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

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.nytim...

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Gift link of the NYT source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-elec...

sounds like they made a solid and accurate assessment

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

He's a grifter. Podcast bro is charitable.

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

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.

Maybe the board was right to kick him out

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

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

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".

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Well, he’s not their direct customer.

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)

Only time will tell

> 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.

More cryptobro, imo

lolololololololololololololol

more like “anime pfp anon”

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

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.

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.