I had a crippling fear of flying and I still have anxiety about it. One way I got over it was by learning a lot more about aviation. Now I'm really not afraid of anything happening on a plane short of a. catastrophic failure like a wing snapping off or b. uncontrolled fire in the cockpit. Most other things are recoverable, and those problems are very unlikely.
The flaw that caused the fatal 737 MAX crashes was something that that better trained pilots would have been able to overcome. And this would likely be the case for most problems. The recent door plug blowout did not cause a crash, for example.
So I would not be afraid to fly on a 737 MAX from a major US airline over US territory. It wouldn't be my preference but I wouldn't be afraid to.
Wings snapping off hasn't ever really been a concern for me ever since I saw those early videos of how hard it is to brake a 747 wing. If I had to describe a current fear (which may be as unfounded as the wing one), it would be fire in the cargo hold.
On my last flight I smelled the distinct smell of plastic which was too hot, and it occurred to me that we were two and a half hours out of Kona and still two and a half hours from the west coast. Maybe that was irrational, but it certainly got my fears amped up a little.
It also didn't help that we were in strong turbulence for 4 straight hours and the flight was just plain uncomfortable. I wanted out of that plane in the worst way, LOL.
How is it opposed to OpenAI's goals to have a friendly company selling them chips instead of NVIDIA, which is, at-best, a neutral company?
Software is always more important than hardware. All the big players have access to NVIDIA chips today and yet only OpenAI has ChatGPT, proving the point.
OpenAI probably wishes someone would create competition to NVIDIA and this is Sam Altman trying to make that happen himself, since no one else seems to have been able to pull it off so far.
A conflict of interest would be OpenAI buying Altman's chips at inflated prices or something like that.
But if he makes a bunch of money selling OpenAI chips and OpenAI gets better/cheaper chips, that seems like pure win-win and totally free of ethical conflict.
"Conflict of interest" is not defined by a bad outcome or malice.
It is defined as the potential of those, human nature, and various cognitive biases. "Conflict of interest" is disclosing anything that could lead to a biased decision or lack of transparency.
Can a CEO of 2 companies be objective about a contract between the two and when claiming that his company no2 is better than the competition?
And in the tech-specific case:
As much as junior engineers would love to believe in "superior" solutions, tech decisions are seldom clear-cut. There are many trade-offs: cost, efficiency, memory use, throughput, latency, ease of use, cost of switching, and many more. You always have a pile of pros and cons. Sometimes, one is strong enough, but most of the time, it feels almost like guessing/intuition. And then the conflict of interest becomes especially concerning.
“Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest” — if I understand?
Asking people to disclose potential conflicts of interest casts a wider net — so they aren’t led to think “nah, that’s not a conflict, it’s a win win!”
It may be a conflict of interest but it will be hidden by layers. OAI has deal with gpu producer and there is little conflict as they don't interact, but MS that owns Azure and resell of hardware creates that conflict. Maybe I have bad view, but I think many such conflicts that come from interdependent parties exist and especially in datacenter/cloud world.
This is patently wrong. All of it. You made up a concept and then ran with it like it’s reality. “Potential” is not an issue. “Actual” is. This isn’t a judge. This is a CEO and they can self deal as long as it stays as a value to the core company. It’s up to the board to decide that when it’s proven.
A bunch of nerds just thought they could jump the gun here because they are inexperienced doofus’s when it comes to corp.
A CEO self-dealing can be civilly (and in gross cases, criminally) convicted of violating their fiduciary duty to act in the company's interest, over their own, and violating company trade secrets.
(If Altman doesn't want to be restricted by fiduciary duties then he shouldn't be on a board or be an executive.)
How could Altman possibly not use private OpenAI information regarding its hardware needs, when creating an AI hardware company he wants to serve OpenAI? And its competitors?
He could invest in a new AI hardware company created and run by other people (without his specific input) without a conflict. That does not appear to be the case here. He could create an OpenAI hardware subsidiary. Again not what he was doing.
I am not sure what you are saying. Agreeing with me or not? "Can" as "a shit ton of room" vs. some undescribed "absolutes"?
Self-dealing CEO's and board members can, and are, convicted criminally and civilly of violating their fiduciary duties. And "can" and are fired with cause.
Lots of e.g. news organizations absolutely have tons of guardrails in place around conflicts of interest that may or may not really influence behavior but may even have the appearance of potentially doing so.
