use io_uring rather than the classic sendmsg/recvmsg. The code it spat out wouldn't compile, let alone work. It was wrong on many points. It was clearly pieces of who-knows-what cut and pasted together. However after having banged my head on the docs for a while I could clearly determine from which sources the code io…

Yep. LLMs don’t really reason about code, which turns out to not be a problem for a lot of programming nowadays. I think devs don’t even realize that the substrate they build on requires this sort of reasoning. This is probably why there’s such a divide when you try to talk about software dev online. One camp believes that it boils down to duct taping as many ready made components together all in pursuit of impact an…

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

#563

Post by kranuckle »

gambiting wrote: post #187
aniviacat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#564

Post by kranuckle »

ilaksh wrote: post #460
aniviacat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which model exactly? You understand that every few months we are getting dramatically better models? Did you try the one that came out within the last week or so (o1-preview).

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

#565

Post by kranuckle »

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…

I think it’s more that if you want to believe it’s magic future tech then it looks like it.

If you aren’t on board then it looks impressive but flawed and not even close to living up to the hype.

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

#566

Post by kranuckle »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #470
shriek wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time the entire apps are just a timer app or something simple. Never a complex app with tons of logic in them. And if you're having to write paragraphs of texts to write something complex then might as well just write that in a programming language, I mean isn't that what high-level programming language was built for? (heh). Also, you're not the only one who's had the thought that someone is vested in som…

You can write the high level structure yourself and let it complete the boilerplate code within the functions, where it's less critical/complicated. Can save you time.

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

#567

Post by kzzzznot »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #216
snowwrestler wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? They’d be excited at getting 100x of 100% output out an AI for 20 dollars a month and laying you off as redundant. If you aren’t scared of the potential of this technology you are lying to yourself.

“Fixed lump of work fallacy” as noted by commenter above. If a company can get 100% more output they don’t fire half their people so they stand still/get no additional productivity gain.

They produce twice as much and grow.

What forum is this???

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

#568

Post by kzzzznot »

physicsguy wrote: post #277
snowwrestler wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: I’m only made redundant if there is no more work that my employer needs me to do. Why should I be scared of technology that makes me more productive?

This assumes that the bottleneck to profitability is the limit of software engineers they can afford to hire. If they’re happy with current rate of progress (and in many companies that is the case), then a productivity increase of 100% means they need half the current number of engineers.

Sure that means they need half the number of engineers to stand still. Most companies aim to grow not stand still.

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

#569

Post by brookst »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #201
brookst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason to believe costs won’t come down with scale and hardware iteration, just like they did for everything else? Short term pricing inefficiency is not relevant to long term impact.

Of course, but every token generated by a 100B model is going to take minimally 100B FLOPS, and if this is being used as an IDE typing assistant then there is going to be a lot of tokens being generated. If there is a common shift to using additional runtime compute to improve quality of output, such as OpenAI's GPT-o1, then FLOPs required goes up massively (OpenAI has said it takes exponential increase in FLOPS/cost…

> but every token generated by a 100B model is going to take minimally 100B FLOPS

Drop the S, I think. There’s no time dimension.

And FLOP is a generalized capability meaning you can do any operation. Hardware optimizations for ML can deliver the same 100B computations faster and cheaper by not being completely generalized. Same way ray tracing acceleration works: it does not use the same amount of compute as ray tracing in general CPU’s.

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

#570

Post by ninetyninenine »

kzzzznot wrote: post #567
ninetyninenine wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? They’d be excited at getting 100x of 100% output out an AI for 20 dollars a month and laying you off as redundant. If you aren’t scared of the potential of this technology you are lying to yourself.

“Fixed lump of work fallacy” as noted by commenter above. If a company can get 100% more output they don’t fire half their people so they stand still/get no additional productivity gain. They produce twice as much and grow. What forum is this???

“Fixed lump of work fallacy”

You're relying on theoretical work needed by employers to be unlimited. You're also assuming all of this additional work can't be handled by an LLM.

First of all fixed lump of work is not a fallacy. We do know there is a limit as there's limits in the amount of work human brains can even comprehend. A limit exists. We don't know where exactly this limit is, but a limit DOES exist and an LLM may possibly cover that limit.

Second, you have to assume that this "additional work" can't be handled by the LLM. How can you be sure? Did you think about what this work actually is? My first thought was "cleaning the toilets."

>What forum is this???

I assume it's a forum of people who don't base their lives off of concepts with buzzwords. “Fixed lump of work fallacy” is a fancy phrase for a fancy concept... that doesn't mean it's an actual fallacy or actually true. Literally you just threw that quote up there as if the slightly clever wording itself proves your point.

What Exactly is this additional work that will pop up once LLMs are around and so powerful they can do all human intellectual work? Can you even do a concrete/solid real-world analysis without jumping to vague hypotheticals covered by fancy worded conceptual quotations? The last guy used analogies as part of his logical baseline of reasoning. Wasn't convincing to me.

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