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

485 points by WithinReason 2y ago

kranke155 2y ago
Might as well share the original NYT article, since this one is a poor summary of that one - https://web.archive.org/web/20240926063521/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-electricity.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240926063521/https://www.nytim...
- wslh 2y ago
  Sorry, but I think the original article is more insightful about the complexity and reality of making chips, which TSMC knows well, compared to moonshots by people who don't fully understand the intricacies of the semiconductors supply chain.
  - kranke155 2y ago
    Huh? What original article? The Toms Hardware article is a copy and paste of the NYT one.
    - wslh 2y ago
      The original article I was referring to is the NYT piece, which covers more of the complexities around chip manufacturing and energy needs. While the Tom's Hardware article draws from it, the summary focuses more on personality clashes, losing some of the nuanced details about supply chain challenges.
      - kranke155 2y ago
        You realise I shared the original article right? And OP shared the summary?
        wslh 2y ago
        What I'm saying is that the two articles are not the same. For example, the term "moonshot" as in "Moonshot dreams crash to earth at TSMC" is specific to one article and not the other. I think it sets a clearer tone, even if one is based on the other.
        svat 2y ago
        Do I understand correctly: you seem to be saying that the original (NYT) article is "more insightful about the complexity and reality of making chips", and "covers more of the complexities", while the summary (Tom's Hardware) article "focuses more on personality clashes, losing some of the nuanced details" — and therefore you prefer the TH article (less insightful about the complexity and nuance), because "it sets a clearer tone"?
        wslh 2y ago
        It seems you're questioning my preference, but I'm simply pointing out that I find the tone and emphasis in the TH article clearer, even though it's less detailed. I'm free to prefer the presentation of one article over another, regardless of complexity.
        svat 2y ago
        The personal preference is fine, just trying to make sure I understood correctly the discussion between you and the root poster. As a reader, it was a bit confusing to read something that starts with “Sorry, but I think the original article is more insightful…” and have it turn out that this (being more insightful) was intended as a problem. Both of the first two comments you posted seemed to be positive about the NYT article over the TH one — I had not previously encountered “insightful” used negatively, or “losing nuance” used positively — so perhaps a different choice of words would have made it clearer (to me).
        wslh 2y ago
        Now reading again, than you for pointing it out, I reversed the NYT by the TH article. My mistake while writing on the mobile phone. I basically said that I preferred the TH article over the NYT one.
Rinzler89 2y ago
Based. The more I read about TSMC, the more I like them.
- mft_ 2y ago
  Eh; the Russians laughed at Musk, before he started SpaceX; too.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    I doubt OpenAI will start challenging TSMC at building chips anytime soon.
    - mft_ 2y ago
      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.
      - croes 2y ago
        SpaceX needed NASA money. Where does Altmann get $7 trillion dollars
        Foobar8568 2y ago
        From his non profit :D
        croes 2y ago
        If they pay 7 trillion dollars, they certainly won't make a profit for a long time.
        tim333 2y ago
joelthelion 2y ago
7 trillion is absurd. The recent advancements in AI are real, but not on the order of 7T.
- unnouinceput 2y ago
  I remember the story about Larry and Sergei pitching their new search engine to investors: "Will make 10B annually in maximum 10 years". Nowadays 10B is the paper clips fund at Alphabet.
- aero-glide2 2y ago
  they will be. Looking at the rate of progress (just tried o1mini), its inevitable.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    Even if we accept that premise, why should OpenAI be the ones to manage a $7T investment in hardware and datacenter development over, y'know, hardware and datacenter companies like Nvidia and Amazon? OpenAI has zero experience in those fields.
    - zer0c00ler 2y ago
      [dead]
    - cdchn 2y ago
      One of these parties cares more about where the money comes from than the other.
  - gtirloni 2y ago
    If it was, companies like Microsoft and Apple would have acquired them a long time ago. The fact they decided to have a partnership means they have reason to believe the hype isn't real beyond what we already know today and they don't want to have to explain it to shareholders in the near future.
    - 2y ago
KaiserPro 2y ago
sounds like they made a solid and accurate assessment
PedroBatista 2y ago
Well.. they are not wrong. Even with the advancements made by OpenAI, some of his takes remind me of a Dollar Store Elon Musk, let alone his despicable way of doing business and seemingly complete lack of any morals. To your average TSMC exec he's closer to a Jake Paul than to a Lisa Su or even Jensen Huang.
- keepamovin 2y ago
  There’s likely some racial bias involved, along with hesitancy to align too closely with the US, especially given the strong ties to China during these geopolitically tense times.
perfmode 2y ago
Only time will tell
bdndndndbve 2y ago
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.
- llmfan 2y ago
  I think this is one of those "controversial" topics where we're meant to be particularly careful to make substantial comments.
  - bdndndndbve 2y ago
    I think it's substantial to say that AI is currently overhyped because it's hitting a weak spot in human cognition. We sympathize with inanimate objects. We see faces in random patterns. If a machine spits out some plausible looking text (or some cookie-cutter code copy-pasted from Stack Overflow) the human brain is basically hardwired to go "wow this is a human friend!". The current LLM trend seems designed to capitalize on this tendency towards sympathizing. This is the same thing that made chatbots seem amazing 30 years ago. There's a minimum amount of "humanness" you have to put in the text and then the recipient fills in the blanks.
    - airstrike 2y ago
      > If a machine spits out some plausible looking text (or some cookie-cutter code copy-pasted from Stack Overflow) This is not a reasonable take on the current capabilities of LLMs.
      - eschaton 2y ago
        It’s certainly been my experience with the technology.
        airstrike 2y ago
        But if nearly everyone else is saying this has real value to them and it's produced meaningful code way beyond what's in SO, then doesn't that just mean your experience isn't representative of the overall value of LLMs?
dmead 2y ago
He's a grifter. Podcast bro is charitable.
threeseed 2y ago
So many weird things going on with this. 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. b) What does Microsoft have to say about OpenAI building a parallel cloud. c) OpenAI has zero competence in designing and building their own end to end stack but yet they are going to jump straight to $7T worth of infrastructure. Even Apple acquired PA Semiconductor and a number of smaller startups to build out their team.
- thruway516 2y ago
  Didn't you know, according to ___ [insert favorite visionary] if you're not building an impossible moonshot you're a nothing and a nobody.
- anon291 2y ago
  > 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.
  - threeseed 2y ago
    > 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 States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act
    - anon291 2y ago
      TSMC is not the Taiwanese government, and besides, according to American foreign policy, the Taiwanese government is not a government either.
dboreham 2y ago
This guy doesn't sound like he understands engineering (checks Wikipedia...ok dropped out of Stanford). Perhaps figure out how to not need the money and electricity from the entire planet first before embarking on plan to use same.
yieldcrv 2y ago
a little bit of column a, a little bit of column b factors are that international markets rely less on local cults of personality and just the financial, it’s also fair to say that TSMC is risk averse, most amusingly is that these personality cults work out fine if you throw enough money at them so I can’t fault this podcast bro for trying
isodev 2y ago
I'm absolutely flabbergasted how much money and political capital is spent on vaporware, while there are very concrete and very impactful challenges we could be addressing instead.
- brookst 2y ago
  There’s a lot of money to be made if you can reliable distinguish the two in advance.
  - isodev 2y ago
    I don't think there is appetite for this, in big tech especially. People are looking for glamorous next big things, everyone wants to be the first in some green field thing instead of digging into "the boring stuff we've been hearing about since forever". Imagine, even Apple completely enshittified their OSes just so they're on the bandwagon of AI with zero added value.
    - fhd2 2y ago
      Exactly. And now, a possibly terrifying question: What if there just is not going to be a "next big thing"? Population size is about to peak. Up until now, for as long as we know, it has been growing. Starting at the latest with colonisation, we've had more people, more resources, new markets advancing into buyers of new products. Once societies advance to a certain point, they begin to shrink, this is well studied. Without these growth factors, does it seem likely we'll see something as transformative as the automobile or the internet again? Possibly bleak and badly informed, but I find it plausible to think that the party is about to end. Most of us here have probably seen what happens to a company when they stop growing. Spoiler: It's typically not innovation.
