[HN Gopher] It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
___________________________________________________________________
It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
Author : feross
Score : 101 points
Date : 2025-10-10 17:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| FfejL wrote:
| "[Microsoft's] platform power didn't just come from controlling
| applications on top of Windows, but the OEM ecosystem underneath.
| If OpenAI builds AI for everyone, then they are positioned to
| extract margin from companies up-and-down the stack -- even
| Nvidia. "
|
| Ah yes, the ChromeOS strategy. How'd that work out for Google?
|
| Building a platform is good, a way to make quite a bit of money.
| It's worked really well for Google and Apple on phones (as Ben
| notes). But there's a reason it didn't happen for Google on PCs.
| Find it hard to believe it will for OpenAI. They don't (and can
| not) control the underlying hardware.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| The question is to what degree that matters - if this power
| applies anywhere you can access ChatGPT (which is anything with
| a web browser), do you actually need to control the hardware?
| consumer451 wrote:
| The counter argument, saying that it's likely going to be
| Google, appears in the latest Acquired.fm podcast.
|
| They're the only AI lab with their own silicon.
|
| Edit: they didn't say "likely," they just marveled at the
| talent + data + TPU + global data centers + not needing
| external investment.
|
| If I recall correctly, their theory was that google could
| deliver tokens cheaper than anyone else.
| bluesroo wrote:
| Every single major AI player at the moment is designing chips
| with some getting close to their first tape out. Including
| OpenAI.
| oblio wrote:
| Amazon.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It worked great, Web is ChromeOS Platform for all practical
| purposes, with Firefox meagre 3%, and Safari only being
| relevant thanks to iOS, and the whole Electron crap as "native
| apps".
| saghm wrote:
| I don't think that this is true in terms of being able to
| extract profits from the OEMs underneath, which is what the
| parent commenter quoted from the article. I don't think this
| refutes their response as much as it's a different point than
| the one they were responding to.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Whats more, every single child here in Australia is learning
| on a school issued Chrome Book. To my kids, a spread sheet is
| google sheets and a power point is google slides.
|
| (We were joking about it just last week because my partner
| asked my eldest what was the Power Point he was working on
| and he said, "Whats Power Point?")
| georgebcrawford wrote:
| > every single child here in Australia is learning on a
| school issued Chrome Book
|
| Many? Most? Possibly, but absolutely not every single one.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > Ah yes, the ChromeOS strategy. How'd that work out for
| Google?
|
| They dominate the EDU market?
| saghm wrote:
| If OpenAI is only able to dominate a market the size of this,
| I don't think it's their world that we're all living in
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| Whenever I see a post at #1 with not comment, I know it's been
| artificially pumped to the top. So many people upvoted but not a
| single comment yet. Let there be some comments! lol.
|
| OpenAI is a geopolitically important play besides being a tech
| startup so it gets pumped in funding and in PR, to show that
| we're still leading the world. But that premise is largely
| hallucinated.
| tallowen wrote:
| I had a different takeaway - that a lot of folks on here read
| Ben Thomson and respect his work! It sounds like Ben is pretty
| bullish on OpenAI and maybe he's convinced folks through his
| work to agree with this take.
| shahahmed wrote:
| yeah something tells me Ben does not care about being #1 on
| hn
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I do like stratechery but this is a roundup newsletter and
| not an article. If the HN thread gets engagement it will
| likely be based on the headline and not any of the articles
| in the roundup.
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| I don't even know who "Ben" is...
| pixl97 wrote:
| Anecdotes are only a datapoint and nearly meaningless by
| themselves. For a great many others just the
| stratechery.com website alone is enough to get a view and
| an upvote.
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| Are you sure Ben is not getting paid $7,000 per post by
| OpenAI?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Are you sure you property clean up the blood stains of
| the call girls you murdered in your basement?
|
| And what I mean by that is what evidence are either of us
| bringing that our claims are true?
|
| Therefore I bring that I have no evidence at all about my
| claim above, and seeming you're in the same boat.
|
| This said the website above lists
|
| >I am not paid by any company for any opinion I post on
| Stratechery or in any public forum, including podcasts
| and Twitter.
|
| >I do not hold individual stocks in any company I write
| about. I do hold various 401k and IRA accounts that
| invest in a wide-ranging basket of stocks, over which I
| have no control.
|
| >I occasionally agree to speaking engagements for both
| public and private events, but not for companies I cover
| on Stratechery. Compensation will vary based on the
| nature of the customer and event, as well as the topic. I
| do not do any consulting at this time.
|
| So you tell me.
|
| >I pay for all of my own travel and expenses when I
| attend company events.
