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'"I hate to say this, because it sounds so arrogant, before OpenAI, what was the last really great scientific breakthrough that came out of a Silicon Valley com
by reducesuffering 3y ago
'"I hate to say this, because it sounds so arrogant, before OpenAI, what was the last really great scientific breakthrough that came out of a Silicon Valley company?" he said.'
Where does he think they got the Transformer paper from, or even the PyTorch and H100 GPU's they use?
- danielmarkbruce 3y agolol, apparently those are just minute details...
- civicsquid 3y agoThis is the sort of trivialization attitude that I’ve come to associate with people who only care about the “big picture”. It is really irksome if you work on the lower-level stuff that (in some sense) makes the big picture possible. I think there is a point here that user-facing innovation stagnated and OpenAI helped break that, but it’s wild to me that there is no acknowledgement at all of the giants whose shoulders they stand on. Although I guess that’s what he meant about the arrogance…
- fakedang 3y agoBy each passing day, this pg protégé continues to prove he lucked out through privilege than through acumen. One has to be really myopic to think that GPT4 is God's gift on Earth (where God is, of course, me, sama).
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoPyTorch was not in any stretch of the imagination a breakthrough, nor is an H100. Those are clear incremental engineering improvements. Notable ones yes, but definitely not breakthroughs. The transformer paper is the only thing that absolutely can be considered a breakthrough and what commercial success or impact did it have before OpenAI? None. He is absolutely correct. Silicon Valley had been chasing crap for years now like crypto or various forms of rent seeking "businesses", and making incremental improvements.
- PaulHoule 3y agoOn the other hand, put enough incremental improvements together and you've got a revolution. Seen that way, even OpenAI got where it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
- PaulHoule 3y agoOn the other hand, put enough incremental improvements together and you've got a revolution.
- reducesuffering 3y agoI’ll bite. Then what are the inventions worthy of the term “scientific breakthrough” that Silicon Valley had, but not anymore? Does the freakin first mass produced EV in the world count? Engineering and manufacturing. Crypto is also an example of a much more globally distributed phenomena. Vitalik in Singapore, tether founders in Italy?, Binance god knows where, FTX in Bahamas, etc. None of the major tech co’s in the Bay were doing much of anything with crypto. Oh except for Coinbase, you know the YC darling of whom Sam is affiliated?
- twelve40 3y agothe reason many of the crypto geniuses and prodigies are "god knows where" is because it's harder to bring them to justice for their innovative scams
- m463 3y agoaren't the pc, the internet, the browser and webserver, the gpu and more all incremental improvements too? (not speaking about silicon valley)
- mempko 3y agoNever equate commercial impact with scientific breakthrough.
- jstarfish 3y ago> "I hate to say this, because it sounds so arrogant, before OpenAI, what was the last really great scientific breakthrough that came out of a Silicon Valley company?" he said.' Theranos! > Where does he think they got the Transformer paper from, or even the PyTorch and H100 GPU's they use? He's hallucinating. OpenAI is not a scientific breakthrough any more than Theranos was. It's just a commercial service that creates a pipeline out of other people's scientific breakthroughs. The opacity of it should obviate any claim of it being scientific; for all we know, the backend is a bullpen of librarians chained to workstations. He's also glossing over the ethics of outsourcing moderation to desperate Africans, which would raise some flags in a truly-scientific context.