[pk-protect-ai]

This is the problem with people: they build icons to worship and turn a blind eye to the crooked side of that icon. Both Jobs and Altman are significant as businessmen and have accomplished a lot, but neither did squat for the technical part of the business. Right now, Altman is irrelevant for the further development of AI and GPT in particular because the vision for the AI future comes from the engineers and scientists of OpenAI. Apple has never had any equipment that is good enough and comparable in price/performance to its market counterparts. The usability of iOS is so horrible that I just can't understand how people decide to use iPhones and eat glass for the sake of the brand. GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo are totally different. They are the best, but they are not irreplaceable. If you look at what Phind did to LLaMA-2, you'll say it is very competitive. Though LLaMA-2 requires some additional hidden layers to further close the gap. Making LLaMA-2 175B or larger is just a matter of finances. That said, Altman is not vital for OpenAI anymore. Preventing Altman from creating a dystopian future is a much more responsible task that OpenAI can undertake.

[zztop44]

I don’t understand this take. Do you really think CEOs don’t have any influence on their business? Alignment, morale, resource allocation, etc? And do you really think that those factors don’t have any influence on the productivity of the workers who make the product?

A bad CEO can make everyone unhappy and grind a business to a halt. Surely a good one can do the opposite, even if that just means facilitating an environment in which key workers can thrive and do their best work.

Edit: None of that is to say Sam Altman is a good or bad CEO. I have no idea. I also disagree with you about iOS, it’s not perfect but it does the job fine. I don’t feel like I’m eating glass when I use it.

[qwytw]

> The usability of iOS is so horrible that I just can't understand how people decide to use iPhones and eat glass for the sake of the brand

You do understand that other people might different preferences and opinions which are not somehow inherently inferior to those you hold.

> comparable in price/performance to its market counterparts

Current MacBooks are extremely competitive and in certain aspects they were fairly competitive for the last 15+ years.

> but neither did squat for the technical part of the business.

Right... MacOS being an Unix based OS is whose achievement exactly? I guess it was just random chance this this happened?

> That said, Altman is not vital for OpenAI anymore

Focusing on the business side might be more vital than ever now with all the competition you mentioned they just might be left behind in a few years if the money taps are turned off.

[pk-protect-ai]

>> Right... MacOS being an Unix based OS is whose achievement exactly?

Match kernel + BSD userland + NeXTSTEP, how Jobs have anything to do with any of this? Is like purchasing NeXT in 1997 is a major technical achievement...

>> Current MacBooks are extremely competitive and in certain aspects they were fairly competitive for the last 15+ years.

For the past 15 years, whenever I needed new hardware, I thought, "Maybe I'll buy a Mac this time." Then I compared the actual Mac model with several different options available on the market and either got the same computing power for half the price or twice the computing power for the same price. With Linux on board, making your desktop environment eye-candy takes seconds; nothing from the Apple ecosystem has been irreplaceable for me for the last 20 years. Sure, there is something that only works perfectly on a Mac, though I can't name it.

>> Focusing on the business side might be more vital than ever now with all the competition you mentioned they just might be left behind in a few years

It is always vital. OpenAI could not even dream of building their products without the finances they've received. However, do not forget that OpenAI has something technical and very obvious that others overlook, which makes their GPT models so good. They can actually make an even deeper GPT or an even cheaper GPT while others are trying to catch up. So it goes both ways.

But I'd prefer my future not to be a dystopian nightmare shaped by the likes of Musk and Altman.

[qwytw]

> Match kernel + BSD userland + NeXTSTEP, how Jobs have anything to do with any of this?

Is that actually a serious question? Or do you just believe that no founder/CEO of a tech company ever had any role whatsoever in designing and building the products their companies have released?

> Then I compared the actual Mac model with several different options available on the market and either got the same computing power for half the price or twice the computing power for the same price.

I'm talking about M-series Mac mainly (e.g. the Macbook Air is simply unbeatable for what it is and there are no equivalents). But even before that you should realize that other people have different priorities and preferences (.e.g go back a few years and all the touchpads on non Mac laptops were just objectively horrible in comparison, how much is that worth?)