| alwa wrote:
| Ben Thompson bopped around doing engineer things at Apple,
| Microsoft, and Automattic, until more than a decade ago he
| started this subscription newsletter with business-of-tech
| kind of analysis. The success of his paid newsletter gave
| Substack the idea [0].
|
| A fair chunk of the tech who's-who seem to find his
| thinking useful.
|
| [0] https://www.vox.com/2017/10/16/16480782/substack-
| subscriptio...
| saghm wrote:
| I've seen articles from this blog over the years and every
| time there are a bunch of comments referring to the author
| on a first name basis. As far as I can tell he's a guy who
| posts a bunch of hot takes on
| finance/economics/markets/etc. and I guess is very well
| known to a core audience that might overestimate his name
| recognition to other people who might just be seeing
| something on the front page of Hacker News without
| recognizing the source.
|
| There's nothing inherently wrong with comments referring to
| him with by his first name, but I don't think I've ever
| seen a similar pattern with any other sources here outside
| of maybe a few with much more universal name recognition.
| It's always struck me as a little bit odd, but not a big
| enough deal for me to go out of my way to comment about it
| before now.
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| Are you sure Ben is not getting paid $7,000 per post by
| OpenAI?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This is just a roundup article (though there are still some
| good nuggets about Sora vs Meta's app.) Looking forward to
| another HN discussion purely driven through article title
| vibes. With nothing mooring the discussion, you know it's
| going to be "good".
| graeme wrote:
| It's easy to write a cynical reaction, but the simplest
| explanation is usually true. In this case, it's just a very
| good headline.
|
| I read Stratechery. Ben's articles are what he makes for public
| consumption. This weekly summary thing is a new roundup for
| subscribers, and just happens to be public, and if you're not a
| subscriber you can't follow the links. If Ben could choose
| something to be #1 on Hacker News it would likely be a full
| article with this headline, rather than a weekly summary post
| for subscribers.
|
| OpenAI has been at the top of the app store for years now. A
| lot of people are interested in it. That trivially explains the
| upvotes without a conspiracy.
|
| Kudos to the headline writer on this one.
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| Sorry, not buying it.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I mean it usually means dang thought the piece deserved a
| conversation. Which in this case I think it does.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to
| replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially
| replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead
| of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to
| do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's
| work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between
| OS' or creating a robust hardware driver model.
| barrenko wrote:
| You could say the same thing about Facebook...
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Not at all, because it is not easy to replicate and move its
| social graph
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, technically no, FB has a network effect of the other
| people on it either being the people you want to talk to, or
| the people you want to advertise to.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| FB has network effects (your friends/neighbors/etc are
| there). When I use ChatGPT, I don't care whether anyone else
| uses it as well.
| chmod775 wrote:
| You mean the social network that is currently dying the same
| death as countless other platforms before it, just on a
| larger scale?
|
| Maybe some are too young to remember the great migrations
| from/to MySpace, MSN, ICQ, AIM, Skype, local alternatives
| like StudiVZ, ..., where people used to keep in contact with
| friends. Facebook was just the latest and largest platform
| where people kept in touch and expressed themselves in some
| way. People adding each other on Facebook before others to
| keep in touch hasn't been a thing for 5 years. It's
| Instagram, Discord, and WhatsApp nowadays depending on your
| social circle (two of which Meta wisely bought because they
| saw the writing on the wall).
|
| If I open Facebook nowadays, then out of ~130 people I used
| to keep in touch with through that platform, pretty much
| nobody is still doing anything on there. The only sign of
| life will be some people showing as online because they've
| the facebook app installed to use direct messaging.
|
| No, people easily migrate between these platforms. All it
| takes is put your new handles (discord ID/phone number/etc)
| as a sticky so people know where to find you. And especially
| children will always use whichever platform their parents
| don't.
|
| Small caveat: This is a German perspective. I don't doubt
| there's some countries where Facebook is still doing well.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Last time I checked 99% of normies are still happily
| scrolling FB and Instagram
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| FB in particular is becoming deader and deader every
| month, and it's only a matter of time before something
| else comes along that sucks their attention away.
| nextworddev wrote:
| The beauty of Meta is that they can just fake engagement
| metrics. Not defending them, just knowing that they do
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _No, people easily migrate between these platforms._
|
| No? It's rare for these platforms to survive, the one that
| was closest to challenging Facebook was kneecapped by the
| US government.
|
| The time between the founding of MySpace to Facebook was a
| little over a year. Instagram has been the largest social
| network for close to decade now, and it's not like others
| haven't been trying. META is up 600% over last 3 years. I'm
| really question your definition of the word "dying"
| yc349833874923 wrote:
| People say you're wrong but I agree. Facebook is nothing more
| than a rent-seeking middle man between you and your
| friends/family. Instead of just talking to your family
| normally, like over the phone, now you have to talk to them
| in between mountains of Sponsored Content and AI-generated
| propaganda. It provides no productive value to the world
| except for making the world more annoying and making people
| more isolated from one another.
|
| When you realize this, you realize that a lot of other
| supposedly valuable tech companies operate in the exact same
| way. Worrying that our parents' retirement depends heavily on
| their valuations!
