As with many startups (especially ones with high burn rates) OpenAI is risky. It could take down SoftBank and its data center vendors. 6% of nvidia’s revenue is not that concerning, as I’m sure they can find other buyers for those GPUs. But I really don’t buy the argument that OpenAI is the gen AI industry. If they ceased to exist tomorrow, the tech/genAI industry would just trundle along. At this point the tech is quite commodotize.
I'd say it's more like kleenex. Lots of people ask you to 'pass them a kleenex' when their nose is runny, but they just mean tissue. They don't actually care what the brand is. Similarly for LLMs most people may not care (or maybe they will, and it will be more like Google search), especially if they just use it via some other app that calls LLM provider APIs. My anecdata so far says early adopters try multiple LLM providers and use the best one for their use-case. No clue on what non-tech folks think though.
Exactly. One of my coworkers prefers Gemini to overcome the blank page hurdle, and he happily describe it as "the ChatGPT from Google". What does that mean for ChatGPT as a business? Nothing. Google would like people to use Gemini, but at least they retain this user and can target him with better ads, their real business. ChatGPT is just a layman synonym for LLM.
It amuses me that ChatGPT actually seems like a generic term already. You Chat with a Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Does what it says on the tin!
"[Trademark] Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature, function, or
characteristic of applicant’s goods and services."
Well this was an entertaining take on the job market.
tl;dr he's salty other people ended up better off doing the same work for other companies, based on views of tech compensation that are very divorced from reality:
> I look at my own place in the world compared to people who just started at Apple or Microsoft 20 years ago then never left, and now they have made eight figures just over the past 4 years while my life path has lead me to… practically nothing. Then the tech inequality continues to compound. Imagine joining a company where the teenage interns have already made a couple million off their passive stock grants and other employees have been making $2MM to $6MM per year over the past 5 years there, while you’re starting over with nothing again for the 5th company in a row so what’s the point in even trying
Nevermind that there aren't really any interns making a couple million off stock grants, and this part:
> Do we just sit here and die in our overpriced studio apartments where rent increases 7% every year while other ICs doing the same work at better companies are buying 5 vacation houses from doing the same work?
Also love the part where he implies he's too smart to pass coding interviews:
> According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk.
This guy is definitely giving delulu vibes but I think there's some truth to the idea that there are inequities in the market. People who work at FAANGs will often make more money and do less work than the foreign contractors in places like Poland and Ukraine getting paid $35k a year for the same work. It's worth talking about because I honestly don't understand why bay area engineers are paid 3 times as much as their European counterparts or 6 times as much as their co-workers in India. Offshoring should work but it often doesn't.
I always wonder what happened to all those companies that went all in on Ukraine. I never worked for one but I heard many stories of US devs being replaced in droves by Ukraine devs.
> People who work at FAANGs will often make more money and do less work than the foreign contractors in places like Poland and Ukraine getting paid $35k a year for the same work.
Not sure what this means. Obviously we're comparing apples and oranges between different projects, but it's weird to suggest that foreign contractors aren't doing the same work as domestic employees. I'm pretty sure FAANG does use foreign contractors too, so they are often doing literally the same work.
These are product-oriented tech companies, while the contracting pertains to e.g. custom software development.
What follows is that these companies have enough revenue to afford FAANG salaries. And FAANG employees in foreign countries have their salaries computed by HR spreadsheets, with the goal of making a family-oriented employee quality of life on par in every country. According to levels.fyi, in Poland Google pays $96.7k to SWE L4. Sure, those salaries were often set when the particular office location was created, and inflation happened since, unevenly. So you might find even higher reported salary from tech companies that opened their Warsaw office somewhat recent.
So, even the entry level SWE earn more than custom software contractors. Beyond that, there's more. With their skillset, 10x employees could leave and form start-ups. To prevent that, the FAANG have a career ladder that make 10x employees earn 10x more every 10 years. Provided they jump the promo hoops.
Again, the tech companies afford that, because their revenue comes from tech products
That isn't to say that as an SWE in these companies you couldn't work on a CRUD database project for some internal website. Perhaps you can get promoted doing that, even though it has more in common with custom software development.
What ends up being useful is hard to predict, so it's better just to do what you enjoy. Lots of useful math started out as just an idle curiosity, though mostly it ends up being useless. Probably most engineering projects are the same though (most end up in the dustbin sooner or later).
Those browsing HN still have sprint deadlines. Browsing HN creates more stress.
Or keep online 24 hours or spend the night mentally trying to solve an abstract issue. At 5pm they are done.
Different stresses / pressures. How many are learning a new language in their freetime just to keep employed. How many people create side projects to land employment at a coffee shop?
To compare employment how many coffee shops test if an employee can make a cup during the interview? How many people are excluded from an interview because they only made starbucks coffee at a previous position.. no way they can figure out McDonalds coffee machines.. How many are asked to go through a take home coffee making task? None..
Many developers work two jobs. Many jobs prevent employees from doing this. Many employees work on free open source. Many companies try to prevent or control this. Some do it for rent, child payments, mortgage or car payments.
I made minimum wage at my first job. Didn't cross the poverty line until my 3rd or 4th job years later. Things might be different now, I started after the .com crash.
I'm sure ChatGPT has it's uses for some people, but the few times I've tried to use it for tasks I would have used search for it's been confidently, eloquently wrong. A search engine you can't trust, or at least evaluate it's sources, is completely useless. Recent publicity on LLM has been incredibly successful at over-inflating the hype, largely because the technology fulfills the fantasy of being able to interact with technology in plain language and get plausible, seemingly coherent responses.
> > ... which in turn causes people like me, who live in apartment blocks, to not be able to have a EV (I'm not going to spend half an hour and more every few days at an electrical charging station)
> You spend a half hour or more every few days at a gas station bud. Set a timer next time you go. Also, charge it at home?
Who spends 30 minutes at the pump? The actual act of filling the car takes less than 5 minutes. Even if you include wait times it's still less than 30 minutes in a busy, car centric city (and then you need to account for the fact that EVs also have to wait to charge).
The comment you replied to explicitly stated they live in an apartment, so at home charging isn't an option.
I would only consider an EV if I had a SFH. Even if the building I live in adds a few charging stations, it's not worth the hassle to go fully electric.
Unless each parking stall will have an EV charger, you will have to share with others. That means plugging your car in (when it's not occupied) and remembering to go back down, unplug, and repark your car in another spot. When the charger is occupied, you'll have to wait until it's available. My condo does not have a charger and AFAIK there's no plan to add one any time soon.
How do self-driving cars funnel money into public transport and and reclaim space? I think they're more likely to do the opposite.
Seems silly to rely on self-driving to reduce emissions when we don't know how to build self-driving cars yet, but we do know how to build better public transit and design walkable cities.
