upvote
Probably because "making the world a better place" has been a trope used so much in the industry that it's made it to a TV show [1]. It's fine to be passionate about your job. It's fine to be paid well. You don't need to make us believe that you're mother Theresa on top of it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

reply
You should stop using mother theresa this way.
reply
What a gem of a TV show.
reply
The don't need you to believe it. They just need themselves to hear say it.
reply
The greatness of human accomplishment has always been measured by size. The bigger, the better. Until now. Nanotech. Smart cars. Small is the new big. In the coming months, Hooli will deliver Nucleus, the most sophisticated compression software platform the world has ever seen. Because if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make cancer smaller. And hunger. And AIDS.

Gavin Belson

reply
Reminds me of when I was younger and thought of companies like Google and Tesla as a force for good that will create and use technology to make people's lives better. Surely OpenAI and these LLM companies will change the world for the better, right? They wouldn't burn down our planet for short-term monetary gain, right?

I've learned over the years that I was naive and it's a coincidence if the tech giants make people's lives better. That's not their goal.

reply
Could US tech companies stop making the world a better place? Like how Airbnb made housing markets "better" and and Facebook made politics "better"? We barely have anything left as regular people as our new feudal lords capture everything they can.
reply
airBnB made a very constrained market more efficient, the downsides are classic NIMBY factors. (which are important, but also nothing has been solved in cities that outlawed AirBnB.)

on the other hand Facebook made the internet hate machine more efficient :(

reply
Right? Like what an incredibly naive thing to think, that BG is going to contain power consumption lmao. OpenAI is always going to run their hardware hot. If BG frees up compute, a new workload will just fill it.

Sure you might argue "well if they can do more with less they won't need as many data centers." But who is going to believe that a company that can squeeze more money from their investment won't grow?

Tangentially, I am looking forward to learn the new innovations that come from this problem space. [Self-rightous] BG certainly is exceptional at presenting hard topics in an approachable and digestible manner. And now it seems he has an unlimited fund to get creative.

reply
They're going to grow either way. Those new workloads are going to be run
reply
Ya, we know. Just humbling the author ;)
reply
The AI train is going with or without you, if you can be part of it and improve the situaton, why not.
reply
if you can be part of it and take a fat check!
reply
deleted
reply
Even a 25% reduction in resource usage will probably not be enough, AI datacenters are still a huge resource sink after all
reply
If you reduce energy consumption of training a new model by 25%, OpenAI will just buy more hardware and try to churn out a new model 25% faster. The total consumption will be exactly the same.

And they're 100% justified to do so, until they hit another bottleneck (when there is literally not that much Nvidia hardware to buy, for example.)

reply
There's no gain to be had there at all. Any optimizations that reduce resource usage per output will be gobbled up by just making more output.

OpenAI released an open source model only because they are capped on growth right now by the amount if hardware they have. Improve resource efficiency and you better believe they'll just crank up use of said resources until they capped again.

reply
I imagine there's a lot more to be gained than that via algorithmic improvements. But at least in the short term, the more you cut costs (and prices), the more usage will increase.
reply
I stopped reading just after that. “I joined PhilipsMorris to make smoking cigarette smoking safer…”

The problems are interesting and the pay is exceptional. Just fucking own it.

reply
He interviewed everywhere and took the biggest offer. Good! Don’t piss on my face and tell me it’s raining.
reply
It's raining anyway. If I piss on your face, I can at least try to make the experience as positive as possible for you.
reply
[flagged]
reply
Firstly, you would do well to read the guidelines about avoiding snark, and then actually say whatever it is you’re trying to say rather than make insinuations. As is, this response comes across as a very shallow read. It’s hard to get to the root of what you’re actually saying in your post other than it quotes two paragraphs about how it’s not fun to push through the bureaucracy of a large organisation, which - I would agree. Probably most people who’ve worked at a big company would.

So why does that make him a “big shot”? Are you perhaps envious of him?

Why does openAI deserve him or anyone? Hard to say.

reply
deleted
reply
[flagged]
reply
[flagged]
reply
[flagged]
reply
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

reply