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Worrying that our parents' retirement depends heavily on
| their valuations!
|
| Maybe you should short the stock to hedge your parents'
| retirement :)
| jorblumesea wrote:
| they understand that, and that's why they're making it sticky
| by adding in app purchasing, advertising, integrations. also
| why they hired OGs from IG/FB. They are building the moat and
| hoping that first to market is going to work out.
| dantyti wrote:
| I do not believe that advertising and purchasing is at the
| top of the list of things what make software sticky
| jorblumesea wrote:
| they are trying to become/replace google. they are first to
| market for an entirely new query paradigm and in app
| purchases and advertising are just one aspect of a
| platform.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| That's why they're working on consumer hardware
| an0malous wrote:
| And business partnerships, government partnerships, and AI
| regulation (to establish laws that keep competitors out). Sam
| knows they have no moat and will try every avenue to
| establish one.
|
| As Peter Thiel says: "competition is for losers"
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I actually prefer Google Gemini. 2.5 is free and works awesome
| for what I need AI for. It just made my resume I uploaded
| immeasurably better last night.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1mkj4zi/chatgpt_pro_g...
| mallowdram wrote:
| That's a precise, incisive observation: OpenAI is trivial (any
| AI provider is), supported by evidence as demonstrated. It has
| no claim to operating software that's specifically distinct
| from others.
| yubblegum wrote:
| > Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most,
| not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or
| creating a robust hardware driver model.
|
| I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar
| prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS
| vendors (say Ora to Ingress) was also "an afernoon's work" but
| it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of
| almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces.
| mgh95 wrote:
| > I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own
| peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching
| RDBMS vendors (say oracle to postgres) was also "an
| afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky
| with these sort of almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces.
|
| The bigger problem is that there was never a way to move data
| between oracle->postgres in pure data form (i.e. point pgsql
| at your oracle folder and it "just works"). Migration is
| always a pain, and thus there is a substantial degree of
| stickiness, due to the cost of moving databases both in terms
| of risk and effort.
|
| In contrast, vendors [1] are literally offering third party
| LLMS (such as claude) in addition to their own and offering
| one-click switching. This means users can try and if they
| desire switch with little friction.
|
| [1] https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2025/09/introducing-claude-
| age...
| gretch wrote:
| The current LLMs support data export/import inherently
| because the interface is pure text.
|
| All one needs to do is say something like "tell me all of
| personalization factors you have on me" and then just copy
| and paste that into the next LLM with "here's stuff you
| should know about how to personalize output for me"
| RussianCow wrote:
| Moreover, it's trivial to run several LLMs side-by-side for
| a while and measure the success of each, then migrate to
| the one that performs the best. And you can even migrate
| in-progress chats since all the context is passed on each
| call anyway.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| If you are doing things "properly" then you have good evals
| that let you test the behaviour of different LLMs and see if
| they work for your problem.
|
| The vendors have all standardised on OpenAIs API surface -
| you can use OpenAIs SDK with a number of providers - so
| switching is very easy. There are also quite a few services
| that offer this as a service.
|
| The real test is does a different LLM work - hence the need
| to evals to check.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not
| 'universal' interfaces.
|
| True, but that's not really applicable here since LLMs
| themselves are not stable, and are certainly not stable
| within a vendors own product line. Like imagine if every time
| Oracle shipped a new version it was significantly
| behaviorally inconsistent with the previous one. Upgrading
| within a vendor and switching vendors ends up being the same
| task. So you quickly solidify on either
|
| 1) never upgrading, although with these being cloud services
| that's not _necessarily_ feasible, and since LLMs are _far_
| from a local maxima in quality that 'd quickly leave your
| stack obsolete
|
| or
|
| 2) being forced to be robust, which makes it easy to migrate
| to other vendors
| jgalt212 wrote:
| If you took any of current top 3 models from me, I would not
| miss the deleted one in the least. I run almost every non-
| trivial prompt through multiple models anyway.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks,
| does it not?
|
| That applies even when you switch models within a vendor,
| though.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| It's reasonable to question it, but there's a fun Chinese
| paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15855) where they attempt
| to create a system of prompts that can be used with
| commercial LLMs to solve hard maths problems.
