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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

This semi-analysis article reads a lot more like an OpenAI press release than a real analysis. And to be honest some of the statements seem like just straight up lies - they initially claim they were invited to benchmark it, and then half way down switch to claiming that OpenAI provided all the numbers. This really kind of sucks, because I want to read actual detailed nuanced and credible analysis of what's happening in the industry and it doesn't seem like you can trust this as far as you can throw it.

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Semianalysis is an AI hype organisation, not a serious, unbiased semiconductor reviewer/journalist like chipsandcheese nor a documentarian of the semiconductor industry like Asianonmetry (as it relates so strongly to the modern economies of Asia). If you see something from semianalysis, you can simply ignore it.

I tend to agree, but the Semianalysis + Dwarkesh side of reporting still does surface interesting information. You just have to take it all with a grain of salt, as indeed it is more hype focused, and look for real information hidden in the noise. And possibly to be a bit more entertained as you do so.

I suppose access journalism does have to get something out of the bargain, however small it's not zero. If that's the way you like to spend idle time, well it takes all kinds. I don't understand competitive scrabble either.

The trouble is the article is so poorly written I don't want to look for hidden information, i want to close out. I'm guessing ai wrote it, the information is constantly repeating, and not even always consistently

Semianalysis seem to have useful information but increasingly crazy extrapolations of trends and future predictions.

It's helpful to realize that Dylan (Semianalysis), Dwarkesh, Aschebrenner (the Situational Awareness guy) and Sholto Douglas (Anthropic) all share a house in SF, so what you are getting from any of them is the SF AI scene view of the world, which is interesting to know, but probably not the best predictor of how things are going to pan out.

As Jensen said, these guys are childish. They might have some technical chops somewhere in the organisation but their communication style of hubris + meme is really grating. I can't take a research organisation seriously when they so clearly want attention on X.

The "better than" in the title should have given it away. You don't compare two sophisticated products that have different ecosystems and summarize your findings with such simplistic wording.

> some of the statements seem like just straight up lies

Why the angst ? I suspect this announcement punctured a lot of people's bubbles, and many are in disbelief and denial and hence the emotional reaction seen here. That a company which never designed chips could suddenly leapfrog the best in the industry. What many forget is that openAI and anthropic are in a unique position to own the end-user experience, and that provides them a distinct advantage. But, making announcements and actually delivering are two different things, and it remains to be seen if these are actually viable. In any case, it gives openai leverage over their vendors.

A lot of the comparison is apples and oranges though - it seems that OpenAI's chip is targeting inference (FP8, FP4), while most of the chips it is being compared to are general purpose.

Notably the only one of the chips that also has a strong inference focus (but not only) is AMD's M1950X, which trounces OpenAI's chip (20 vs 3.4 FP8 PFLOPS, 40 vs 13.4 FP4 PFLOPS, 23 vs 15 TB/sec memory bandwidth), although it does use a lot more power (2500 vs 700W).

Google's TPU (now 8th generation) is glaringly absent from the performance comparison.

At the end of the day what really matters is cost not performance since you can always just run more chips. Google are full stack optimized from chip to data center, and might be expected to have an advantage.

It's very common in the industry today. They let some journos be the first to break the news. In return the journos write a glowing review. A symbiotic relationship.

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