Altman's hardware startup would only be free of ethical conflict if Altman was open about it, and the board approved at least two things (and probably more):
1. A formal plan to separate OpenAI CEO Altman from OpenAI hardware acquisition decisions.
2. A formal agreement with Altman and his new company, on how OpenAI's private information with hardware implications is firewalled and/or shared with Altman's new hardware concern.
Otherwise, Altman is going rogue, acting on private OpenAI information useful to a new hardware company looking for future business with OpenAI and OpenAI competitors.
CEO Altman has a fiduciary duty to act directly in OpenAI's interest, and not in some "hey this could be great for everyone" version.
Litmus test: If your legal partner/executive is doing things behind your back with large implications for you, they are almost certainly violating ethics in some way.
Non-profits totally have boards with fiduciary duties. Just because it’s a non profit doesn’t mean it isn’t being juiced for money by others. It just means that the org can’t make a profit, but it can totally spend its money unwisely so that it winds up in someone’s pockets. Heck, most of America’s hospital systems are like that.
The “fiduciary duty“ of a nonprofit, such as it is, is just securing operating funds so that it can Fulfil its mission. Altman has been spectacularly successful at achieving that goal by obtaining $10 billion in funding. Better, cheaper, or more power efficient chips, whatever the source, would absolutely help through the mission too. and that of course is assuming they actually buy or use them at all in the first place. Firing him on the grounds that it could potentially be a bad deal that “lines his pockets“ sometime in the future seems premature.
I think it’s a real stretch to say this chip company would be a violation of his “fiduciary duty“ to open AI. The best argument you could make is that he has a conflict of interest with a competitor. But again, open AI is a nonprofit. It doesn’t have “competitors“. Either it has the funding it needs and is fulfilling its mission or it isn’t.
It's still not clear to me how a board member prospectively running a chip company (a related but different business) works against OpenAI's interests. And people here seem to be making an awful lot of assumptions in order to somehow connect those dots.
Sam Altman has inside information on OpenAI's current and future hardware needs. Sam Altman as CEO, was in a position to direct OpenAI's current and future hardware purchases.
How can he separate those concerns from having his own hardware initiative put together precisely to serve OpenAI and its competitors hardware needs?
Without an agreement with the OpenAI board on how these conflicts of trade secret information and executive power can be settled (Significant shares in the new company for OpenAI?) no competent board would put up with this.
This situation smacks of the ethically questionable transition to a closed/profit organization, after receiving initial funding based on their being an open/non-profit organization. (Apparently the original funders didn't retain any veto power over such a transition, to the regret of at least one significant donor.)
>Without an agreement with the OpenAI board on how these conflicts of trade secret information and executive power can be settled (Significant shares in the new company for OpenAI?) no competent board would put up with this.
I would say if they really did anticipate and worry about such an issue, a competent board would work toward forging such an agreement, rather than firing the CEO years before the aforementioned chip company even existed and before telling any of their other stakeholders.
I’m not taking a side here because I don’t know the facts of the case. But a conflict of interest is a huge deal because it could lead to spending more money than necessary, and is also the main way people juice non profits for profits somewhere else. Of course, if they start a chip company out in the open and not granting it money or guaranteed business from the non profit, things might be up to standard.
The issue is not the OpenAI/SamaChip relationship, which is probably beneficial for OpenAI.
The issue is what happens when SamaChip's profit imperative forces them to maximize revenue. Because the best way to maximize revenue, when you're an independent chipmaker with a large R&D investment, is to sell to more companies. Which by definition are going to be OpenAI's competitors, and whose interests may not be aligned with OpenAI, but will have a financial line to SamaChip.
Gwern's highlighting an interesting contradiction in OpenAI's core charter. In order to ensure responsible, safe, humanity-benefiting AGI, OpenAI needs to have control over AGI's development; any for-profit entity that gets ahead of them probably will not have the same humanity-benefitting mission (actually, we know they won't, they will have a shareholder-benefitting mission by definition). But that means that by their charter, they can't be "Open". Anything like the Developer Day or API or a SamaChip that can sell to other startups means that other parties will have the freedom to use it for their own interests.
Not saying whether this is good or bad - the tension between openness and vulnerability always exists, and personally I tend to come down on the side of openness. But IMHO OpenAI's mission was contradictory from the very beginning, and was more a recruiting tool to get bright idealistic AI researchers to work for them.
> How is it opposed to OpenAI's goals to have a friendly company selling them chips instead of NVIDIA, which is, at-best, a neutral company?
Because OpenAI's mission statement is along the lines of providing AI to all. "All" is more than data centers and billion dollar valuation companies.