|
| It turns out that they can use the same prompt system for all
| of them, with no changes and still solve 5/6 IMO problems. I
| think this is possibly iffy, since people might have updated
| the models etc., but it's pretty obvious that this kind of
| thing is how OpenAI are doing their multi-stage thinking
| thing for maths internally.
|
| Consequently if prompt systems are this transferable for
| these hard problems, why wouldn't both they and individual
| prompts, be highly transferable in general?
| llmslave wrote:
| They only invented modern AI, can easily be replaced!!
| threetonesun wrote:
| The play OpenAI is making has nothing to do with the underlying
| models any more. They release good ones but it doesn't really
| matter, they're going for being the place people land when they
| open a web browser. That is incredibly sticky and not easily
| replaced. Being the company that replaces the phrase "oh just
| Google it" is worth half the money in the world, and I think
| they're well on their way to getting there.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| But that also makes them the product itself and requires
| standalone profitability which is not at all like the
| Windows' analogy being presented.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I agree, in general. I don't know what the world looks like
| in 10 years if all of the weird attempts at fitting an LLM
| as a replacement to what we have currently actually works,
| however. Facebook is probably the closest analogy, where
| there's plenty of room to grow, but at some point you're
| going to have the OS builders shut down your efforts unless
| you want to build your own OS.
| scottyah wrote:
| I do say ChatGPT when referring to LLMs/genAI in general, but
| I do hate saying it as it is nowhere near as nice to say as
| "google". I will switch immediately once something better
| comes up.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| "Chat" is already in the youth lexicon, originally
| referring to an amorphous blob of live stream viewers. It
| now kind of refers to a non-existent but omnipresent viewer
| of your life.
|
| I think ChatGPT might turn into just "chat" as the next
| evolution of the term.
| aerhardt wrote:
| Yeah, I'm extremely loyal to ChatGPT Plus and Codex, but is't
| because OpenAI has a native Mac app that I like, and Codex
| included with Plus and has served me well enough to not look at
| Claude. I like GPT-5 quite a bit as a user. I'll concede none
| of these are small things - they've had my money for 2+ years -
| but they're not gigantic advantages either.
|
| At an enterprise level however, in the current workload I am
| dealing with, I can't get GPT-5 with high thinking to yield
| acceptable results; Gemini 2.5 Pro is crushing it in my tests.
|
| Things are changing fast, and OpenAI seems to be the most
| dynamic player in terms of productization, but I'm still
| failing to see the moat.
| Insanity wrote:
| I don't think they will get any moat. I might be wrong on
| this of course, but I don't see a killer feature for these
| stochastic parrots that can't be easily replicated
| ebb_earl_co wrote:
| > ... stochastic parrots... What a wonderful phrase, mind
| if I borrow it?
| airstrike wrote:
| It's commonly used at this point, for what it's worth
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| _" the term stochastic parrot is a metaphor, introduced
| by Emily M. Bender and colleagues in a 2021 paper, that
| frames large language models as systems that
| statistically mimic text without real understanding"_
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Never mind the phrase. If your parrot can compete in
| international math and programming competitions at the
| gold-medal level and make entire subreddits fail the
| Turing test, I would like to borrow your _parrot_.
| airstrike wrote:
| OpenAI is dynamic for consumer apps. Anthropic seems much
| better at productizing AI that you can actually build with,
| while also catering to enterprise in their own productized
| offerings
|
| Also Claude Opus 4.1 runs multidimensional circles around
| GPT-5 in my view. The only better use case for GPT-5 is when
| you need it to scrape the web for data
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Too bad Anthropic fucks over their 20x max subscribers.
| Their whole opus usage limit bullshit in favor of sonnet
| 4.5 which is objectively worse regardless of whatever they
| say. They clearly want to save money and take our $200.
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8449
|
| I hope they get destroyed in the AI race.
| airstrike wrote:
| FWIW I don't disagree
| moomoo11 wrote:
| I think their moat is ironically the platform.
|
| Like Apple vs every other computer maker.
|
| Their platform mostly just works. Their api playground and
| docs are like 100x better than whatever garbage Anthropic
| has.
|
| I think their UX is way better, and I can have long AF
| conversations without lagging. I can even change models in
| the same conversation. Basic shit Anthropic can't figure out
| (they can fleece their 20x max subscribers tho)
|
| I think if they get the AI human interface right, they will
| have their iPhone moment and 10x.
| dabockster wrote:
| The platform is just a search tool and extended processing
| modes. That is easily replicated elsewhere.
