> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.