12 ms·
Behind OpenAI's plan to make A.I. flow like electricity
- zero-sharp 2y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoGift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-electricity.html?unlocked_article_code=1.N04.o9nX.JsdL-fFg9AxU&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-elec...
- Ericson2314 2y ago> TSMC’s executives found the idea so absurd that they took to calling Mr. Altman a “podcasting bro,” one of these people said. This is very heartwarming.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoIs Altman another Ackman/Musk? I thought he tends to stay on topic when doing interviews.
- Ericson2314 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoAckman and Musk stay on topic in interviews as far as I can tell. They may share viewpoints that much of HN disagrees with, but I don’t see them answering questions with completely unrelated responses. Altman however, dodges questions all the time, with vague corporate speak and generalities. To me it looks like he is avoiding hard questions, although maybe he just doesn’t know the answer and is trying to stumble his way through, or he genuinely wants to not give away confidential things like trade secrets.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Ackman and Musk stay on topic in interviews as far as I can tell. They may share viewpoints that much of HN disagrees with Makes sense. I'd consider Ackman issuing comments on politics off topic for a hedge fund manager. But I suppose he's technically on topic with a narrow view. > Altman however, dodges questions all the time, with vague corporate speak and generalities He has a documented history of dishonesty, correct?
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoI don’t know his history fully enough to say. But it does seem like past claims about not getting equity or about keeping OpenAI’s founding principles may have at least changed. Some claim it may be an honest change - they need capital to compete, attract talent, and complete their mission, and giving equity actually keeps Altman focused on OpenAI instead of side gigs and investments. That could be true. But I’ve found his evasiveness in interviews to be untrustworthy.
- drexlspivey 2y agoMy opinion after hearing him on multiple interviews is that he always just says various generalities, he can be talking for 5 minutes and never say anything, all noise. I don't know if he is under an NDA and can't say literally anything about OpenAI and the future or if it's just the way he talks.
- mrweasel 2y agoMaybe he doesn't actually know anything?
- maxwell 2y agoBut he has such force of will.
- ben_w 2y agoThat would be my bet. He's a CEO, I've not once heard it suggested that he's also a researcher (though according to Wikipedia he's a Stanford CompSci dropout). Quite rare to be competent at both CEO-things and the stuff you're hiring people to do.
- disqard 2y agoA Stanford dropout? He must be hot stuff, like Elizabeth Holmes... oops, wrong example.
- akomtu 2y agoPerhaps he uses an earpiece connected to an LLM.
- surfingdino 2y agoI had the same revelation when I read the transcript of one of his interviews with Lex. I found it to be so free of detail or substance that I wanted to make sure it wasn't just a one case of him having a bad day, but reading transcripts of a couple of more interviews confirmed my suspicion that he has nothing of substance to say.
- mrcwinn 2y agoIt may just be his public persona. I don’t work with him on a day to day basis of course. I find him to be very uninteresting. He speaks with an air of aloof tech-savant but it feels quite hallow, faked, forced. I can’t think of many examples where he said something in an interview and it really challenged or surprised me. By contrast, any random hour with Lisa Su and you will come away quite impressed and easily understand why she is her company’s leader. Plenty of smart money behind Altman, though, so maybe he shows up stronger behind the scenes. [Edit: added "aloof" due to perceived aloofness.]
- soneca 2y agoMagicleap also had plenty of smart money behind them. It ceased to be a useful signal for me then.
- disqard 2y agoIndeed, and SoftBank flushed a ton down the toilet named WeWork because of Adam Neumann's charisma. I don't think anyone doubts Sam's ability to charm people and tell a good story. The graver concern is "should we trust him"? My gut says NO.
- botro 2y ago"Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. “YES!!!” exclaimed a third. What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision....We were incredibly impressed, Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.” This is 'smart money' in reference to Sam Bankman Fried.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoNot really the dig you think it is. They were right but got unlucky that SBF broke the law, which is hard to predict.
- ohSidfried 2y ago[dead]
- dotnet00 2y agoAltman projects more Bankman-Fried vibes to me than Musk vibes. A common sentiment about SpaceX and Musk is that the employees also believe in the mission of making space accessible and going to Mars. Musk has been consistent on that being SpaceX's eventual goal since founding it, and he stuck through it even when SpaceX was one failure away from missing payroll. All of his early employees still publicly support this mission, even after retiring or moving on to found their own space companies. Altman comes off as a "say anything to keep the money flowing" type guy even to his own employees. The fractured leadership all seems to suggest that he can't even manage to convince the people who work with him the most that he actually believes in his oft-repeated lofty goals regarding AGI.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI thought SBF interviews I listened to were excellent, with lots of substance and clear explication, especially the interview with Matt levine
- dotnet00 2y agoInteresting, my impression of him from his interviews was the opposite, while I didn't follow him closely, I felt from the first time I heard him speak that FTX would turn out to be yet another crypto-scam/disaster.