|
| The only moat they have is the fact that you still need a
| GPU of some kind to reliably run even a tiny LLM. But the
| gap between what absolutely needs a server farm and what
| can be ran on a store bought gaming computer is quickly
| closing. You can already run mixture of experts models on
| gaming rigs with a high degree of usability compared to
| just one year ago. And that tech continues to be pushed
| further and further. It's only a matter of time until we
| see ChatGPT levels of access running on a quad core laptop
| totally offline. And once that happens, all such a system
| would need is the correct tooling on top of the AI model
| "brain" to make it usable.
|
| And beyond that, what if you could have an AI model on an
| ASIC-style add-in card? Where's their moat then?
| auggierose wrote:
| Actually, Anthrophic has a Mac app I can use, and I cannot
| use the OpenAI one.
| mettamage wrote:
| Fun fact, it's an Electron app
| pants2 wrote:
| Much of the value I get from ChatGPT is based on it's memory
| system that has a good profile on me. For example if I ask it
| to find me something to eat at X restaurant, it will already
| know my allergies, dietary preferences, weight goals,
| medications, other foods I like, etc and suggest an item based
| on that, all workout me explicitly telling it.
|
| Moving from ChatGPT to Claude I would lose a lot of this
| valuable history.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Or you could type up "My allergies are X, Y, Z, I have the
| following preferences..." etc. and put it into whatever chat
| bot you like. Obviously this is a bit of a pain, but it
| probably constrains significantly how much of a premium
| ChatGPT can charge. You might not bother if ChatGPT is time
| and a half more expensive, but what if it's 3x as much as the
| competition? What if there's a free alternative that's just
| as good?
| pants2 wrote:
| I pay for the $200/mo ChatGPT, to me that's insanely cheap
| compared to the value it provides. Better pricing is highly
| unlikely to make me switch. If a competitor were able to
| sustain a lead in model intelligence/capability then I'd
| consider it.
| sumedh wrote:
| > Or you could type up "My allergies are X, Y, Z, I have
| the following preferences..."
|
| Why use a car when you can just walk?
| yannyu wrote:
| Even simpler, ask ChatGPT "How would you describe my
| dietary preferences and restrictions?", maybe throw in some
| personality guidance of "You are training my executive
| assistant".
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| I like to ask each llm what it knows about me. I feel like I
| could take that output and feed it into another llm and the
| new one would be up to speed quickly....
| mattmanser wrote:
| Still not much of a moat, especially with data portability.
|
| In the EU/UK you might not have rights to the memories right
| now, but you've rights to the inputs that created those
| memories in the first place.
|
| Wouldn't be too hard to export your chat history into a
| different AI automatically.
| scottyah wrote:
| Have you tried asking ChatGPT to output everything it knows
| about you to a format easily digestible by LLMs? Does the
| memory stick between model switches?
| pants2 wrote:
| I suspect it does RAG on my previous convos, so this
| wouldn't work fully, but to some extent yes that would
| help.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| You could literally ask it to write out everything it knows
| about you into a form usable in a CLAUDE.md file, put that in
| the directory you're using e.g. claude code in, and boom.
|
| No moat.
| yen223 wrote:
| A lot of the points also apply to Google as a search engine,
| yet we're still seeing Google owning about 90% of search engine
| usage.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Google search requires a lot of resources to crawl, keep
| indices up to date, and provide user level significance (i.e.
| different results to different users). Then couple it with
| their other services (Google Maps, etc).
|
| The competitors have not come even close to Google's level of
| quality.
|
| With LLMs, it's different. Gemini/Claude are as good, for the
| most part. And users don't care that much either - most use
| the standard free ChatGPT, which likely is worse than many
| competitors' paid models.
| psychoslave wrote:
| It's not just the quality. The are people who do complain
| about how they perceive it significantly decreased over
| time. Yet there are many other factors, including presence
| as default search engine in so many setup out there.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Google is a product not a platform. How many companies are
| still using Google search for their intranets? (yes yes I'm
| old, don't remind me)
|
| Meanwhile _bing search_ is actually a platform, and is what
| then powers other "search engines" (duckduckgo, kagi,
| etc...)
| ryukoposting wrote:
| OpenAI's moat is the data you give it. It's the same reason so
| many people have GMail accounts, even though we all know Google
| sucks. It's not that you like GMail better than any other email
| service, it's because migrating to another service is a pain in
| the ass.
|
| OpenAI will either use customer data to enshittify to a level
| never seen before, or they will go insolvent.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| That's why OpenAI is hard pivoting towards products now. The
| big one IMO is Instant Checkout and Agentic Commerce Protocol.