I strongly doubt I would be able to purchase one of said chips and have it in my house.
This GPU fiasco is all thanks to LLMs - especially transformers, which was OpenAIs trajectory under Altman. I wouldn't be surprised if the breakdown in communication was over OpenAI becoming a LLM printer. Transformers are a solved problem, making a bigger one is hardly research and definitely not a step towards OpenAIs mission statement.
Yes but creating the processing power with which they can realize their vision is. In interviews Sam’s opponent at Open AI Ilya Sutskever has said lack of hardware and energy for them could become major factors impeding progress in AI. It’s obvious how more players in the chip field help them, especially if the manufacturer has intimate knowledge of what they need or would like to see made. Even if Sam is gone for good they should work toward doing this anyway.
I don’t know if “strongly doubting“ you could buy one of these chips and have it in your house is a strong enough basis for arguing a conflict of interest between open AI and this chip company. People seem to be making an awful lot of assumptions about the specifics of a company that doesn’t even exist yet.
These are strange times, very strange ones, and you are grossly underestimating how much hardware constraints are impacting people. What I know is under NDA, but trust me, even the biggest names you know and would never guess are short tens of thousands of GPUs
It's completely ignorant to discount all organizational leaders based on your extremely limited personal experience. Thousands of years of history proves the difference between successful leaders and unsuccessful leaders.
Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.
Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He didn't do most of the actual work but he did create the company and he did lead it to where it is today.
Personally, If I had stock in OpenAI I'd be selling it right now. The odds of someone else doing as good a job is low. And the odds of him out-competing OpenAI is high.
> Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.
I'm not sure this is actually the case, even ignoring the non-profit charter and the for-profit being beholden to it.
We know that OpenAI has been the talk of the town, we know that there is quite a bit of revenue, and that Microsoft invested heavily. What we don't know is if the strategy being pursued ever had any chance of being profitable.
Decades-long runways with hope that there is a point where profitability will come and at a level where all the investment was worth it is a pretty common operating strategy for the type of company Altman has worked with and invested in, but it is less clear to me that this is viable for this sort of setup, or perhaps at all - money isn't nearly as cheap as it was a decade ago.
What makes a for-profit startup successful isn't necessarily what makes a for-profit LLC with an operating agreement that makes it beholden to the charter of a non-profit parent organization successful.
> Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.
In what way, exactly? ChatGPT would have been built regardless of whether he was there or not. It's not like he knows how to put a transformer pipeline together. The success of OpenAI's product rests on its scientists and engineers, not the CEO, and certainly not a non-technical one like Mr. Altman.
If you want to get really basic: there's no OpenAI at all without Sam Altman, which means there's no ChatGPT either.
There are much larger armies of highly qualified scientists and engineers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other companies and none of them created ChatGPT. They wrote papers and did experiments but created nothing even remotely as useful.
And they still haven't been able to even fully clone it with years of effort, unlimited budgets, and the advantage of knowing exactly what they're trying to build. It should really give you pause to consider why it happened at OpenAI and not elsewhere. Your understanding of the dynamics of organizations may need a major rethink.
The answer is that the CEO of OpenAI created the incentives, hiring, funding, vision, support, and direction that made ChatGPT happen. Because leadership makes all the difference in the world.
To pin OpenAI's success completely on Sam is disingenuous at best, outright dishonest at worst. Incentives don't build ML pipelines and infrastructure, developers and scientists do.
This visionary bullshit is exactly that, bullshit.
A leader can't do anything on their own, they need people to lead. And those people deserve recognition and rewards. But in most cases there's no one more important than the leader. And thus, no one that deserves more credit than the leader.
I'm absolutely not comparing Sam Altman to any of these leaders, but just to illustrate how much vision and leadership does matter. Consider how stupid these statements sound:
"Jesus didn't build any churches, those were all built by brick layers and carpenters!"
"Pharaohs didn't build a single pyramid, those were all built by artists and workers!"
"Abraham Lincoln didn't free any slaves, he didn't break the chains of a single slave, that was all done by blacksmiths!"
"Martin Luther King Jr. didn't radically improve civil rights, he never passed a single law, that was all done by lawmakers!"
"Sam Altman didn't build ChatGPT, he didn't create a single ML pipeline, it was all done by engineers!"
It's a hard fact of life that some specific individuals play more important roles in successful projects than others.
Sounds like you may be confused thinking that a panic in Go is like throw in other languages? Third-party libraries should virtually never panic. Go has panic, and it's useful for a few things, but does not use them as exceptions are used in other languages.