      - fellowmartian 2y ago
        I’m not the biggest AI fanboy, but AI is the solution to this. You’re right that the population is about to peak, and we’ll stop adding biological brains that can come up with new things, but if we crack real AGI then we’ll have many more orders of magnitude of mechanical brains that can do the same.
AlexandrB 2y ago
It's ironic that Sam Altman's background is in YC, because this is the opposite of startup thinking. Instead of scrappy disruption he seems to want massive investment upfront with only vague ideas of what the technology could be used for.
- torlok 2y ago
  The second sentence describes a lot of startups.
  - pyb 2y ago
    It describes bad startups.
- AdamN 2y ago
  They already know that some of these upcoming model builds are going to require $100MM and possibly even a billion dollars. That is just the compute costs for building a single model. Product-market fit is basically established and the cost structure is basically understood so he needs the money for pretty straighforward reasons. With that said it's a gamble since somebody might come along with a $10MM model based on some new technique and then OpenAI's cost structure becomes a problem. Presumably their scientists could adapt pretty quickly though if that happened.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- stackghost 2y ago
  >he seems to want massive investment upfront with only vague ideas of what the technology could be used for That sounds exactly like venture-funded startup thinking to me.
hlanders10 2y ago
He may have the last laugh. His traveling around the world and threatening to build fabs in the UAE and Taiwan is a diplomatic scheme to get the U.S. hawks into action. And lo and behold, ClopenAI has already hired CHIPS act people: "To bolster its efforts, OpenAI has hired Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House lawyer, as its vice president of global policy, along with two people from the Commerce Department who worked on the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law designed to increase domestic chip manufacturing. One of them will manage future infrastructure projects and policy." We'll build plants overseas if you don't give us CHIPS Act money is a great scheme.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  > Build fabs Such a misguided take. If it were that easy to build fabs to compete with TSMC, Intel would do it. China would do it. Hardware is way harder than software.
  - iphoneisbetter 2y ago
    Or maybe, just maybe, TSMC has gaslit all of us to think it is much harder than it really is. If Taiwan isn't needed for its chips, what is the strategic interest of the USG?
    - osnium123 2y ago
      No, TSMC is really that special. Intel has been struggling for a while now.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      It's not like nobody is trying to compete with TSMC, Samsung and Intel are doing their best, but TSMC are consistently ahead despite all of these companies using the same ASML lithography machines.
      - iphoneisbetter 2y ago
        Good point. However my mind is drawn back to the fact that the USG licenses the patents to ASML. A tweak or change of that licensing model could suddenly make TSMC's cost basis rise and Intel's drop. We are after all talking about US national security interests as the backdrop - the usual market rules may not apply so cleanly.
actuallyalys 2y ago
The analogy to electricity doesn’t make sense to me. OpenAI’s and their competitors’ products are already widely available, companies have added to AI to a bunch of apps, and the cost per token has already come down significantly. (Edit: not to mention openly licensed models.) I also don’t see think it’s historically accurate. My understanding was that widespread electrification were motivated by lighting, the radio, and other applications. Getting electricity to more people probably helped spur further development, sure, but there were already “killer apps.”
- anon291 2y ago
  The 'token economy' is but one facet of an AI revolution. From my perspective, the main point of LLMs has been to simply be marketing. No one wants to hear about protein folding, physics sim, etc.
- pphysch 2y ago
  AI algorithms alone definitely don't represent "energy" in a meaningful way, but high-quality data is a commodity. Part of the AI scam peeling back the facade on every AI product and realizing "oh this is actually pretty useless unless we already have high-quality automated data systems internally at $ORG", and the advancements in AI only make that nominally more accessible. No, synthetic data is not the solution, and Copilot won't build you a robust data platform. Digitalization and digital literacy are long-term trends that AI is at the whim of, but pretends otherwise.
redleader55 2y ago
He seems to be the same kind of individual as Musk: able to bring together teams that build great things, but also able to bring about drama and ego. The whole musical chair act with profit/non-profit OpenAI, and getting rid of many of the folks that created the models they are famous for.
- leobg 2y ago
  I’m sure he’d love that comparison. But Elon is responsible for PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI and now Grok. I have a Starlink antenna on my roof because of him, and I take my kids to school safely and quietly in a car that, 15 years ago, someone willing to spend 20 million dollars would not have been able to buy. Sam? An iris scanning crypto scam. I think that’s all he ever got off the ground. With ChatGPT, he positioned himself at the right place at the right time. And by dubious means, too.
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    > Elon is responsible for PayPal Actually, he was responsible for the competitor that PayPal bought out because the market wasn't big enough for two companies, and was forced out of PayPal because he was pushing ruinously bad ideas.
    - leobg 2y ago
      Depends on whose viewpoint you read. He was the biggest shareholder and received $176 million when PayPal was sold to eBay. He was there from the beginning. And he wasn’t the marketing guy. Whether you like him or not, that’s all very different from Altman.
      - FireBeyond 2y ago
        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 want to contribute to the codebase, so we really need to rewrite it in Classic ASP", problematic on so many levels.
apwell23 2y ago
What PG see in him as a teenager to proclaim he is 'Michael jordan of listening' or that he knew within 3 mins that sam is next bill gates. These are actual paul graham quotes not something from Silicon Valley TV show. Edit: to ppl responding "you should already know know paul graham is a grifter" . I don't believe is the case given his essays about meritocracy.
- Invictus0 2y ago
  Sequoia wrote 13,000 words about how Sam Bankman-Fried was god's gift to mankind. VCs are not serious. > Bankman-Fried's first pitch meeting with the VC firm's partners during its Series B round is also included in the profile, in which the founder laid out his vision to investors for FTX to become a super-app — all while he was playing the video game "League of Legends" on his computer.
- leobg 2y ago
  I imagine that means that he observes a lot and thinks a lot before he acts. Which is great. I just wish that he had some higher God than fame and power.
- snapcaster 2y ago
  You don't see the grift here? People collude to hype eachother up to increase prestige and social status. It sounds like you take things said in public by billionaires at face value. I would suggest you stop doing that
lvl155 2y ago
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.
- causal 2y ago
  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.
dizzydes 2y ago
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 economic impact. Even at the current state of the art this is plausible. - The notion that everyone laid off above will find new employment from the opportunities AI creates. Perhaps it's just a gap in my knowledge. What opportunities are so large they'll make up for the economies we're starting to see? I understand the inverting population pyramid in the Western world helps this some also (more retirees/less workers).
- schnitzelstoat 2y ago
  I agree on the first two points. On the third point, I think we've always seen this happen even in massive shocks like the Industrial Revolution (and the Second Industrial Revolution with assembly lines etc. and the Computer Age) It might be hard for people to retrain to whatever the new opportunities are though. Although perhaps somewhat easier nowadays with the internet etc.
  - beepbooptheory 2y ago
    The industrial revolution didn't lay everyone off, it just made everyone's jobs worse in every possible sense.
    - visarga 2y ago
      I don't think many would switch current life with pre-industrial life. You are idealising the past and discounting the present
      - beepbooptheory 2y ago
        Not trying to value life in general at all, just the nature of the jobs. You might reply "distinction without a difference," and well, the fact that you'd think so would be one of my points about the labor ;). Personally, preindustrial life sounds pretty rough, but its all just apples and oranges! The future will continue to happen, to critique the present and how we got here is not to exhort the past (unless, you know, you are a particularly conservative person I guess).