| ChatGPT is going to turn into a product recommendation engine
| and OpenAI is going to get a slice of every purchase, which is
| going to disrupt the current impression/click adtech model and
| potentially Google and Amazon themselves. It's an open question
| how hard they can do this without enshittifying ChatGPT itself,
| but we'll see.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| Openai is an artificially and ridiculously inflated balloon. It
| has nothing except initial market capture with hype. But yes they
| will keep whipping investors and keep burning money.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| They also have the leading model.
| nicce wrote:
| In which area?
| dantyti wrote:
| I'd assume active user count
| throwboy1119 wrote:
| hype
| thiago_fm wrote:
| Which model? Sonnet 4.5 DESTROYS anything OpenAI has for
| coding.
| hn_throw_bs wrote:
| Can someone elucidate us as to how so many platforms (ChatGPT,
| Gemini, Claude, etc etc) all sprung up so quickly? How did the
| engineering teams immediately know how to go about doing this
| kind of tech with LLMs and DNNs and whatnot?
| nemomarx wrote:
| Was it that quickly? GPT 3 is where I would kind of put the
| start of this and that was in 2020, they had to work on the
| technology for quite a while before it got like this. Everyone
| else has been able to follow their progress and see what works.
| dantyti wrote:
| GPT 2 didn't have a chat interface but had made a splash in
| some circles (think spam-adjacent).
|
| Edit: mixed up my dates claiming DALL E came out before GPT 3
| warkdarrior wrote:
| "so quickly" meaning over the last 3 years? (ChatGPT was
| launched in Nov 2022)
| icyfox wrote:
| All of the products you mention already had research teams (in
| the case of ChatGPT and Claude that actually predated most of
| their engineers). So knowing how to build small language models
| was always in their wheel house. Scaling up to larger LLMs
| required a few algorithmic advancements but for the most part
| it was a question of sourcing more data and more compute. The
| remarkable part of transformers is their scaling laws, which
| let us achieve much better models without having to reinvent
| new architecture.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| This is the paper that kicked off the current generation: https
| ://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3....
|
| That was 2017. And of course Google & UofT were working on it
| for many years before the paper was published.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Once you have the weights, actually running these models is
| easy _. The code is not complicated - they are just huge in
| terms of memory requirements.
|
| Deep learning has now been around for a long time. Running
| these models is well understood.
|
| _ obviously running them at scale for multiple users is more
| difficult.
|
| The actual front ends are not complicated - as is evidenced by
| the number of open source equivalents.
| 0xfeba wrote:
| Intersection of cloud compute power being plentiful combined
| with existing LMs. As I understand it, right now, it's really
| just throwing compute power at existing LMs to learn on
| gigantic datasets.
| saghm wrote:
| I imagine it wasn't as immediate as it might look on the
| outside. If they all were working independently on similar
| ideas for a while, one of them launching their product might
| have caused the others to scramble to get theirs out as well to
| avoid missing the train.
|
| I think it's also worth pointing out that the polish on these
| products was not actually there on day one. I remember the
| first week or so after ChatGPT's initial launch being full of
| stories and screenshots of people fairly easily getting around
| some of the intended limitations with silly methods like asking
| it to write a play where the dialogue has the topic it refused
| to talk about directly or asking it to give examples about what
| types of things it's not allowed to say in response to certain
| questions. My point isn't that there wasn't a lot of technical
| knowledge that went into the initial launch, but that it's a
| bit of an oversimplification to view things at a binary where
| people didn't know how to do it before, but then they did.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| By 2020/2021 with the release of GPT-3, the trajectory of a lot
| of the most obvious product directions had already become
| clear. It was mainly a matter of models becoming capable enough
| to unlock them.
|
| E.g. here's a forecast of 2021 to 2026 from 2021, over a year
| before ChatGPT was released. It hits a lot of the product beats
| we've come to see as we move into late 2025.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...
|
| (The author of this is one of the authors of AI 2027:
| https://ai-2027.com/)
|
| Or e.g. AI agents (this is a doc from about six months before
| ChatGPT was released: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpPnReyBC
| 54KESiSn/optimality...)
| rcxdude wrote:
| It's not much different to other ML, pretty much it's on a
| bigger and more expensive scale. So once someone figured out
| the rough recipie (NN architecture, ludicrous scale of weights
| and data, reinforcement learning tuning), it's not hard for
| other experts in the field to replicate, so long as they have
| the resources. Deepseek was pretty much a side project, for
| example.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I wonder if OpenAI's app platform is going to be more like
| Windows (most economic value goes to user and app partners) or
| like Facebook (most economic value goes to facebook, app makers
| get screwed. I mean Microsoft acted badly towards a lot of
| partners, but it was a true platform.
| cj wrote:
| Or like Apple. Mix of both, except they take the best ideas and
| bring them in house (and occasionally use proprietary APIs to
| do things others can't)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| OpenAI doesn't have a moat unfortunately. One URL replacement
| away and you can switch most models in minutes. I have personally
| done this many times over the last year and a half.
