Where does he think they got the Transformer paper from, or even the PyTorch and H100 GPU's they use?
I think there is a point here that user-facing innovation stagnated and OpenAI helped break that, but it’s wild to me that there is no acknowledgement at all of the giants whose shoulders they stand on. Although I guess that’s what he meant about the arrogance…
Theranos!
> Where does he think they got the Transformer paper from, or even the PyTorch and H100 GPU's they use?
He's hallucinating. OpenAI is not a scientific breakthrough any more than Theranos was. It's just a commercial service that creates a pipeline out of other people's scientific breakthroughs.
The opacity of it should obviate any claim of it being scientific; for all we know, the backend is a bullpen of librarians chained to workstations. He's also glossing over the ethics of outsourcing moderation to desperate Africans, which would raise some flags in a truly-scientific context.
The transformer paper is the only thing that absolutely can be considered a breakthrough and what commercial success or impact did it have before OpenAI? None.
He is absolutely correct. Silicon Valley had been chasing crap for years now like crypto or various forms of rent seeking "businesses", and making incremental improvements.
Does the freakin first mass produced EV in the world count? Engineering and manufacturing.
Crypto is also an example of a much more globally distributed phenomena. Vitalik in Singapore, tether founders in Italy?, Binance god knows where, FTX in Bahamas, etc. None of the major tech co’s in the Bay were doing much of anything with crypto. Oh except for Coinbase, you know the YC darling of whom Sam is affiliated?
(not speaking about silicon valley)