Comment by rashidujang

Comment by rashidujang 20 hours ago

22 replies

> There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development.

It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed. Throw in a knee-jerk solution of "daily call" (sound familiar?) for those involved while they are wading knee-deep through work and you have a perfect storm of terrible working conditions. My money is Google, who in my opinion have not only caught up, but surpassed OpenAI with their latest iteration of their AI offerings.

wlesieutre 20 hours ago

Besides, can't they just allocate more ChatGPT instances to accelerating their development?

palmotea 19 hours ago

> It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed.

A lot of advice is that way, which is why it is advice. If following it were easy everyone would just do it all the time, but if it's hard or there are temptations in the other direction, it has to be endlessly repeated.

Plus, there are always those special-snowflake guys who are "that's good advice for you, but for me it's different!"

Also it wouldn't surprise me if Sam Altman's talents aren't in management or successfully running a large organization, but in machiavellian manipulation and maneuvering.

amelius 20 hours ago

Imho it just shows how relatively simple this technology really is, and nobody will have a moat. The bubble will pop.

  • deelowe 20 hours ago

    Not exactly. Infra will win the race. In this aspect, Google is miles ahead of the competition. Their DC solutions scale very well. Their only risk is that the hardware and low level software stack is EXTREMELY custom. They don't even fully leverage OCP. Having said that, this has never been a major problem for Google over their 20+ years of moving away from OTS parts.

    • amelius 19 hours ago

      But anyone with enough money can make infra. Maybe not at the scale of Google, but maybe that's not necessary (unless you have a continuous stream of fresh high-quality training data).

      • shaftway 15 hours ago

        Anyone with enough money can cross any moat. That's one of the many benefits of having infinite money.

      • piva00 19 hours ago

        If making infra means designing their own silicon to target only inference instead of more general GPUs I can agree with you, otherwise the long-term success is based on how cheap they can run the infra compared to competitors.

        Depending on Nvidia for your inference means you'll be price gouged for it, Nvidia has a golden goose for now and will milk it as much as possible.

        I don't see how a company without optimised hardware can win in the long run.

        • amelius 18 hours ago

          The silicon can be very generic. I don't see why prices of "tensor" computation units can't go down if the world sees the value in them, just like how it happened with CPUs.

  • simianwords 20 hours ago

    amazing how the bubble pops either from the technology either being too simple or being too complex to make a profit

    • amelius 19 hours ago

      The technology is simple, but you need a ton of hardware. So you lose either because there's lots of competition or you lose because your hardware costs can't be recuperated.

dathinab 20 hours ago

the thought that this might be done one recommendation of ChatGPT has me rolling

think about it, with how much bad advice is out there in certain topics it's guaranteed that ChatGPT will promote common bad advice in many cases

tiahura 20 hours ago

Also, google has plenty of (unmatched?) proprietary data and their own money tree to fuel the money furnace.

  • FinnKuhn 20 hours ago

    As well as their own hardware and a steady cash flow to finance their AI endevours for longer.

bgwalter 17 hours ago

There is always a daily call if a U.S. startup fails. Soon there will be quadrants and Ikigai Venn diagrams on the internal Slack.

ryandvm 19 hours ago

Don't forget the bleak subtext of all this.

All these engineers working 70 hour weeks for world class sociopaths in some sort of fucked up space race to create a technology that is supposed to make all of them unemployed.

  • p1esk 17 hours ago

    These engineers make enough money to comfortably retire by the time they are replaced with AI.

  • wiseowise 14 hours ago

    > technology that is supposed to make all of them unemployed.

    To make all of us (other poor fuckers) unemployed.

  • tim333 18 hours ago

    You can have a more upbeat take on it all.

    • jiggawatts 17 hours ago

      You can, but then your model of the world will be less accurate.

  • bluecalm 16 hours ago

    They are paid exceptionally well though. Way above market rate for their skill set was at any point in history. Work long hours for a few years and enjoy freedom for the rest of your life. That's a deal a lot of people would take. No need to feel sorry for the ones in position to actually get the choice.

woeirua 20 hours ago

Wait, shouldn't their internal agents be able to do all this work by now?

  • JacobAsmuth 19 hours ago

    They have a stated goal of an AI researcher for 2028. Several years away.