jp0001 2y ago
Well, he’s not their direct customer.
zackkatz 2y ago
[flagged]
- concerndc1tizen 2y ago
  What do we call the Middle East then?
  - NonEUCitizen 2y ago
    West Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Asia Southwest Asia: https://www.britannica.com/place/Southwest-Asia https://www.britannica.com/place/Southwest-Asia
    - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
      I agree in principle. But that still leaves it called Far East, it's just Far East Asia.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- trashtester 2y ago
  The origin of the term "Asia" is from ancient Greece, and meant anything to the east of the Dardanelles Strait. The Romans used the term specifically for the province of western Anatolia. To extend that term to include all those landmasses, including China, India and Japan is extremely Eurocentric. I would consider "Far East" quite neutral by comparison.
wg0 2y ago
> OpenAI’s business model, as it exists today, doesn’t really inspire confidence, as it seems to exist on the promise of ‘jam tomorrow.’ Specifically, the firm has an income of approximately $3 billion per year, which is put in deep shade by its $7 billion annual expenditure. So a yearly loss of 4 billion dollars or losing $10 million daily. The IPOs basically (mostly) have been operating just the way Bitcoin has been - Next bigger fool theory. That you pass on the potato to the next bigger fool till it ends to the last in the chain like Twitter who doesn't know what to do to churn out those inflated sums paid along the chain. Not sure how many days OpenAI can afford to lose 10 million dollars daily but current macroeconomic environment, prospects aren't great.
- shubhamjain 2y ago
  Most of the expense can probably be attributed to training and operating their free-tier. They can shut off both of them any day and become insanely profitable. I don't think people realize the sheer magnitude of reaching $3B ARR in under two years. Is there an AI hype? Sure. Is it a crypto-like bubble just where everyone is just peddling BS? No, not even close.
  - wg0 2y ago
    Training costing billions can't be. Biggest line item would be salaries. Probably. Also, revenue you can't take home. Doesn't matter how many billions. It is the profit that matters in the end.
  - gotaran 2y ago
    OpenAI has no clear moat though. If they shut off training, everyone would just move over to a competitor.
  - iphoneisbetter 2y ago
    > I don't think people realize the sheer magnitude of reaching $3B ARR in under two years. These things impress people who fail to digest business fundamentals. Anyone with a suit and a slick powerpoint preso can in theory start a money-incinerating machine. The real measurement is the profit. And before someone makes the "capture the market" comment - this isn't ZIRP anymore. Money costs fuckin money now.
gepardi 2y ago
That’s hilarious. Maybe there’ll be an episode in some show a decade from now, inspired by this.
5cott0 2y ago
more like “anime pfp anon”
SavageBeast 2y ago
I was having some kind of issue the other day - browser cache corruption issue or ChatGPT hiccuped for a few minutes - but I needed to know an answer for a thing RIGHT NOW. I reluctantly went back to Google and searched for it the old way. Just ... OMFG ... I used to do this all the time? This used to be how you learned things? You mean I get to read 10 sites and 25 dumb answers to get to a possibly correct one? And all the while I got ads coming at me for this and that. A friend was trying to decode some chat convo we had about GLP-1 drugs and get factual information. Google search was nothing but direct ads selling "IF YOU LIKE OZEMPIC YOU WILL LOOOOOVE NOZEMPIC - ITS ALL NATURAL!!" and the content-mill blogs and such that tout the benefits of some "NOZEMPIC" variant. AI has changed the way I learn and research. I have a very capable tutor on demand for any subject there is, any time I want to use it. Its mostly right or "good enough for government work" as the old guys say. I was once an AI hater - now Im an AI evangelist and Im turning people in my sphere of influence into AI users too. Once you show them the value prop they totally get it. Learning and such no longer requires manual work for the 90% case.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  > Just ... OMFG ... I used to do this all the time? This used to be how you learned things? No. Google is really not useful anymore, it wasn't like that. It is IMPOSSIBLE to search for what you want, Google just think they know what you want and literally change the words to match. It is crazy.
  - SavageBeast 2y ago
    I think Google, with regard to Search here, is in the Skin The Sheep phase of its story arc. Innovation is done, market dominance is here, no point in innovating because they're making so much money. The total shit state that is Google Search these days is a tacit admission that search as we know it is over. No more innovating, instead lets suck as much money out of this thing as we can today because its going away. Good news is things become pure profit for Google while they wait for the inevitable changing of the guard and their replacement becomes the new normal.
- finikytou 2y ago
bob1029 2y ago
It is clear to me that Sam has never set foot inside of a semiconductor manufacturing facility. Or, if he did he definitely wasn't paying attention to what was going on around him. I don't know how you could witness these things and then make glib statements about building 36 of them. It will likely take well over a decade to recoup investment on any new chip fab at this point. Chasing ~4 customers on one narrow use case is nonsensical from the perspective of anyone running these companies.
- H8crilA 2y ago
  It is reasonable from his point of view - you guys sink the capital, I will have more compute. And if it doesn't work out and orders stop coming in then well that's not my problem, is it?
  - bob1029 2y ago
    > It is reasonable from his point of view If he wants to actually accomplish his objectives, he needs to get inside the minds of the executives that run these companies. Empathize with their concerns and then develop a strategy for walking them towards a path to build even one additional factory. Throwing out a cartoonish figure and then hoping to be taken seriously is not something I'd expect from the CEO of something so adjacent.
    - mrbungie 2y ago
      I think OAI and especially sama as its CEO are crossing the point of being significant in their own right, and as old talent moves out of OAI we may start to hear increasingly crazy stuff coming from them. They're just becoming brands to put over the machinations of some VCs, hyperscalers and big techs.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      You say that, but to me the Americans have a stereotype of making outrageous demands and then getting big wins because sometimes people say yes. And if he doesn't ask for what he wants he certainly won't get it. Empathy is a good practice when managing others and have control over what they do, but in business negotiations it is often productive to just make your wants and budget clear.
imaginationra 2y ago
Grifters gonna grift- My nerd hype died as I used gpt4+ and Claude 3.5+ whatever for coding tasks and realized if a human somewhere in the training data hadn't already solved a programming problem/wrote code for a solution the LLM's are useless for said problem. They're useful as an assistant/junior coder to do repetitive tasks/things you/other humans already have already done tho. BUT that's not going to revolutionize programming as you already have to know how to code to use them. * and "hallucinations" should be referred to as "bullshitting" when it comes to LLM's as that's what it really is.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  I was watching Alien last night and as they talked with Mother it was refreshing to see the ship computer just say “I don’t know” when it didn’t know something. If we could get our LLMs there it would be a nice step forward. You can definitely tell ours were made in Silicon Valley, home of the bullshit and fake it till you make it.
  - prewett 2y ago
    I tried asking Gemini to summarize a non-existent poem, and it said it would need the actual source of the poem to summarize it (but provided four potential themes based on the title). I then suggested that it was a standard English course text and it apologetically said that it couldn't find any record of it, but perhaps I was thinking of this other poem? It is perhaps too helpful at coming up with a workable solution to my request, but it did seem to know when it didn't know. Although perhaps that isn't the LLM but some additional information from a search query being fed into the LLM.
- anon291 2y ago
  > My nerd hype died as I used gpt4+ and Claude 3.5+ whatever for coding tasks and realized if a human somewhere in the training data hadn't already solved a programming problem/wrote code for a solution the LLM's are useless for said problem. See my experience is the opposite, and gpt3 was able to answer questions about the niche Haskell library I wrote better than I was. Unless you posit that there's some secret cabal of people using this Haskell library and writing answers for GPT to consume somewhere in the depths of OpenAIs org structure, it's pretty obvious to me that LLMs are quite capable.
drawkward 2y ago
More cryptobro, imo
andy_ppp 2y ago
Arguably compared to the technical people who do the actual work isn’t this a fairly perceptive description?
- joeybloey 2y ago
  There's lots of smart serious people who aren't technical but the problem with Altman is that he isn't serious at all, he's a pure grifter, focused only on headlines