This is a bit like worrying that your programming language won't prevent a third-party library from sending a SIGKILL to your program or that it doesn't prevent third-party libraries from delete your entire file system.
No general purpose language protects against malicious or stupid code.
I've seen apps break in prod where third party libraries had array accesses on indices that didn't exist, or dereferenced nil pointers, in goroutines they spawned. And those aren't the only ways to cause a panic without ever calling the panic function.
Third party libraries have bugs sometimes, and other times our usage of them can create bugs. Nothing like a SIGKILL or anything malicious. That's just the way things are and will be. And breaking down like this in dev can be fantastic!
But when a once in a blue moon issue crops up in prod and all other connections are dropped, the fact that a simple defer+recover couldn't have been preemptively placed on all goroutines is a huge nightmare. I'd even take a "you can add defer+recover for any goroutines created further in this callstack" - it's rare that libraries spawn goroutines, I'll already know which ones to trigger that behavior on
> But when a once in a blue moon issue crops up in prod and all other connections are dropped, the fact that a simple defer+recover couldn't have been preemptively placed on their goroutines is a huge nightmare
Yeah, this is one of the weird things, to say it mildly, that Go does that is hardly mentioned anywhere. Most people don't know about it until they themselves first encounter the nightmare bug similar to what you said.
Wrapping every third-party library in defensive code doesn't make a lot of sense since this isn't the most dangerous kind of bug. To make a one example of a million: a third-party database library that corrupts your database is infinitely more dangerous and that there's no form of wrapping that will save you.
Bad code is bad code. Bugs are bugs. This issue is not a major source of problems in Go code.
> Sounds like you may be confused thinking that a panic in Go is like throw in other languages?
Not at all. I knew that panics in Go shouldn't be used for error handling in general.
> Third-party libraries should virtually never panic.
True, as true as 3rd-party libraries shouldn't have any security vulnerabilities. But we don't live in a perfect world. Bugs happen.
> This is a bit like worrying that your programming language won't prevent a third-party library from sending a SIGKILL to your program or that it doesn't prevent third-party libraries from delete your entire file system.
Very different. Your examples are intentional and malicious actions. What usually happens is due to bugs.
> No general purpose language protects against malicious or stupid code.
Are you implying that all bugs are caused by either malicious code or stupid code? Panic-related bugs are often due to the billion dollar mistake [1] that Go's team refused to solve.
> but does not use them as exceptions are used in other languages
IIRC, the Go lexer/parser itself relies on panic/recover to handle errors[0], in an exception-like fashion. Granted, it's one unusual case, where the code is split in a multitude of mutually recursive functions.
My sense is that you probably could help them get their technical act together, if the team was otherwise in good shape, but that you're probably not the right person to provide the kind of comprehensive leadership they need.
What's required to fix this situation is for someone to manage up and down the hierarchy, and it doesn't seem like you're going to be able to pull that off in this organization. Maybe someone with more experience could make it happen but it's probably just a shitty company and it's not worth the effort.
The fact that the CTO and directors let this situation fester for years is a sign that they're clueless and/or disinterested.
Best alternative would probably to create a new team to replace the previous team's services one-by-one with well-operated versions. And then fire the previous team entirely. Probably not a very fun job.
I've used Digital Ocean (and many other hosting providers) for as long as most of them have existed. Most of my servers have been running nearly uninterrupted for many years. Yes, there will be a reboot or move every so often but the uptime is incredibly high.
The idea that single server is capable beat the reliability of a massively distributed system is counter-intuitive and yet usually it's the case.
The average distributed system is a house of cards that can come tumbling down if any one of a number of pieces fails. The average static server is a rock of stability, with very few failure modes.
Facebook ARPU for Europe is $19.04 per quarter, or $6.33 per month. This is based on monthly active users and includes Messenger. If you adjust for that - someone paying for a subscription is likely to be much more active than an average monthly user - it's likely that 10 EUR is a loss. The big winners are Apple and Google getting their cut if it's an IAP.
The economics are even worse in US/Canada, where an MAU is worth $56.11 per quarter, or $18.70 per month.
I think there's also a major tax difference between subs and ads, working in the same direction.
They don't need to collect VAT on the revenue from the vast majority of ads (basically only ads bought by individuals, which can't be common). They would need to do it for the subscriptions, and the end-user pricing is with VAT included. That's going to be another 20-25% off.
It seems very plausible that they are making less profit from the subscribers than from the non-subscribers at these prices. The pricing might still be more than people are willing to pay, but it's not any kind of scam.
