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methodical commented on How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise   nytimes.com/interactive/2... · Posted by u/reaperducer
crazygringo · 2 months ago
This is such a strange article -- there's nothing particularly unusual going on here.

The first example basically stands in for all of them -- Microsoft invests $13B in OpenAI, and OpenAI spends $13B on Azure. This is literally just OpenAI purchasing Microsoft cloud usage with OpenAI's stock rather than its cash. There is nothing unusual, illicit, or deceptive about this. This is entirely normal. You can finance your spending through debt or equity. They're financing through equity, as most startups do, and they presumably get a better deal (better rates, more guaranteed access) via Microsoft than via other random investors and then buying the cloud compute retail from Microsoft.

This isn't deceiving any investors. This is all out in the open. And it's entirely normal business practice. Nothing of this is an indicator of a bubble or anything.

Or take the deal with Oracle -- Oracle is building data centers for OpenAI, with the guarantee that OpenAI will use them. That's just... a regular business deal. What is even newsworthy about this? NYT thinks these are "circular" deals, but by this logic every deal is a "circular" deal, because both sides benefit. This is just... normal capitalism.

methodical · 2 months ago
Circularly passing around tens to hundreds of billions of dollars for things which don't exist and may never exist to fund a technology that hasn't A. lived up to the hype they've marketed and B. proven any strategy to breakeven is fundamentally not that much different than the way in which Enron strategically boasted their revenue numbers by passing the money between shell corporations that their CFO created.

The main difference of course being that these are actual companies as opposed to just entities intently designed to inflate the apparent financials. While it seems like that difference means this situation is perfectly fine as compared with the fraudulent case of Enron, the net effect is still the same; these companies are posting crazy quarter over quarter revenue growth, sending their stock prices to crazy highs and P/E multiples, while the insiders are cashing out to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars.

I don't really see how exactly you're trying to make the argument that it may or may not be a bubble, it objectively meets the definition of a bubble in the traditional economic sense (when an asset's market price surges significantly above its intrinsic value, driven by speculative behavior rather than fundamental factors). These companies are massively overvalued on the speculative value of AI, despite AI having not yet shown much economic viability for actual profit (not just revenue).

Worse yet, it's not just one company with inflated numbers, it's pretty much the entire top end of the market. To compare it to the dot com bubble wouldn't be a stretch, it'd basically be apples to apples as far as I see it.

methodical commented on NASA rover finds potential sign of ancient life in Martian rocks   reuters.com/science/nasa-... · Posted by u/methodical
beejiu · 4 months ago
Press conference is being broadcast live now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-StZggK4hhA
methodical · 4 months ago
Watching along, will be interesting to hear how much they leave for the paper they seem to be releasing alongside this conference
methodical commented on BYOJS (Bring your own JS)   byojs.dev/... · Posted by u/fs_software
leptons · a year ago
eh... so far Typescript hasn't saved us from any bugs, but YMMV.
methodical · a year ago
Ditto. If anything, trying to add it into an existing codebase via JSDoc has only really been a detriment via being a massive time sink. It might have caught maybe 4-5 bugs in the code but none that presented a large enough issue to warrant the time investment. If you're starting from scratch with TS instead of JSDoc, it might be worth it, but even on the best of days trying to figure out typing oddities from library typings being wrong and such have only really added headache. As always YMMV
methodical commented on OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/lukebennett
ablation · a year ago
Breaking: Man says enigmatic thing to sustain hype and flow of money into his business.
methodical · a year ago
Ditto- I have a feeling the investors in his latest 2.3 quintillion dollar series Z round wouldn't be as happy if he'd have tweeted "there is a wall"
methodical commented on U.S. Sets Targets to Triple Nuclear Energy Capacity by 2050   energy.gov/ne/articles/us... · Posted by u/chickenbig
eru · a year ago
> Not when the domestic companies which manufacture the same product wither as a result.