|
| It only takes labs to produce better and better models, and the
| race to bottom on token costs.
| alonmower wrote:
| you could say the same thing about a search engine. if they
| keep an edge on brand or quality they can find ways of
| monetizing that attention
| nemomarx wrote:
| Honestly how google maintains a "moat" over other search
| engines could use a good business study. They've defied some
| pretty serious competitors there without an obvious lock in
| or anything.
|
| (You can say default in various browsers and a phone OS and
| that's probably the main component but it's not clear
| changing that default would let Bing win or etc.)
| sumedh wrote:
| > OpenAI doesn't have a moat unfortunately.
|
| The moat is the branding, for most people AI means ChatGpt.
| zkmon wrote:
| I think platform monopolies are a thing of the past, where, when
| most of the world was asleep, a few silicon valley garage
| companies took over the green field and locked-in a huge customer
| base irreversibly, thus colonizing the world. The world is now
| much more awake and connected, ruling out any concentration of
| dominance. You can't have a repeat of colonial times.
| yalogin wrote:
| I am not sure about this. They definitely created a brand new
| service and data flows that didn't exist before and they have the
| majority of the mind share, however it's already commoditized.
| The next two to three years will show how the chips fall. I can
| see that it's tough or almost impossible for apple to get a share
| in this but google is right there to take the consumer side. For
| enterprise again we have to wait and see how gcp and AWS do.
|
| The value is not in the llm but vertical integration and
| providing value. OpenAI has identified this and is doing is
| vertical integration in a hurry. If the revenue sustains it will
| be because of that. For consumer space again, nvidia is better
| positioned with their chips and SoCs but OpenAI is not a sure
| thing yet. By that I don't mean they are going to fall apart,
| they will continue to make a large amount fmloney but whether
| it's their world or not is still up in the air.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > The value is not in the llm but vertical integration and
| providing value.
|
| The irony being that LLMs are particularly good at writing the
| web frontend code, lowering the technical barrier to entry for
| competitors.
| irl_zebra wrote:
| I'm on the verge of unsubscribing from Stratechery. The last
| month has been a bunch of fawning over Meta, YouTube, and
| constant talk about and fawning over OpenAI and whatever latest
| models are coming out. It's kind of tiring and boring. I swear I
| heard them talk about some YouTube influencers event like five
| times across their different shows and across time. Like, I do
| not care at all.
| Multiplayer wrote:
| Did you listen to the recent interview with Ben Bajarin? I
| thought that interview alone justified the subscription.
| Curious as to whether anyone else felt the same.
| graeme wrote:
| Fantastic interview. Hard to get much info from inside the
| world Bajarin was speaking of. Notable how everyone is saying
| they can't get capacity for the tokens they're trying to
| serve.
| roxolotl wrote:
| Is this fawning or just reflecting reality? I'm generally in
| the "LLMs kinda suck camp" and I read the headline and thought
| "yep 100%". OpenAI is able to raise and deploy insane amounts
| of capital on a whim. Regardless of that being a good or bad
| thing it's still true.
| mooglevich wrote:
| As a longtime loyal subscriber to Stratechery... I kinda agree.
| But as the other commenters did point out, this does reflect
| how the market seems to feel about OpenAI, at least. (Meta -
| I'm less sure of; Thompson does fawn over Meta quite a bit, I
| personally think it's too much and seems to not fully reflect
| reality, but man do they really cane it when you see their
| usage numbers, so maybe he's right.)
|
| I did think his GPT-5 commentary was good, insofar as picking
| up the nuance of why it's actually better than the immediate
| reactions I, at least, saw in the headlines.
|
| Where I do agree with you is how Stratechery's getting a little
| oversaturated. I'm happy Ben Thompson is building a mini media
| empire, but I might have liked it more when it was just a
| simple newsletter that I got in my inbox, rather than pods,
| YouTube videos, and expanding to include other tech/news
| doyens. Maybe I'm just a tech media hipster lol.
| Multiplayer wrote:
| The current AI wave has been compared (by sama) to electricity
| and sometimes transistors. AI is just going to be in all the
| products. The trillion dollar question is: Do you care what kind
| of electricity you are using? So, will you care what kind of AI
| you are using.
|
| In the last few interviews with him I have listened to he has
| said that what he wants is "your ai" that knows you, everywhere
| that you are. So his game is "Switching Costs" based on your own
| data. So he's making a device, etc etc.
|
| Switching costs are a terrific moat in many circumstances and
| requires a 10x product (or whatever) to get you to cross over.
