I am a bit perplexed by the amount of comments praising Sam as an absolute god and the second coming of tech leadership Jesus.
The company is not profitable and miles away from being profitable, I’d go as far to say it doesn’t have a path to profit.
Outside of the copilot use cases that MS is leading - GPT is both cost ineffective, and not that terribly impressive - it’s built on foundational technologies developed elsewhere and is not miles away from similar models built at Meta and Google/DM. At the point it was launched and started generating terribly inflated buzz that formed the AI balloon - both Meta and Google has similar scale and parameter models already running in their stacks.
The only thing he did is package the product nicely and put it out to masses (an ethically dubious move that couldn’t have been done by big corpos for PR reasons - explicitly because it formed a misinformed balloon). He did that at huge cost, even though the product is largely useless outside of some eyebrow raising and incidental gimmicky use cases.
All of the actual product work (i.e copilot and distillation that GOT brings) was done by other companies.
What is everyone drinking and how can I get on that? Is he getting credit for bringing sth that was widely known to the AI community to the masses (and thus starting the AI arms race) hence bringing in more mainstream capital funding? I’d argue itms not a good thing that technology as powerful as foundational AI is now being debated and policy formed on by people who don’t know the first thing about ML, I think we skipped a couple rungs on the natural evolution of this - which is why the whole AI safety debate started.
He did all of that because he wanted a moat an an edge over the competition (including trying to regulate the competition out of the running). This is like Apple-level shenanigans- something that HNews usually despises.
I genuinely don’t get where the impressiveness is coming from?
I agree with a lot of what you said but the product is definitely not useless. ChatGPT alone has saved me a lot of time. If it does get a lot better, then it will be even more useful.
Irrelevant. I’m not dissing him for the company being non profitable - but given he didn’t have any input into building the tech (it was built in Google) and the product he lead is unimpressive by any measure (if you disentangle product from the technology underpinning it you zoom on the commercial aspects) - what did he do except influence his way to world leaders and the masses (a cynic might say con his way to world leaders and masses)?
Not saying that isn’t impressive - but it also usually isn’t what Hnews community values. So I’m just a bit perplexed.
HN is not a monolithic entity with a single opinion. I don't know what specific comments you're referring to, but I don't see any hagiographies myself. I've seen a lot of people hopeful that OpenAI will go in a different direction with him gone!
The company is not profitable and miles away from being profitable, I’d go as far to say it doesn’t have a path to profit.
Outside of the copilot use cases that MS is leading - GPT is both cost ineffective, and not that terribly impressive - it’s built on foundational technologies developed elsewhere and is not miles away from similar models built at Meta and Google/DM. At the point it was launched and started generating terribly inflated buzz that formed the AI balloon - both Meta and Google has similar scale and parameter models already running in their stacks.
The only thing he did is package the product nicely and put it out to masses (an ethically dubious move that couldn’t have been done by big corpos for PR reasons - explicitly because it formed a misinformed balloon). He did that at huge cost, even though the product is largely useless outside of some eyebrow raising and incidental gimmicky use cases.
All of the actual product work (i.e copilot and distillation that GOT brings) was done by other companies.
What is everyone drinking and how can I get on that? Is he getting credit for bringing sth that was widely known to the AI community to the masses (and thus starting the AI arms race) hence bringing in more mainstream capital funding? I’d argue itms not a good thing that technology as powerful as foundational AI is now being debated and policy formed on by people who don’t know the first thing about ML, I think we skipped a couple rungs on the natural evolution of this - which is why the whole AI safety debate started.
He did all of that because he wanted a moat an an edge over the competition (including trying to regulate the competition out of the running). This is like Apple-level shenanigans- something that HNews usually despises.
I genuinely don’t get where the impressiveness is coming from?