- benreesman 2y agoNever having been an elite semiconductor person myself, I have only the dimmest intuition about the absurd science, technology, engineering, and mathematics that goes into it: but you hear these parts per trillion, measured in angstroms, quantum mechanics type units of account and it’s hard not to imagine it as some world apart. I have a fond fantasy that those folks are laughing their asses off whenever we call the software stuff “high technology”.
- petre 2y agoThey're laughing their asses off when some CEO of an AI company comes out and asks investors for $7T for AI chips. Sure bro, here's 1/4 of the US GDP for your AI chips.
- bob1029 2y agoThe hard part of semiconductor manufacturing is all about the emergent complexity of many systems put together all at once. Any one tool can be isolated and dealt with by a finite team in a finite period of time. It's when you combine all of the tools and facilities together that you get this beast that has incomprehensible levels of complexity. Some people like to say that everything is harder in game development, but I'd say that it's even more so in semiconductor systems engineering. Tracing problems through every layer of the factory is like playing Elden Ring without a monitor. All you get is a guy in Korea who speaks very bad English to describe the scene for you. I can guarantee there is nowhere you will find more cursed problems. Imagine enduring a root cause analysis that winds up attributing a yield issue to fertilizer being spread on a field 20 miles away.
- hiddencost 2y agoKeep in mind they're also dealing with being potentially the only thing keeping China from invading Taiwan. So keeping their competitive advantage is very important to them.
- a13n 2y ago> The OpenAI chief told White House officials that A.I. data centers would be a catalyst for the re-industrialization of America, creating as many as half a million jobs Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking.
- tarikozket 2y agosomeone gotta plug the GPUs in and run the cables, right?
- Terr_ 2y agoBut after they plug in the GPUs and run the cables, Large Language Models will give everyone personal robot servants and jetpacks while allowing {your generous investment nation here} to conquer all the economies. /s
- mirekrusin 2y agothere should be robot for that
- Aerroon 2y agoThere should be and could be a robot for everything. The scale and variability of the tasks just don't make them viable. I should have a machine that peels my potatoes. I should have a machine that cooks me my favorite meal at the push of a button. I should have a machine that I can feed fabric into and it will sew me a shirt. All of these things are doable, but they don't make economic sense or they need to handle too many unforeseen cases. A machine that sews shirts doesn't make sense to have at home, but if you're selling millions of shirts then it does. Same for all the rest. A machine that runs all the cables etc needs to be too complicated to handle all the eventualities that there isn't enough scale (yet) to justify its existence. Basically, we don't build enough data centers.
- mirekrusin 2y agoWhen it comes to arms people don't seem to have problems with so many zeroes in cost and scale in general. Make fabs, not war.
- pwb25 2y agoso tired of all this AI hype and CEO stuff. just do your thing and let peopel buy it or not, no need to try to be the next henry ford or something
- elliotec 2y agoIt's all part of the Sam plan to make as much money as possible before whatever happens next.
- mrbungie 2y agoI would also say that big tech companies (at least MSFT, Apple and Meta) are consciously all-in in this game. There is nothing else to drive "disruptive" growth in their ovens, and many tech stocks were already going down in 2022 pre-ChatGPT. If AI fails to deliver its promises or fails to do so in the short timeframes implicitly proposed by the ecosystem, I expect dark times in terms of growth for the tech industry at least for a while. Anecdote: As a on-off tech shopper dealing with some big providers from time to time, I can sniff the reek of desperation when trying to sell GenAI stuff. And that's weird.
- TyrianPurple 2y agoJust pump and dump, boys. Pump and dump.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoI’d rather we pump and dump new technologies and investment in renewables, scale out compute, and all the transferable benefits for the investment than NFTs. I’m kind of curious where it all leads to. There’s a non zero chance it’s amazing given what is in my hands today is already amazing compared to what was in my hands 3 years ago. I don’t think the choice is like AI or curing cancer. I think it’s more like Doge coin and meme stocks or whatever finance fad.
- fuzztester 2y agoOr pick the right shovels. And profit!