mpalmer 2y ago
This jumped out at me: "The NYT claims it discussed OpenAI's negotiations with nine people close to the discussions but who wish to remain anonymous." "Claims"? Generally newspapers do not lie about the sourcing for a story.
- dylan604 2y ago
  You have qualms with "claims", yet you use "generally" to describe newspaper dogma. So you accept that newspapers do not always not lie, yet you have issues accepting that sometimes sources have not been verified?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jpm_sd 2y ago
At this point it's become clear that Sam Altman is an Emissary of the Eschaton (in the Strossian sense)
finikytou 2y ago
they are right tho. He is a snake oil vendor and all his A team leaving due likely to his moves and unethical steps taken from day 1 are proof that TSMC is a solid business
zooq_ai 2y ago
Remember when the Russians mocked Elon Musk for his rocket purchase? Remember when Blockbuster mocked Netflix? Remember when Steve Ballmer mocked the iPhone? Remember when Zuck was mocked for the Metaverse? I'm pretty sure Sam would have heard similar mockings like "You can't take on Google behemoth, podcaster bro" before. But the sad part is, the newer tech generation is so brainwashed that it takes the side of the mocker instead of the mockee. Watch Sam partner with some other fab like Intel and make TSMC irrelevant. Of course HN will then side with Sam
- dylan604 2y ago
  > Remember when Zuck was mocked for the Metaverse? One of these things is not like the others. You listed 3 things proven silly with hindsight, then you post one comment that is mere hopeful wishing.
  - koolala 2y ago
    If Meta makes those new AR glasses real it makes up for the Metaverse branding.
  - zooq_ai 2y ago
    Like I said, if you didn't follow Orion's demo and still parroting "Metaverse Bad" you belong in the exact same category as Blockbuster
tempodox 2y ago
Altman is used to deal with people whose medium is mostly hot air. I'd expect a chip manufacturer to have a healthy allergy against that. Having your process filled with 99% bullshit might be good enough if the desired outcome is investment, but if you want to produce functional hardware, you can't afford that.
dangitman 2y ago
[dead]
asn1parse 2y ago
lolololololololololololololol
JCharante 2y ago
> Even implementing a fraction of the OpenAI CEO’s ideas would be incredibly risky, the execs are said to have openly pondered. I don’t want to live in a world where nobody takes risks. > However, the latest OpenAI statements have rolled back such talk to "mere" hundreds of billions. It is reported that years of construction time would also be needed to satisfy the OpenAI compute scaling plans. Yeah so what? It will take years to build so build 36 mega data-centers in parallel. > the firm has an income of approximately $3 billion per year, which is put in deep shade by its $7 billion annual expenditure. Those are tiny numbers. Airpods are a $14B/year line of products. OpenAI needs to be ready to spend 100B/year. > Likewise, Apple launched its iPhone 16 and 16 Pro earlier in the month with a lot of talk about Apple Intelligence, but the first of these AI features won’t be available on the new devices until next month. I’m on a 15 pro max with the 18.1 PUBLIC Beta. I have these features and so do 16 users. Mark Tyson. This is terrible lazy journalism. You add half true statements to make your point.
lizknope 2y ago
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 work. OpenAI has tried to assemble a loose federation of companies, including data center builders like Microsoft as well as investors and chipmakers. But the particulars of who would pay the money, who would get it and what they would even build are hazy. He's trying to get a bunch of diverse companies including Microsoft to fund this but it's unclear what kind of chips he actually wants. Many of the big companies including Microsoft are designing their own custom AI chips. But the article mentions Nvidia. Does OpenAI have any plans to design their own chips or do they just use Nvidia? It may be difficult to get Nvidia competitors to want to join his effort. > TSMC makes semiconductors for Nvidia, the leading developer of A.I. chips. The plan would allow Nvidia to churn out more chips. OpenAI and other companies would use those chips in more A.I. data centers.
- calf 2y ago
  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.
  - ksec 2y ago
    >He's a Steve Jobs type C-level manager. Steve Jobs actually knows a lot more about many things than most people realise.
    - calf 2y ago
      Same could be said of Sam Altman, doesn't change the fact that they are not trained scientists i.e. knowledge workers.
BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
This is like posting a reaction video. Just post the actual source.
spamizbad 2y ago
TSMC shade aside, I think Altman is keenly aware that AI is still too capital intensive for short-to-medium term viability and I think his hope to was to probe the semiconductor industry's willingness to build-out more fabs to drive the costs down substantially. I suspect Altman was being bluntly honest with them about the economics of AI rather than enthusiastically telling them they should immediately build 37 fabs because surely that's super easy. Blackwell cabinets are $3M each and have significant power requirements and thus you'd likely need to be selling your products at $100/month/seat to turn a slim profit.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Gift link of the NYT source: 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...
throw4847285 2y ago
This is going to sound nuts, but I think CEOs like Altman have more in common with historical monarchs than modern Democratic leaders. In a Democracy, there's more transparency into the degree to which everything the President/PM does is actually delegated out. Joe Biden may be the Commander in Chief, but just watch a political military thriller and you'll see that culturally, we understand the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in having the actual depth of knowledge the President lacks. But CEOs often practice a form of charismatic leadership whereby you have to project having more knowledge than you actually do. That is because their leadership is both less democratic and less secure than their counterparts. You've got to be constantly maneuvering against challenges to your legitimacy. I think it has something to do with the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy from German sociology. You might think that a tech company would be the quintessential form of Gesellschaft, but in reality, the community of tech CEOs and VCs is far more like a social club than it is like a rational, contractual relationship.
- MDJMediaLab 2y ago
  I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
  - throw4847285 2y ago
    I'm truly flattered, but you would just get regurgitated ideas from smarter newsletters.
thebigspacefuck 2y ago
Maybe the board was right to kick him out
yapyap 2y ago
36 new plants, 7 trillion dollars and that would all have to be backed by AI? yikes. I know Sam is gonna be a billionaire assetwise soon but I wonder if it’ll make him more realistic or even more “idealistic” (bigger bullshitter)
churchill 2y ago
On some level, I still see Sam Altman as a visionary, but the moment that got me rolling my eyes was when we traveled to Middle East, reportedly looking to raise up to $7 trillion for AI chips. Like, bro, all the sovereign wealth funds of the Arab Gulf hold less than $3 trillion, mostly in illiquid assets that you could take a 50% haircut if you need to liquidate. And after the $100b Vision Fund fiasco where Saudi Arabia was subsidizing "Uber for Dog-walking" startups for years (no thanks to Masayoshi Son), I'm not sure they're going to be keen subsidizing yet another bubble. But, isn't that the default in VC? Aggressive, toxic optimism because it's not your money and you need to promise otherworldly yield to get capital.
- davidivadavid 2y ago
  Can someone enlighten me on how Sam Altman is a "visionary" of any kind? The extent of his vision, to the best of my knowledge so far, is "things will get cheap then cool stuff will happen." That's the laziest "vision" I've ever seen in my life. It depicts nothing concrete whatsoever.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
How do you anticipate sama will take being rejected by TSMC?
Ninjak8051 2y ago
Maybe Altman has no idea about the realities of semiconductor manufacturing, or maybe he does. Sometimes it takes an outsider to shake things up and produce the impossible. Probably some Verizon execs called Steve Jobs a "computer bro" when he walked in with a pre-production iPhone and asked for "half".
m3kw9 2y ago
This is what he needs, someone is there to tell him if it can be done or not.
htk 2y ago
Very biased article, with the author injecting a lot of his personal opinions on the matter.
dang 2y ago
I've re-upped the original article here: Behind OpenAI's plan to make A.I. flow like electricity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41663562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41663562 Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
rldjbpin 2y ago
as someone working in AI, if i had access to 7T USD, i would never put it all in AI research, forget in one moonshot alone to put it best. in retrospect, press media was much more critical of meta and the whole metaverse schtick. it took long but all the money poured on the research has brought more meaningful results with the orion prototype. we are giving this AI company too much air time. let them do their bidding by themselves.