> environment eye-candy takes seconds

I find it a struggle. There are other reasons why I much prefer Linux to macOS but UI and GUI app UX is just on a different level. Of course again it's a personal preference and some people find it much easier to ignore some "imperfections" and inconsistencies which is perfectly fine.

> They can actually make an even deeper GPT or an even cheaper GPT while others are trying to catch up

Maybe, maybe not. Antagonizing MS and their other investors certainly isn't going to make it easier though.

[financltravsty]

OSX comes with a scuffed and lobotomized version of core-utils. To the point where what is POSIX/portable to almost every single unix (Linux, various BSDs, etc.) is not on OSX.

Disregarding every other point, in my eyes this single one downgrades OSX to “we don’t use that here” for any serious endeavor.

Add in Linux’s fantastic virtualization via KVM — something OSX does not have a sane and performant default for (no, hvf is neither of these things). Even OpenBSD has vmm.

The software story for Apple is not there for complicated development tasks (for simple webdev it’s completely useable).

[qwytw]

> The software story for Apple is not there for complicated development tasks (for simple webdev it’s completely useable).

Well.. it's understandable that some people believe that things which are important and interesting to them (and presumably the ones which they work with on/with) are somehow inherently superior to what everyone else is doing.

And I understand that, to be fair I don't use MacOS that much these days besides when I need to work on my laptop. However.. most of those limitations are irrelevant/merely nuisances/outweighed by other considerations for a very high number of people who have built some very complicated and complex software (which has generated many billions in revenue) over the years. You're free to look down on those people since I don't really think they are bothered by that too much...

> for simple webdev it’s completely useable

I assume you also believe that any webdev (frontend anyway) is inherently simple and pretty much worhtless compared to the more "serious" stuff?

[financltravsty]

I don't look down on webdev. I've done webdev, in all its flavors and incarnations. I see it for what it is: mostly gluing together the work of other people, with various tweaks and transformations. It is simple work, once you get a feel for it.

The main issue I have with it is that there are no problems in webdev any more, so you get the same thing in both the frontend and backend: people building frameworks, and tools/languages/etc. to be "better" than what we had before. But it's never better, it's just mildly more streamlined for the use-case that is most en vogue. All of the novel work is being done by programming language theorists and other academic circles (distributed systems, databases, ML, etc.).

Regardless, the world runs on Linux. If you want to do something novel, Linux will let you. Fork the kernel, edit it, recompile it, run it. Mess with all of the settings. Build and download all of the tools (there are many, and almost all built with Linux in mind). Experiment, have fun, break things, mess up. The world is your oyster. In contrast, OSX is a woodchip schoolyard playground where you can only do a few things that someone else has decided for you.

Now, if you want to glue things together, OSX is perfectly fine a tool compared to a Linux distro. The choice there is one of taste and values. Even Windows will work for CRUD. The environments are almost indistinguishable nowadays.

[finnh]

> Match kernel + BSD userland + NeXTSTEP, how Jobs have anything to do with any of this? Is like purchasing NeXT in 1997 is a major technical achievement...

Steve Jobs founded NeXT

[Max-q]

Aren't your thoughts contradictory? You say Altman is no longer needed because Gpt4 is now very good. Then you describe how horrible the iPhone is now. Steve Jobs has been dead a long time, and without his leadership, the uncompromising user focused development process in Apple was weakened.

How will OpenAI develop further without the leader with a strong vision?

I think Apple is the example confirming that a tech companies need visionary leaders -- even if they are not programmers.

Also, even with our logical brains, we engineers (and teachers) have been found to be the worst at predicting social economic behavior (ref: Freakonomics). To the point where our reasoning is not logical at all.

[lozenge]

Maybe Altman was instrumental in securing those investments and finances that you describe without reason as replaceable and trivial.

You haven't actually given anything "crooked" that Altman did.