- gafferongames 2y agoEyes rolling so hard right now
- throwanem 2y agoIt has to be easier to pitch sovereign wealth funds on something that isn't even nominally nonprofit.
- kurthr 2y agoWait, he wants his open product to be like a utility with low profits for maximized reach? Or he wants his suppliers to be a regulated utility while he sells 100% margin products on top of it? Or he wants all the greater fools now wherever they are so he can get out before the collapse? It feels like this is a case of following the money to understand the real goals, since it's unclear to me that AGI is that goal.
- ben_w 2y ago> it's unclear to me that AGI is that goal. Ironically, much of the observed behaviour is instrumentally convergent for most of the suggested ultimate goals. Trying to make a safe and aligned AGI or a statutory government monopoly would both get about half the things we've seen. The other half is stuff which is collectively mutually exclusive on all goals, but humans aren't perfect logical spheres in a vacuum, so it could still be basically any of them.
- krapp 2y agoThe goal is to be the man who stands at the right hand of God, holding the keys to the kingdom.
- riehwvfbk 2y agoThe sales pitch for the investors, of course, is that they will get to be God in this picture.
- kylehotchkiss 2y ago
- jmakov 2y agoThere's really no way back. AI is today helping design chips (check Google's report on how they use it for their own designs), drugs etc. And having a LLM connected to a simplistic enterprise app is a money printing machine. Really is a new ind revolution. And it's held back by not enough infra and power.
- iwontberude 2y agoI think we are seeing in realtime the resetting of expectations which means we don’t need to “go back” rather we are realizing we aren’t anywhere to go back from. LLMs haven’t made more than a small dent. Non LLM inference is still more important and will continue to be. The problem with LLM is they input/output in text or images and are too general.
- tmpz22 2y ago> And having a LLM connected to a simplistic enterprise app is a money printing machine. What would be a concrete example of this? Has Salesforce revenue increased with their AI offerings? Has Microsofts?
- segasaturn 2y agoThis is what I was wondering reading that comment too. The only people I've seen making money off LLMs are spammers.
- scotty79 2y agoChatGPT itself
- segasaturn 2y agoChatGPT loses billions of dollars, $5bn this year alone just on running the service. Even the subscription-based services like Github Copilot are losing money, $20 lost for every $10 subscriber according to MSFT. The only ones making money I can see are NVidia and maybe the oil and gas companies...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Jtsummers 2y ago> Mr. Altman has since scaled his ambition down to hundreds of billions of dollars, the nine people said, and hatched a new strategy: Court U.S. government officials by first helping to build data centers in the United States. When all else fails, pitch your idea to the right officials in the USG and you'll make bank. And if you do it right, you won't even be doing anything at all. There are companies getting 8-10 figures a year to fail at upgrading systems from DOS to literally anything not DOS. It's a very low bar, but a profitable one if you can pull it off.
- mesh 2y agoDo data centers drive a lot of jobs or revenue for local or federal governments?
- edm0nd 2y agoThe NSA Utah data center cost $1.5B-$2B to build and then another ~$2B of electronics to stock inside it. It also had hundreds of contractors and employs 200+ full time employees. It consumes $40M worth of electricity each year and uses 1.7 million gallons of water each day for cooling. So it sure doesn't seem like it unless we want to get into a debate around how much perceived useful data and value the NSA gets out of spying on Americans and foreign countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- citizenpaul 2y ago>There are companies getting 8-10 figures a year to fail I read some article about how the federal retirement system is about up to $500m over the last 20 years on a failed outsourcing the digitization of their paper system. They are apparently not much closer to having a digital version than they were when they started something like 3-4 contractors ago. Specifically the storage hub in West Virginia. There has to be some sort of grift in that kinda waste. How do that many companies not move the needle and get to keep the money?
- jonathanyc 2y ago
- mhh__ 2y agoIn a sense I kind of respect it but the way OpenAI are 100x-ing all their statements ("Universal basic compute"!) like every small startup has to pretend to be the next XYZ (only on a much bigger scale) is hilarious. Are they even in the lead at the moment?
- throwaway918299 2y agoWho is buying this absolute nonsense?! Sam Altman is the biggest conman of the last century.
- xbar 2y agoHe makes my list, but the list is long.
- Paddywack 2y agoOut of interest, who would be in the top X of that list?
- didcoten 2y agoAnd worse than that, he sexually molested his sister. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311509 Pure evil.