485 points by WithinReason 2y ago

Might as well share the original NYT article, since this one is a poor summary of that one - https://web.archive.org/web/20240926063521/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-electricity.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240926063521/https://www.nytim...

wslh 2y ago
Sorry, but I think the original article is more insightful about the complexity and reality of making chips, which TSMC knows well, compared to moonshots by people who don't fully understand the intricacies of the semiconductors supply chain.
- kranke155 2y ago
  Huh? What original article? The Toms Hardware article is a copy and paste of the NYT one.
  - wslh 2y ago
    The original article I was referring to is the NYT piece, which covers more of the complexities around chip manufacturing and energy needs. While the Tom's Hardware article draws from it, the summary focuses more on personality clashes, losing some of the nuanced details about supply chain challenges.
    - kranke155 2y ago
      You realise I shared the original article right? And OP shared the summary?
      - wslh 2y ago
        What I'm saying is that the two articles are not the same. For example, the term "moonshot" as in "Moonshot dreams crash to earth at TSMC" is specific to one article and not the other. I think it sets a clearer tone, even if one is based on the other.
        svat 2y ago
        Do I understand correctly: you seem to be saying that the original (NYT) article is "more insightful about the complexity and reality of making chips", and "covers more of the complexities", while the summary (Tom's Hardware) article "focuses more on personality clashes, losing some of the nuanced details" — and therefore you prefer the TH article (less insightful about the complexity and nuance), because "it sets a clearer tone"?
        wslh 2y ago
        It seems you're questioning my preference, but I'm simply pointing out that I find the tone and emphasis in the TH article clearer, even though it's less detailed. I'm free to prefer the presentation of one article over another, regardless of complexity.
        svat 2y ago
        The personal preference is fine, just trying to make sure I understood correctly the discussion between you and the root poster. As a reader, it was a bit confusing to read something that starts with “Sorry, but I think the original article is more insightful…” and have it turn out that this (being more insightful) was intended as a problem. Both of the first two comments you posted seemed to be positive about the NYT article over the TH one — I had not previously encountered “insightful” used negatively, or “losing nuance” used positively — so perhaps a different choice of words would have made it clearer (to me).
        wslh 2y ago
        Now reading again, than you for pointing it out, I reversed the NYT by the TH article. My mistake while writing on the mobile phone. I basically said that I preferred the TH article over the NYT one.

Rinzler89 2y ago

Based. The more I read about TSMC, the more I like them.

mft_ 2y ago
Eh; the Russians laughed at Musk, before he started SpaceX; too.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  I doubt OpenAI will start challenging TSMC at building chips anytime soon.
  - mft_ 2y ago
    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.
    - croes 2y ago
      SpaceX needed NASA money. Where does Altmann get $7 trillion dollars
      - Foobar8568 2y ago
        From his non profit :D
        croes 2y ago
        If they pay 7 trillion dollars, they certainly won't make a profit for a long time.
      - tim333 2y ago

joelthelion 2y ago

7 trillion is absurd. The recent advancements in AI are real, but not on the order of 7T.

unnouinceput 2y ago
I remember the story about Larry and Sergei pitching their new search engine to investors: "Will make 10B annually in maximum 10 years". Nowadays 10B is the paper clips fund at Alphabet.
aero-glide2 2y ago
they will be. Looking at the rate of progress (just tried o1mini), its inevitable.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Even if we accept that premise, why should OpenAI be the ones to manage a $7T investment in hardware and datacenter development over, y'know, hardware and datacenter companies like Nvidia and Amazon? OpenAI has zero experience in those fields.
  - zer0c00ler 2y ago
    [dead]
  - cdchn 2y ago
    One of these parties cares more about where the money comes from than the other.
- gtirloni 2y ago
  If it was, companies like Microsoft and Apple would have acquired them a long time ago. The fact they decided to have a partnership means they have reason to believe the hype isn't real beyond what we already know today and they don't want to have to explain it to shareholders in the near future.
  - 2y ago

KaiserPro 2y ago

sounds like they made a solid and accurate assessment

PedroBatista 2y ago

Well.. they are not wrong. Even with the advancements made by OpenAI, some of his takes remind me of a Dollar Store Elon Musk, let alone his despicable way of doing business and seemingly complete lack of any morals. To your average TSMC exec he's closer to a Jake Paul than to a Lisa Su or even Jensen Huang.

keepamovin 2y ago
There’s likely some racial bias involved, along with hesitancy to align too closely with the US, especially given the strong ties to China during these geopolitically tense times.

perfmode 2y ago

Only time will tell

bdndndndbve 2y ago

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.

llmfan 2y ago
I think this is one of those "controversial" topics where we're meant to be particularly careful to make substantial comments.
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  I think it's substantial to say that AI is currently overhyped because it's hitting a weak spot in human cognition. We sympathize with inanimate objects. We see faces in random patterns. If a machine spits out some plausible looking text (or some cookie-cutter code copy-pasted from Stack Overflow) the human brain is basically hardwired to go "wow this is a human friend!". The current LLM trend seems designed to capitalize on this tendency towards sympathizing. This is the same thing that made chatbots seem amazing 30 years ago. There's a minimum amount of "humanness" you have to put in the text and then the recipient fills in the blanks.
  - airstrike 2y ago
    > If a machine spits out some plausible looking text (or some cookie-cutter code copy-pasted from Stack Overflow) This is not a reasonable take on the current capabilities of LLMs.
    - eschaton 2y ago
      It’s certainly been my experience with the technology.
      - airstrike 2y ago
        But if nearly everyone else is saying this has real value to them and it's produced meaningful code way beyond what's in SO, then doesn't that just mean your experience isn't representative of the overall value of LLMs?

dmead 2y ago

He's a grifter. Podcast bro is charitable.

threeseed 2y ago

So many weird things going on with this. 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. b) What does Microsoft have to say about OpenAI building a parallel cloud. c) OpenAI has zero competence in designing and building their own end to end stack but yet they are going to jump straight to $7T worth of infrastructure. Even Apple acquired PA Semiconductor and a number of smaller startups to build out their team.

thruway516 2y ago
Didn't you know, according to ___ [insert favorite visionary] if you're not building an impossible moonshot you're a nothing and a nobody.
anon291 2y ago
> 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.
- threeseed 2y ago
  > 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 States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act
  - anon291 2y ago
    TSMC is not the Taiwanese government, and besides, according to American foreign policy, the Taiwanese government is not a government either.

dboreham 2y ago

This guy doesn't sound like he understands engineering (checks Wikipedia...ok dropped out of Stanford). Perhaps figure out how to not need the money and electricity from the entire planet first before embarking on plan to use same.

yieldcrv 2y ago

a little bit of column a, a little bit of column b factors are that international markets rely less on local cults of personality and just the financial, it’s also fair to say that TSMC is risk averse, most amusingly is that these personality cults work out fine if you throw enough money at them so I can’t fault this podcast bro for trying

isodev 2y ago

I'm absolutely flabbergasted how much money and political capital is spent on vaporware, while there are very concrete and very impactful challenges we could be addressing instead.

brookst 2y ago
There’s a lot of money to be made if you can reliable distinguish the two in advance.
- isodev 2y ago
  I don't think there is appetite for this, in big tech especially. People are looking for glamorous next big things, everyone wants to be the first in some green field thing instead of digging into "the boring stuff we've been hearing about since forever". Imagine, even Apple completely enshittified their OSes just so they're on the bandwagon of AI with zero added value.
  - fhd2 2y ago
    Exactly. And now, a possibly terrifying question: What if there just is not going to be a "next big thing"? Population size is about to peak. Up until now, for as long as we know, it has been growing. Starting at the latest with colonisation, we've had more people, more resources, new markets advancing into buyers of new products. Once societies advance to a certain point, they begin to shrink, this is well studied. Without these growth factors, does it seem likely we'll see something as transformative as the automobile or the internet again? Possibly bleak and badly informed, but I find it plausible to think that the party is about to end. Most of us here have probably seen what happens to a company when they stop growing. Spoiler: It's typically not innovation.
    - fellowmartian 2y ago
      I’m not the biggest AI fanboy, but AI is the solution to this. You’re right that the population is about to peak, and we’ll stop adding biological brains that can come up with new things, but if we crack real AGI then we’ll have many more orders of magnitude of mechanical brains that can do the same.