[pk-protect-ai]

Locking out competition by investing substantial time and resources into AI regulations—how about this one? Or another: promoting "AI safety" to win the AI race and establish dominance in the market? I just do not understand how you can't see how dangerous Sam Altman is for the future of our children...

[tim333]

When Jobs left Apple it went to hell because there was no one competently directing the technical guys as to what to build. The fact that he had flaws is kind of irrelevant to that. I'm not sure if similar applies to Altman.

By the way I can't agree with you on iOS from my personal experience. If you are using the phone as a phone it works very nicely. Admittedly it's not great if you want to write code or some such but there are other devices for that.

[qwytw]

> When Jobs left Apple it went to hell because there was no one competently directing the technical guys as to what to build

I'm not sure that's true though? They did quite alright over the next ~5 years or so and the way how Jobs handled the Lisa or even the Mac was far from ideal. The late 90s Jobs was a very different person from the mid-early 80s one.

IMHO removing Jobs was probably one of the best thing that happened to Apple (from a long-term perspective). Mainly because when he came back he was a much more experienced capable person and he would've probably achieved way less had he stayed at Apple after 1985.

[Max-q]

The claim that Apple equipment is not good on a price performance ratio does not hold water. I recently needed to upgrade both my phone and my laptop. I use Apple products, but not exclusively. Making cross platform apps, I like to use all the major platforms.

I compared the quality phone brands and PC brands. For a 13" laptop, both Samsung and Dell XPS are $4-500 more expensive on the same spec (i7/M2 pro, 32GB, 1TB), and I personally think that the MacBook Pro has a better screen, better touch pad and better build quality than the two others

iOS devices are comparably priced with Samsung models.

It was this way last time I upgraded my computer, and the time before.

Yeah, you will find cheaper phones and computers, and maybe you like them, but I appreciate build quality as well as MIPS. They are tools I use from early morning to late night every day.

[ohcmon]

Ecosystem around chat GPT is the differentiator that Meta and Mistral can’t beat – so I’d say that Altman is more relevant today than ever. And, for example, if you’ve read Mistral’s paper – I think you would agree that it’s straightforward to replicate similar results for every other major player. Replicating ecosystem is much harder.

Performance is never a complete product – neither for Apple, nor for Open AI (its for-profit part).

[pk-protect-ai]

If you really need such an ecosystem, then you can build one right away, like Kagi Labs and Phind did. In the case of Kagi, no GPT is involved; in the case of Phind, GPT-4 is still vital, but they are closing the gap with their cheaper and faster LLaMA-2 34B-based models.

> Performance is never a complete product

In the case of GPT-4, performance - in terms of the quality of generation and speed - is the vital aspect that still holds competitors back.

Google, Microsoft, Meta, and countless research teams and individual researchers are actually responsible for the success of OpenAI, and this should remain a collective effort. What OpenAI is doing now by hiding details of their models is actually wrong. They stand on the shoulders of giants but refuse to share these days, and Altman is responsible for this.

Let us not forget what OpenAI was declared to stand for.

[ohcmon]

Under ecosystem I mean people using ChatGPT daily on their phones and browsers, developers (and now virtually anyone) writing extensions. For most of the world all of the progress is condensed at chat.openai.com, and it will be only harder to beat this adoption.

Tech superiority might be relevant today, but I highly doubt it will stay the same for a long time even if openai continues to hide details (which I agree is bad). We could argue about the training data, but we have so much publicity available so that is not an issue as well.

[dcwca]

Right now, Altman may be the most relevant for the further development of AI because the way the technology continues to go to market will be largely shaped by the regulatory environments that exist globally, and Sam leading OAI is in by far thr best position to influence guide that policy. And he has been doing a good job with it.

[Turing_Machine]

> Both Jobs and Altman are significant as businessmen and have accomplished a lot, but neither did squat for the technical part of the business.

The history of technology is littered with the corpses of companies that concentrated solely on the "technical side of the business".

[pcvarmint]

I think you mean "idols".