Who are these people that make advertising so valuable? Everyone I know either doesn't click on FB ads, or if they did, they've got a story about how they got scammed by some fly-by-night drop shipper.
Evidently, your friends are clicking on those ads, as they are getting scammed. It's unlikely they just clicked on scams.
It's true that a lot of people essentially never click the ads, but it's also true that seemingly smart and educated people can be extremely dumb about these things.
Ever heard the story of cambridge analytica and the 2016 election? Granted, its an extreme of the system, but there are quiet some actors willing to pay for such services.
That seems plausible but can you cite where these figures are from? Is this just a rough estimate from total numbers for the entire company of $REVENUE / $MAUS?
I wouldn't expect them to be lying but there to be some data hiding in the "average" part of the ARPU. We often want the median or some other percentile, not the mean.
"We define ARPU as our total revenue in a given geography during a given quarter, divided by the average of the number of MAUs in the geography at the beginning and end of the quarter."
So that is about what I expected. I'm not going to dig into this but it could be very meaningful or extremely misleading. Interesting though.
There are two values here: what percentage of people opt for the “ad-free” experience and how much FB makes per user. In fact, as long as their ad revenue per user is LESS than 12.99, this will work out net positive for them.
The only way it would be less is if the alternative is “not having Facebook”, rather than “Facebook with ads”.
I would argue that people who potentially would like to pay for this are worth far less in terms of revenue for Meta than the rest. For instance, I use Facebook semi-regularly, mostly because I follow some people and also have a few Messenger chats open to the side, I ignore their advertising completely. Would I like Facebook ad-free? Yes. Would I pay for it? No. Would I, as a user, care if Meta declared bankruptcy tomorrow and ceased immediately? Certainly not.
Coupling vs Decoupling is not some one-sided thing. It's a major trade-off.
One of the most obvious examples of the problem with this approach is that they're shipping previous generation servers on Day 1. One can easily buy current generation AMD servers from a number of vendors.
They will also likely charge a significant premium over decoupled vendors that are forced to compete head-to-head for a specific role (server vendor, switch vendor, etc).
Their coupling approach will most likely leave them perpetually behind and more expensive.
But there are advantages too. Their stuff should be simpler to use and require less in-house expertise to operate well.
This is probably a reasonable trade-off for government agencies and the like, but will probably never be ideal for more savvy customers.
And I don't know how truly open source their work is but if it's truly open source, they'll most likely find themselves turned into a software company with an open core model. Other vendors that are already at scale can almost certainly assemble hardware better than they can.
> will probably never be ideal for more savvy customers
IDK about every use case, but slightly older generations of CPUs would affect me roughly zero. I'm sure there are things so compute-intensive that one would care very much, but a lot of people probably wouldn't bat an eye about that, and not because they're unsavvy.
To the extent that these things are supported as a whole by the vendor rather than a bunch of finger pointing though, that could be massive, specifically in terms of how many staff members you could "not hire" compared to if you had to employ someone to both build and continually maintain it.
I'm posting this not to invalidate what you're saying, just to say that a little predictable upfront amount of money (the premium) will be spent very happily by lots of people who value predictability and TCO over initial price.
If you're not rapidly scaling it probably doesn't matter. But if you're still buying (and maybe even using) Haswell CPUs in 2023, you may be missing out in a big way.
A moderately large Haswell cluster is equivalent in power to a moderately powerful modern server.
No not buying new, just using what was bought years ago. It still works, it does the job. Is it the best performance per watt, clearly no but the budget for electricity and the budget for new capital expenses are two different things.
If you go on Google cloud and select an E2 instance type (atleast in `us-central1` where my company runs most of it's infra) you'll usually get Broadwell chips.
> They will also likely charge a significant premium over decoupled vendors
It seems like they're trying to hit a middle ground between cloud vendors and fully decoupled server equipment companies.
Using Oxide is likely cheaper over the life of the hardware than using a cloud vendor. A company who already has in-house expertise on running racks of systems may be less the target market here than people who want to do cloud computing but under their own control.
> A company who already has in-house expertise on running racks of systems may be less the target market here than people who want to do cloud computing but under their own control.
True, but Oxide may find themselves competing against Dell or HP if they adopt Oxides software for their respective servers. Additionally, Oxide may find itself competing against consultants and vendors in specialized verticals (e.g. core Banking software + Oracle DB + COTS servers + Oxide software). Oxide, and their competitors are going for people who used to buy racks of Sun hardware.