That's not how economics works.

methodical · a year ago
A company being unable to compete with another one on price will result in a drop in revenue, as consumers purchase the product with the cheaper price. Revenue going down is bad for a business. How exactly is any of what I've just stated wrong? How exactly is another company selling a similar product at a much lower price point good for the company? Perplexing position that somehow introducing a much cheaper product into the market from company B is good for company A.
methodical commented on U.S. Sets Targets to Triple Nuclear Energy Capacity by 2050   energy.gov/ne/articles/us... · Posted by u/chickenbig
eru · a year ago
You say it like 'undercutting' is a bad thing.

If consumers have to pay less, that's a Good Thing.

methodical · a year ago
Not when the domestic companies which manufacture the same product wither as a result. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in defensive national economic policy as a blanket protection we should do to protect all industries, but in special circumstances such as this one where losing all of our electric vehicle production capability and specialization is at play, I think it certainly is in our strategic interest to avoid that from happening.
methodical commented on U.S. Sets Targets to Triple Nuclear Energy Capacity by 2050   energy.gov/ne/articles/us... · Posted by u/chickenbig
eru · a year ago
> You can’t just snap your fingers and replace millions of cars, [...]

The Chinese are trying to help, but Americans like tariffs more than they hate climate change. (At least that's the preference that their political system expresses.)

methodical · a year ago
Help is an interesting word choice for what is essentially undercutting our entire domestic automotive manufacturers and ensuring, on a pure cost front, that the majority of Americans purchase and rely on maintenance for a product produced in China. Doing so would have major negative consequences for our own strategic interests, hence why there has been such a massive tariff on it for several years now. China isn't being altruistic when they're attempting to sell us their much more affordable EVs. It's not a uniquely US perspective on the threat of Chinese EVs either, as the EU also has lesser but still non-trivial tariffs on Chinese EV brands.
methodical commented on Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations   bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
sa46 · a year ago
Most engineers, including good ones, that I've interviewed have no interesting GitHub contributions. GitHub is also game-able. Bootcamps, in particular, push their graduates to build an interesting GitHub portfolio.

I've found that talking through projects is a weak indicator of competence. It's much easier to memorize talking points than to produce working code.

methodical · a year ago
It may be a result of personal preference, but I struggle to see how talking through challenges encountered with a personal project are a poor indicator of competence. If you ask some boilerplate list of questions, sure, but few if any candidates could memorize all of the random in-the-weeds architecture questions one could ask while talking through someone's project. For a junior specifically, even a non-answer to these questions provides valuable insight into their humility and self-awareness. I also think that it'd be pretty easy to visually weed out personal projects created for the sake of saying one has personal projects, like a bootcamp may push to create, versus an actual passion project, and even easier to weed out during any actual discussion. I suppose YMMV, but in my experience, the body language and flow of discussion are vastly different when someone is passionate about a subject versus not.
methodical commented on Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations   bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
pj_mukh · a year ago
Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions?

-> GPA can be gamed, as laid out.

-> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use.

-> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts

-> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot.

What should be best practice here? Ideally something that controls for first-time interviewer jitters.

methodical · a year ago
I think the best test for a Junior is to ask them to submit some of their OSS or personal fun projects they've worked on. From my perspective, especially with Juniors who aren't expected to be extremely knowledgeable, displaying a sense of curiosity and a willingness to learn is much more important.

If, hypothetically, there's two candidates, one who is more knowledgeable but has no personal projects versus someone who has less knowledge but has worked on different side projects in various languages/domains, I'm always going to pick the latter candidate since they clearly have a passion, and that passion will drive them to pick up the knowledge more than someone who's just doing it for a paycheck and could care less about expanding their own knowledge.

To go one step forward, you can ask them to go into detail about their side project, interesting problems they faced, how they overcame them, etc. Even introverts who are generally worse at small talk are on a much more balanced playing field when talking about something they're passionate about.

u/methodical

KarmaCake day552January 14, 2022View Original