AlexandrB 2y ago

It's ironic that Sam Altman's background is in YC, because this is the opposite of startup thinking. Instead of scrappy disruption he seems to want massive investment upfront with only vague ideas of what the technology could be used for.

torlok 2y ago
The second sentence describes a lot of startups.
- pyb 2y ago
  It describes bad startups.
AdamN 2y ago
They already know that some of these upcoming model builds are going to require $100MM and possibly even a billion dollars. That is just the compute costs for building a single model. Product-market fit is basically established and the cost structure is basically understood so he needs the money for pretty straighforward reasons. With that said it's a gamble since somebody might come along with a $10MM model based on some new technique and then OpenAI's cost structure becomes a problem. Presumably their scientists could adapt pretty quickly though if that happened.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
stackghost 2y ago
>he seems to want massive investment upfront with only vague ideas of what the technology could be used for That sounds exactly like venture-funded startup thinking to me.

hlanders10 2y ago

He may have the last laugh. His traveling around the world and threatening to build fabs in the UAE and Taiwan is a diplomatic scheme to get the U.S. hawks into action. And lo and behold, ClopenAI has already hired CHIPS act people: "To bolster its efforts, OpenAI has hired Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House lawyer, as its vice president of global policy, along with two people from the Commerce Department who worked on the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law designed to increase domestic chip manufacturing. One of them will manage future infrastructure projects and policy." We'll build plants overseas if you don't give us CHIPS Act money is a great scheme.

CharlieDigital 2y ago
> Build fabs Such a misguided take. If it were that easy to build fabs to compete with TSMC, Intel would do it. China would do it. Hardware is way harder than software.
- iphoneisbetter 2y ago
  Or maybe, just maybe, TSMC has gaslit all of us to think it is much harder than it really is. If Taiwan isn't needed for its chips, what is the strategic interest of the USG?
  - osnium123 2y ago
    No, TSMC is really that special. Intel has been struggling for a while now.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    It's not like nobody is trying to compete with TSMC, Samsung and Intel are doing their best, but TSMC are consistently ahead despite all of these companies using the same ASML lithography machines.
    - iphoneisbetter 2y ago
      Good point. However my mind is drawn back to the fact that the USG licenses the patents to ASML. A tweak or change of that licensing model could suddenly make TSMC's cost basis rise and Intel's drop. We are after all talking about US national security interests as the backdrop - the usual market rules may not apply so cleanly.

actuallyalys 2y ago

The analogy to electricity doesn’t make sense to me. OpenAI’s and their competitors’ products are already widely available, companies have added to AI to a bunch of apps, and the cost per token has already come down significantly. (Edit: not to mention openly licensed models.) I also don’t see think it’s historically accurate. My understanding was that widespread electrification were motivated by lighting, the radio, and other applications. Getting electricity to more people probably helped spur further development, sure, but there were already “killer apps.”

anon291 2y ago
The 'token economy' is but one facet of an AI revolution. From my perspective, the main point of LLMs has been to simply be marketing. No one wants to hear about protein folding, physics sim, etc.
pphysch 2y ago
AI algorithms alone definitely don't represent "energy" in a meaningful way, but high-quality data is a commodity. Part of the AI scam peeling back the facade on every AI product and realizing "oh this is actually pretty useless unless we already have high-quality automated data systems internally at $ORG", and the advancements in AI only make that nominally more accessible. No, synthetic data is not the solution, and Copilot won't build you a robust data platform. Digitalization and digital literacy are long-term trends that AI is at the whim of, but pretends otherwise.

redleader55 2y ago

He seems to be the same kind of individual as Musk: able to bring together teams that build great things, but also able to bring about drama and ego. The whole musical chair act with profit/non-profit OpenAI, and getting rid of many of the folks that created the models they are famous for.

leobg 2y ago
I’m sure he’d love that comparison. But Elon is responsible for PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI and now Grok. I have a Starlink antenna on my roof because of him, and I take my kids to school safely and quietly in a car that, 15 years ago, someone willing to spend 20 million dollars would not have been able to buy. Sam? An iris scanning crypto scam. I think that’s all he ever got off the ground. With ChatGPT, he positioned himself at the right place at the right time. And by dubious means, too.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  > Elon is responsible for PayPal Actually, he was responsible for the competitor that PayPal bought out because the market wasn't big enough for two companies, and was forced out of PayPal because he was pushing ruinously bad ideas.
  - leobg 2y ago
    Depends on whose viewpoint you read. He was the biggest shareholder and received $176 million when PayPal was sold to eBay. He was there from the beginning. And he wasn’t the marketing guy. Whether you like him or not, that’s all very different from Altman.
    - FireBeyond 2y ago
      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 want to contribute to the codebase, so we really need to rewrite it in Classic ASP", problematic on so many levels.

apwell23 2y ago

What PG see in him as a teenager to proclaim he is 'Michael jordan of listening' or that he knew within 3 mins that sam is next bill gates. These are actual paul graham quotes not something from Silicon Valley TV show. Edit: to ppl responding "you should already know know paul graham is a grifter" . I don't believe is the case given his essays about meritocracy.

Invictus0 2y ago
Sequoia wrote 13,000 words about how Sam Bankman-Fried was god's gift to mankind. VCs are not serious. > Bankman-Fried's first pitch meeting with the VC firm's partners during its Series B round is also included in the profile, in which the founder laid out his vision to investors for FTX to become a super-app — all while he was playing the video game "League of Legends" on his computer.
leobg 2y ago
I imagine that means that he observes a lot and thinks a lot before he acts. Which is great. I just wish that he had some higher God than fame and power.
snapcaster 2y ago
You don't see the grift here? People collude to hype eachother up to increase prestige and social status. It sounds like you take things said in public by billionaires at face value. I would suggest you stop doing that

lvl155 2y ago

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.

causal 2y ago
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.

dizzydes 2y ago

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 economic impact. Even at the current state of the art this is plausible. - The notion that everyone laid off above will find new employment from the opportunities AI creates. Perhaps it's just a gap in my knowledge. What opportunities are so large they'll make up for the economies we're starting to see? I understand the inverting population pyramid in the Western world helps this some also (more retirees/less workers).

schnitzelstoat 2y ago
I agree on the first two points. On the third point, I think we've always seen this happen even in massive shocks like the Industrial Revolution (and the Second Industrial Revolution with assembly lines etc. and the Computer Age) It might be hard for people to retrain to whatever the new opportunities are though. Although perhaps somewhat easier nowadays with the internet etc.
- beepbooptheory 2y ago
  The industrial revolution didn't lay everyone off, it just made everyone's jobs worse in every possible sense.
  - visarga 2y ago
    I don't think many would switch current life with pre-industrial life. You are idealising the past and discounting the present
    - beepbooptheory 2y ago
      Not trying to value life in general at all, just the nature of the jobs. You might reply "distinction without a difference," and well, the fact that you'd think so would be one of my points about the labor ;). Personally, preindustrial life sounds pretty rough, but its all just apples and oranges! The future will continue to happen, to critique the present and how we got here is not to exhort the past (unless, you know, you are a particularly conservative person I guess).

jp0001 2y ago

Well, he’s not their direct customer.