HP and Dell would have to fundamentally change the way they design hardware and software to be that kind of threat, and if that ever happens I think I would be pretty okay with that outcome.
> One of the most obvious examples of the problem with this approach is that they're shipping previous generation servers on Day 1. One can easily buy current generation AMD servers from a number of vendors.
> Their coupling approach will most likely leave them perpetually behind
This is a startup that took years to get their initial hardware developed. The time between this version and the version using the next version of AMD chips will be shorter than the time it took to develop this product. This is not an inherent issue with coupling vs decoupling.
Also, most servers are rarely running on the most recent cpus anyway. At least in companies I've worked at with on-site hardware they're usually years (sometimes even a decade) out of date getting the last life sucked out of them before too many internal users start complaining and they get replaced.
Coupling requires more integration work, including writing and testing custom firmware. Oxide will be a tiny market player for a long time, even if things go very well. Are AMD and Broadcom really going to spend as much time helping Oxide as they do helping Dell? Of course not, Oxide's order volume will be a rounding error.
I'm sure they'll improve their processes over time but the lag will probably always be a non-zero value. Hopefully they'll be able to keep it low enough that it's not an important factor but as a customer it's certainly something one should consider.
It would be surprising if they don't run into some nasty issue that leaves their customers 6+ months behind on servers or switches at some point.
From listening to their talks they've actually gotten pretty good direct responses from AMD and AMD likes them quite a bit. They've done what no other system integrator has done and brought up the CPU without using AMD's AGESA firmware bootloader. By simplifying the system they've reduced the workload on what they need to handle.
As to your second point, unless AMD somehow becomes supply constrained and only wants to ship to their most important customers first I don't see a future where there would be any lag. Again, the delay this time is from how long it took from company start until product release. Future delays will be based on the time it takes from them getting early development parts to released products, which they could even possibly beat Dell to market on given the smaller company size and IMO more skilled employees.
> It would be surprising if they don't run into some nasty issue that leaves their customers 6+ months behind on servers or switches at some point.
I mean they've already hit tons of nasty issues, for example finding two zero-day vulnerabilities in their chosen security processor. They've shown they can work around issues pretty well.
> it would be surprising if they don't run into some nasty issue that leaves their customers 6+ months behind on servers or switches at some point.
I just think your premise is wrong - most customers don't care about not having the absolute latest and greatest. Indeed they will often avoid them because
1. They are new so more likely to have as yet undiscovered issues ( hardware or drivers ).
2. If you buy top end, they sell at a premium well above their performance premium.
ie the customers who are perennially chasing the latest hardware are in the minority.
Most customers care about having the best of the available options. Rarely would any company deliberately choose to be behind where their competitors can be.
1. The way to run into undiscovered issues is to choose a completely custom firmware/hardware/software stack that almost no one else in the world is running.
2. Not sure where you're getting this from. There is almost always a price:performance calculation that results in current generation smashing the previous generation with server and switch hardware. Often this means not buying the flagship chips but still the current generation.
And a major reason to get off old generations of hardware is that they become unavailable relatively quickly. It's always easier to buy current generation hardware than previous generation hardware, especially a couple years into the current generation. This has nothing to do with chasing the latest hardware.
> And a major reason to get off old generations of hardware is that they become unavailable relatively quickly.
That's not in the customers interests per se- in fact it's a pain. Having control of their own stuff could mean they could offer a much longer effective operational life.
> The way to run into undiscovered issues is to choose a completely custom firmware/hardware/software stack that almost no one else in the world is running.
What breaks stuff is change - sure when they are starting up it's higher risk - but again if they can manage the lifecycle better, not have change for changes sake, then they could be much more reliable.
> Not sure where you're getting this from.
I was talking about not taking the flagship stuff - which is typically a few months ahead of the best price/performance stuff.
If they standardize and open the server shape and plug interface then it gets really cool. Then I could go design a GPU server myself and add it to their rack. The rack is no longer a hyperconverged single-user proprietary setup and becomes something that can be extended and repurposed.
One can easily imagine the privileged son of a medieval samurai attempting to purchase a lemon-lime Shasta from a vending machine outside his castle, only to have his coin repeatedly drop into the return slot.
The flaw that caused the fatal 737 MAX crashes was something that that better trained pilots would have been able to overcome. And this would likely be the case for most problems. The recent door plug blowout did not cause a crash, for example.
So I would not be afraid to fly on a 737 MAX from a major US airline over US territory. It wouldn't be my preference but I wouldn't be afraid to.