- disqard 2y agoThank you for sharing that! Whatever else he has done, he ranks super-super-low on the empathy scale... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman... Search for "car payments". It's heartbreaking :'( If I ran a company, I would not hire this man.
- throwaway918299 2y agoHoly Shit
- beeflet 2y agoIdk if the clam is true, but it does make me question sam's character. I appreciate how well documented and sourced it is and how the author attempts to capture the big picture through the accumulation of many small verifiable facts. Edit: what is this lesswrong site about?
- DonHopkins 2y agoSam Altman will champion Direct Intelligence, while Elon Musk will take credit for Alternating Intelligence. Then, to prove how dangerous Alternating Intelligence really is, Sam will use it to execute dogs, fry elephants, and even immolate a few Teslas, before finally inventing the deadly Artificially Intelligent Chair to execute prisoners.
- mrbungie 2y agoThis is a twisted and ironic example of VC thinking taken to the extreme: we just need it to growth it more for it to really show its potential. What happens if giving to everyone and their mothers ends up in low usage? Are they going to blame scale again and ask for a Dyson Sphere?
- karaterobot 2y ago> In private conversations, Mr. Altman has compared the world’s data centers to electricity, according to three people close to the discussions. As the availability of electricity became more widespread, people found better ways of using it. Mr. Altman hoped to do the same with data centers and eventually make A.I. technologies flow like electricity. Reminds me of a quote I saved from Kevin Kelly's book The Inevitable, which was published in 2016. I saved it because it sounded so absurd at the time. To be clear, it sort of still does sound absurd to me, who remain moderately skeptical about AI (though admittedly less so than in 2016, largely because of the following sentence). What's very serious is how much money and old-fashioned brainpower is going into making this future real. I don't know whether the metaphor was arrived at independently, derives from the same source, or is just an obvious way of thinking about the world when you've drunk the right flavor of Kool-Aid. > Amid all this activity, of a picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of superintelligence. The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century past. Three generations ago, many a tinkerer struck it rich by taking a tool and making an electric version. Take a manual pump; electrify it. Find a hand-wringer washer; electrify it. The entrepreneurs didn’t need to generate the electricity; they brought it from the grid and used it to automate the previously manual. Now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognify. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or more valuable by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.
- yencabulator 2y agoRarely have I read that much blind faith in AGI happening. Reality today seems to be anyone who's getting decent results out of ML is doing something slightly different according to the specifics of their domain. You can't take a chatbot LLM and expect it to predict the weather, architect a building, drive a car, and fold laundry.
- groby_b 2y agoSam's flailing. He's desperate for more money, because OAI is running out. And Sam will say anything and everything to get more money. He's making whatever noise makes the audience feel good, truth be damned. And it's kind of funny to see how well MS has played that particular instrument. A partnership with Sam got them 49% ownership and got rid of the doomer faction. The 75% profit share makes any future investors look long and hard at investing into what looks to be a capital-intensive low-revenue business right now. Which makes it likely that OAI will run out of money, and oops, let's see if there aren't suddenly more than 49% ownership. And MS has a technology where they were long behind. (My bet is that the majority ownership will happen this funding round, because Sam is desperate) The only way that doesn't happen is if Sam manages a massive investment round and finds a path to profit before the money's burned up. And the beauty of it is that the early 49% ownership means they only need to make a comparatively tiny investment this round to still be a majority owner in the company, with a 75% revenue share until their money is fully recouped. And the other investors get to bear the majority of the risk for the much larger funding round. This are all utterly logical plays if you are willing to accept Sam is somebody who can make things move, loves gambling, and is a narcissist. I really do think he's being played by a virtuoso, and it gives me great joy to watch that unfold.
- 7e 2y agoFor 7 trillion dollars we could solve aging, making humans immortal and genetically engineer them to be super intelligent. Instead we’re going to create super-inefficient AIs? At least use the money to fix climate change and other existential threats, rather than creating a new one.
- rldjbpin 2y agocall me narrow-minded but just like general public read books on a daily, write essays regularly like daily journals, or make public speeches, you'd have to drink a special kind of kool-aid to assume we all need AI like public utilities. the "muh job" angle is well and good, but if this really convinces you, i got a bridge to sell. maybe sam thinks we all are into making podcasts now.
- beezlewax 2y agoHonestly the more AI I use the more issues I find with it. Copilot chat is especially useless outside of anything basic. Downright harmful in some cases.
- sanp 2y agoAll these Libertarians asking for government handouts…