zackkatz 2y ago

[flagged]

concerndc1tizen 2y ago
What do we call the Middle East then?
- NonEUCitizen 2y ago
  West Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Asia Southwest Asia: https://www.britannica.com/place/Southwest-Asia https://www.britannica.com/place/Southwest-Asia
  - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
    I agree in principle. But that still leaves it called Far East, it's just Far East Asia.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
trashtester 2y ago
The origin of the term "Asia" is from ancient Greece, and meant anything to the east of the Dardanelles Strait. The Romans used the term specifically for the province of western Anatolia. To extend that term to include all those landmasses, including China, India and Japan is extremely Eurocentric. I would consider "Far East" quite neutral by comparison.

wg0 2y ago

> OpenAI’s business model, as it exists today, doesn’t really inspire confidence, as it seems to exist on the promise of ‘jam tomorrow.’ Specifically, the firm has an income of approximately $3 billion per year, which is put in deep shade by its $7 billion annual expenditure. So a yearly loss of 4 billion dollars or losing $10 million daily. The IPOs basically (mostly) have been operating just the way Bitcoin has been - Next bigger fool theory. That you pass on the potato to the next bigger fool till it ends to the last in the chain like Twitter who doesn't know what to do to churn out those inflated sums paid along the chain. Not sure how many days OpenAI can afford to lose 10 million dollars daily but current macroeconomic environment, prospects aren't great.

shubhamjain 2y ago
Most of the expense can probably be attributed to training and operating their free-tier. They can shut off both of them any day and become insanely profitable. I don't think people realize the sheer magnitude of reaching $3B ARR in under two years. Is there an AI hype? Sure. Is it a crypto-like bubble just where everyone is just peddling BS? No, not even close.
- wg0 2y ago
  Training costing billions can't be. Biggest line item would be salaries. Probably. Also, revenue you can't take home. Doesn't matter how many billions. It is the profit that matters in the end.
- gotaran 2y ago
  OpenAI has no clear moat though. If they shut off training, everyone would just move over to a competitor.
- iphoneisbetter 2y ago
  > I don't think people realize the sheer magnitude of reaching $3B ARR in under two years. These things impress people who fail to digest business fundamentals. Anyone with a suit and a slick powerpoint preso can in theory start a money-incinerating machine. The real measurement is the profit. And before someone makes the "capture the market" comment - this isn't ZIRP anymore. Money costs fuckin money now.

gepardi 2y ago

That’s hilarious. Maybe there’ll be an episode in some show a decade from now, inspired by this.

5cott0 2y ago

more like “anime pfp anon”

SavageBeast 2y ago

I was having some kind of issue the other day - browser cache corruption issue or ChatGPT hiccuped for a few minutes - but I needed to know an answer for a thing RIGHT NOW. I reluctantly went back to Google and searched for it the old way. Just ... OMFG ... I used to do this all the time? This used to be how you learned things? You mean I get to read 10 sites and 25 dumb answers to get to a possibly correct one? And all the while I got ads coming at me for this and that. A friend was trying to decode some chat convo we had about GLP-1 drugs and get factual information. Google search was nothing but direct ads selling "IF YOU LIKE OZEMPIC YOU WILL LOOOOOVE NOZEMPIC - ITS ALL NATURAL!!" and the content-mill blogs and such that tout the benefits of some "NOZEMPIC" variant. AI has changed the way I learn and research. I have a very capable tutor on demand for any subject there is, any time I want to use it. Its mostly right or "good enough for government work" as the old guys say. I was once an AI hater - now Im an AI evangelist and Im turning people in my sphere of influence into AI users too. Once you show them the value prop they totally get it. Learning and such no longer requires manual work for the 90% case.

meiraleal 2y ago
> Just ... OMFG ... I used to do this all the time? This used to be how you learned things? No. Google is really not useful anymore, it wasn't like that. It is IMPOSSIBLE to search for what you want, Google just think they know what you want and literally change the words to match. It is crazy.
- SavageBeast 2y ago
  I think Google, with regard to Search here, is in the Skin The Sheep phase of its story arc. Innovation is done, market dominance is here, no point in innovating because they're making so much money. The total shit state that is Google Search these days is a tacit admission that search as we know it is over. No more innovating, instead lets suck as much money out of this thing as we can today because its going away. Good news is things become pure profit for Google while they wait for the inevitable changing of the guard and their replacement becomes the new normal.
finikytou 2y ago

bob1029 2y ago

It is clear to me that Sam has never set foot inside of a semiconductor manufacturing facility. Or, if he did he definitely wasn't paying attention to what was going on around him. I don't know how you could witness these things and then make glib statements about building 36 of them. It will likely take well over a decade to recoup investment on any new chip fab at this point. Chasing ~4 customers on one narrow use case is nonsensical from the perspective of anyone running these companies.

H8crilA 2y ago
It is reasonable from his point of view - you guys sink the capital, I will have more compute. And if it doesn't work out and orders stop coming in then well that's not my problem, is it?
- bob1029 2y ago
  > It is reasonable from his point of view If he wants to actually accomplish his objectives, he needs to get inside the minds of the executives that run these companies. Empathize with their concerns and then develop a strategy for walking them towards a path to build even one additional factory. Throwing out a cartoonish figure and then hoping to be taken seriously is not something I'd expect from the CEO of something so adjacent.
  - mrbungie 2y ago
    I think OAI and especially sama as its CEO are crossing the point of being significant in their own right, and as old talent moves out of OAI we may start to hear increasingly crazy stuff coming from them. They're just becoming brands to put over the machinations of some VCs, hyperscalers and big techs.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    You say that, but to me the Americans have a stereotype of making outrageous demands and then getting big wins because sometimes people say yes. And if he doesn't ask for what he wants he certainly won't get it. Empathy is a good practice when managing others and have control over what they do, but in business negotiations it is often productive to just make your wants and budget clear.

imaginationra 2y ago

Grifters gonna grift- My nerd hype died as I used gpt4+ and Claude 3.5+ whatever for coding tasks and realized if a human somewhere in the training data hadn't already solved a programming problem/wrote code for a solution the LLM's are useless for said problem. They're useful as an assistant/junior coder to do repetitive tasks/things you/other humans already have already done tho. BUT that's not going to revolutionize programming as you already have to know how to code to use them. * and "hallucinations" should be referred to as "bullshitting" when it comes to LLM's as that's what it really is.

Mistletoe 2y ago
I was watching Alien last night and as they talked with Mother it was refreshing to see the ship computer just say “I don’t know” when it didn’t know something. If we could get our LLMs there it would be a nice step forward. You can definitely tell ours were made in Silicon Valley, home of the bullshit and fake it till you make it.
- prewett 2y ago
  I tried asking Gemini to summarize a non-existent poem, and it said it would need the actual source of the poem to summarize it (but provided four potential themes based on the title). I then suggested that it was a standard English course text and it apologetically said that it couldn't find any record of it, but perhaps I was thinking of this other poem? It is perhaps too helpful at coming up with a workable solution to my request, but it did seem to know when it didn't know. Although perhaps that isn't the LLM but some additional information from a search query being fed into the LLM.
anon291 2y ago
> My nerd hype died as I used gpt4+ and Claude 3.5+ whatever for coding tasks and realized if a human somewhere in the training data hadn't already solved a programming problem/wrote code for a solution the LLM's are useless for said problem. See my experience is the opposite, and gpt3 was able to answer questions about the niche Haskell library I wrote better than I was. Unless you posit that there's some secret cabal of people using this Haskell library and writing answers for GPT to consume somewhere in the depths of OpenAIs org structure, it's pretty obvious to me that LLMs are quite capable.

drawkward 2y ago

More cryptobro, imo

andy_ppp 2y ago

Arguably compared to the technical people who do the actual work isn’t this a fairly perceptive description?

joeybloey 2y ago
There's lots of smart serious people who aren't technical but the problem with Altman is that he isn't serious at all, he's a pure grifter, focused only on headlines

mpalmer 2y ago

This jumped out at me: "The NYT claims it discussed OpenAI's negotiations with nine people close to the discussions but who wish to remain anonymous." "Claims"? Generally newspapers do not lie about the sourcing for a story.

