I would imagine these folks are being treated like gods at their companies. And having access to all the money/fame. It is not surprising they see themselves above all
Is it bizarre? Or is it you surrealist line of thinking here? What's your angle here? Man with power and money == A cornerstone knowledge base if you want know anything about AI? Wtf.
Trump, Musk, Andreessen, Thiel, Biden, and Bankman-Fried all have or had a lot of power, and I would look to none of them if I wanted to get a better understanding of reality. If anything, I expect this kind of skin in the game to be strongly anticorrelated with providing useful takes; these are the people with the greatest incentives to mislead the public.
I suppose they should. That seems like the right, or at least a related, discipline for some of the questions raised by ai developments. But i cannot help but feel completely unenthusiastic about the idea of the AI labs controlling the narrative around societal impact of AI.
I don’t get it. This whole thing says single writer does not scale, so we stopped writing as much and removed reads away from it, so it works ok and we decided that’s enough. I guess thats great.
The post tells you there is a single point of failure: if you wanted to DDOS OpenAI, you'd target write-heavy operations.
For that reason, I find it actually bold that they disclosed it, and I appreciate it.
The article reminded me of a similar post about MySQL use for Facebook from the Meta team, which had the same message: big database servers are powerful workhorses that scale and are very cost-effective (and simpler to manage than distributed setups where writes need be to carefully orchestrated - a very hard task).
The two core mesages of both articles combined could be read as: 1. big DB servers are your friend and 2. keep it simple, unless you can't avoid the extra complexity any more.
What Facebook post are you referring to? Generally speaking, Facebook's MySQL infra has been heavily sharded for a very long time, and doesn't rely on abnormally-beefy servers. It's basically the complete opposite approach of what OpenAI is describing here.
when I joined twitter in 2011 there was a single mysql master user (not tweets) database and a few dozen read replicas. it was writing about 7000 updates per second and during bursts it would go too high for the single-threaded replication in mysql at the time to keep up with the master which would cause replication lag and all kinds of annoying things in the app. you just have to pick the right time to make the switch before it is an emergency.
Postgres setups are typically based on physical replication, which is not an option on MySQL. My testing shows the limit to be about 177k tps with each transaction consisting of 3 updates and 1 insert.
AI has to be the solution to everything to justify the kind of investments going into it right now.
Sam’s a savvy businessman so he obviously understands that and goes few steps further. He promises exponential returns and addresses any regulatory and societal concerns. This piece is strategically crafted, not for us, but for investors.
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