dylan604 2y ago
You have qualms with "claims", yet you use "generally" to describe newspaper dogma. So you accept that newspapers do not always not lie, yet you have issues accepting that sometimes sources have not been verified?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jpm_sd 2y ago

At this point it's become clear that Sam Altman is an Emissary of the Eschaton (in the Strossian sense)

finikytou 2y ago

they are right tho. He is a snake oil vendor and all his A team leaving due likely to his moves and unethical steps taken from day 1 are proof that TSMC is a solid business

zooq_ai 2y ago

Remember when the Russians mocked Elon Musk for his rocket purchase? Remember when Blockbuster mocked Netflix? Remember when Steve Ballmer mocked the iPhone? Remember when Zuck was mocked for the Metaverse? I'm pretty sure Sam would have heard similar mockings like "You can't take on Google behemoth, podcaster bro" before. But the sad part is, the newer tech generation is so brainwashed that it takes the side of the mocker instead of the mockee. Watch Sam partner with some other fab like Intel and make TSMC irrelevant. Of course HN will then side with Sam

dylan604 2y ago
> Remember when Zuck was mocked for the Metaverse? One of these things is not like the others. You listed 3 things proven silly with hindsight, then you post one comment that is mere hopeful wishing.
- koolala 2y ago
  If Meta makes those new AR glasses real it makes up for the Metaverse branding.
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  Like I said, if you didn't follow Orion's demo and still parroting "Metaverse Bad" you belong in the exact same category as Blockbuster

tempodox 2y ago

Altman is used to deal with people whose medium is mostly hot air. I'd expect a chip manufacturer to have a healthy allergy against that. Having your process filled with 99% bullshit might be good enough if the desired outcome is investment, but if you want to produce functional hardware, you can't afford that.

dangitman 2y ago

[dead]

asn1parse 2y ago

lolololololololololololololol

JCharante 2y ago

> Even implementing a fraction of the OpenAI CEO’s ideas would be incredibly risky, the execs are said to have openly pondered. I don’t want to live in a world where nobody takes risks. > However, the latest OpenAI statements have rolled back such talk to "mere" hundreds of billions. It is reported that years of construction time would also be needed to satisfy the OpenAI compute scaling plans. Yeah so what? It will take years to build so build 36 mega data-centers in parallel. > the firm has an income of approximately $3 billion per year, which is put in deep shade by its $7 billion annual expenditure. Those are tiny numbers. Airpods are a $14B/year line of products. OpenAI needs to be ready to spend 100B/year. > Likewise, Apple launched its iPhone 16 and 16 Pro earlier in the month with a lot of talk about Apple Intelligence, but the first of these AI features won’t be available on the new devices until next month. I’m on a 15 pro max with the 18.1 PUBLIC Beta. I have these features and so do 16 users. Mark Tyson. This is terrible lazy journalism. You add half true statements to make your point.

lizknope 2y ago

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 work. OpenAI has tried to assemble a loose federation of companies, including data center builders like Microsoft as well as investors and chipmakers. But the particulars of who would pay the money, who would get it and what they would even build are hazy. He's trying to get a bunch of diverse companies including Microsoft to fund this but it's unclear what kind of chips he actually wants. Many of the big companies including Microsoft are designing their own custom AI chips. But the article mentions Nvidia. Does OpenAI have any plans to design their own chips or do they just use Nvidia? It may be difficult to get Nvidia competitors to want to join his effort. > TSMC makes semiconductors for Nvidia, the leading developer of A.I. chips. The plan would allow Nvidia to churn out more chips. OpenAI and other companies would use those chips in more A.I. data centers.

calf 2y ago
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.
- ksec 2y ago
  >He's a Steve Jobs type C-level manager. Steve Jobs actually knows a lot more about many things than most people realise.
  - calf 2y ago
    Same could be said of Sam Altman, doesn't change the fact that they are not trained scientists i.e. knowledge workers.

BaculumMeumEst 2y ago

This is like posting a reaction video. Just post the actual source.

spamizbad 2y ago

TSMC shade aside, I think Altman is keenly aware that AI is still too capital intensive for short-to-medium term viability and I think his hope to was to probe the semiconductor industry's willingness to build-out more fabs to drive the costs down substantially. I suspect Altman was being bluntly honest with them about the economics of AI rather than enthusiastically telling them they should immediately build 37 fabs because surely that's super easy. Blackwell cabinets are $3M each and have significant power requirements and thus you'd likely need to be selling your products at $100/month/seat to turn a slim profit.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Gift link of the NYT source: 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...

throw4847285 2y ago

This is going to sound nuts, but I think CEOs like Altman have more in common with historical monarchs than modern Democratic leaders. In a Democracy, there's more transparency into the degree to which everything the President/PM does is actually delegated out. Joe Biden may be the Commander in Chief, but just watch a political military thriller and you'll see that culturally, we understand the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in having the actual depth of knowledge the President lacks. But CEOs often practice a form of charismatic leadership whereby you have to project having more knowledge than you actually do. That is because their leadership is both less democratic and less secure than their counterparts. You've got to be constantly maneuvering against challenges to your legitimacy. I think it has something to do with the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy from German sociology. You might think that a tech company would be the quintessential form of Gesellschaft, but in reality, the community of tech CEOs and VCs is far more like a social club than it is like a rational, contractual relationship.

MDJMediaLab 2y ago
I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
- throw4847285 2y ago
  I'm truly flattered, but you would just get regurgitated ideas from smarter newsletters.

thebigspacefuck 2y ago

Maybe the board was right to kick him out

yapyap 2y ago

36 new plants, 7 trillion dollars and that would all have to be backed by AI? yikes. I know Sam is gonna be a billionaire assetwise soon but I wonder if it’ll make him more realistic or even more “idealistic” (bigger bullshitter)

churchill 2y ago

On some level, I still see Sam Altman as a visionary, but the moment that got me rolling my eyes was when we traveled to Middle East, reportedly looking to raise up to $7 trillion for AI chips. Like, bro, all the sovereign wealth funds of the Arab Gulf hold less than $3 trillion, mostly in illiquid assets that you could take a 50% haircut if you need to liquidate. And after the $100b Vision Fund fiasco where Saudi Arabia was subsidizing "Uber for Dog-walking" startups for years (no thanks to Masayoshi Son), I'm not sure they're going to be keen subsidizing yet another bubble. But, isn't that the default in VC? Aggressive, toxic optimism because it's not your money and you need to promise otherworldly yield to get capital.

davidivadavid 2y ago
Can someone enlighten me on how Sam Altman is a "visionary" of any kind? The extent of his vision, to the best of my knowledge so far, is "things will get cheap then cool stuff will happen." That's the laziest "vision" I've ever seen in my life. It depicts nothing concrete whatsoever.

stonethrowaway 2y ago

How do you anticipate sama will take being rejected by TSMC?

Ninjak8051 2y ago

Maybe Altman has no idea about the realities of semiconductor manufacturing, or maybe he does. Sometimes it takes an outsider to shake things up and produce the impossible. Probably some Verizon execs called Steve Jobs a "computer bro" when he walked in with a pre-production iPhone and asked for "half".

m3kw9 2y ago

This is what he needs, someone is there to tell him if it can be done or not.

htk 2y ago

Very biased article, with the author injecting a lot of his personal opinions on the matter.

dang 2y ago

I've re-upped the original article here: Behind OpenAI's plan to make A.I. flow like electricity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41663562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41663562 Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rldjbpin 2y ago

as someone working in AI, if i had access to 7T USD, i would never put it all in AI research, forget in one moonshot alone to put it best. in retrospect, press media was much more critical of meta and the whole metaverse schtick. it took long but all the money poured on the research has brought more meaningful results with the orion prototype. we are giving this AI company too much air time. let them do their bidding by themselves.