| Claude Code was easily a 5x product for me, but I do think GPT5
| is doing a better job on just "remembering personal details" and
| it's compelling.
|
| I do not think that apps inside chatgpt matters to me at all and
| I think it will go the way of all the other "super app" ambitions
| openai has.
| visarga wrote:
| > I do think GPT5 is doing a better job on just "remembering
| personal details" and it's compelling.
|
| Today I asked GPT5 to extract a transcript of all my messages
| in the conversation and it hallucinated messages from a
| previous conversation, maybe leaked through the memory system.
| It cannot tell the difference. Indiscriminate learning and use
| of memory system is a risk.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| I mean don't you think this is is more analogous to the
| introduction of computing than electricity? If you told people
| in 1960 that there would be supercomputers inside people's
| refrigerators do you think they would have believed you?
|
| And most people actually don't care what CPU they have in their
| laptop (enthusiasts still do which i think continues to match
| the analogy), they care more about the OS (chatGPT app vs
| gemini etc).
| random9749832 wrote:
| >The current AI wave has been compared (by sama) to electricity
| and sometimes transistors. AI is just going to be in all the
| products.
|
| Sorry, but you have to be beyond thick to believe any of this.
| polalavik wrote:
| Ya absolutely wild take.
|
| can the world and tech survive fruitfully without AI? yes.
| can the world and tech survive without electricity and
| transistors - not really. the modern world would come
| crashing down if transistors and electricity disappeared
| overnight. if AI disappeared over night the world might just
| be a better place.
| tim333 wrote:
| That might be because AI is new so we don't rely on it. The
| world got on for a long time before electrical engineering
| came about.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| If you take that at face value, shouldn't every investor just
| back Google or Apple instead? Like, OpenAI is, at best, months
| ahead when it comes to model quality. But for them to get
| integrated into the lives of people in the way all their
| competitors are would take years. If the way in which ai
| becomes this ubiquitous trillion dollar thing involves making
| it hyper-personalized, is there any way in which OpenAi is
| particularly well positioned to achieve that?
| bgwalter wrote:
| Stratechery has always been shallow, but these overt
| advertisements are disturbing:
|
| - Sneaking in how someone went from a Sora skeptic to a purported
| creator within a week.
|
| - Calling the result the "future of creation".
|
| - Titling the advertisement "It's OpenAI's World, We're Just
| Living in It".
|
| What they are doing here is to pitch Sora to attention deficit
| teenagers in order to have yet another way to make the hair of
| the favorite content creator red. As if that didn't already
| exist.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| The victory lap from Sam Altman and all the money being raised
| makes people forget the following:
|
| - Open source LLM models at most 12 months behind ChatGPT/Gemini;
| - Gemini from Google is just as good, also much cheaper. For both
| Google and the users, as they make their own TPU; - Coding.
| OpenAI has nothing like Sonnet 4.5
|
| They look like they invested billions to do research for
| competitors, which have already taken most of their lunch.
|
| Now with the Sora 2 App, they are just burning more and more
| cash, so people watch those generated videos in Tiktok and
| Youtube.
|
| I find it hilarious all the big talk. I hope I get proven wrong,
| but they seem to be getting wrecked by competitors.
| karel-3d wrote:
| I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and
| the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's
| usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the
| perspective he has about the money involved.
|
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/
|
| OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep
| existing. That's more than all currently available capital,
| together, from all private equity. If you take all private equity
| together, it still won't be enough for OpenAI in next four years.
|
| It's just staggering amount of money that the world needs to bet
| on OpenAI.
| aiiizzz wrote:
| The openai bet goes "within 4 years, we need to be able to tell
| the AI to make money for us." Are they on track?
| rcxdude wrote:
| There's another important bit there: 'we need to be able to
| tell the AI to make money for us and no-one else can compete
| with us on that'. I think both halves of that are
| questionable.
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| I mean FWIW they could probably make those folks happy by
| just spitting out a list of everything to short because of
| ai disruption on each new release lol
| sixtyj wrote:
| Not sure.
|
| https://youtu.be/OYlQyPo-L4g
|
| From 7th minute, truth about ChatGPT - 2% paid users.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Yeah the conversion rate is poor and its demand is not
| price inelastic, I would argue for many individuals demand
| is very price elastic.
| lkrubner wrote:
| In late 2021, Ed Zitron wrote (on Twitter) that the future of
| all work was "work from home" and that no one would ever work
| in an office again. I responded:
|
| "In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards
| office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear
| their processes to handle external workers. Now that the
| companies have invested in these changed processes, they are
| finding it easier to outsource work to Brazil or India. Here in
| New York City, I am seeing an uptick in outsourcing. The work
| that remains in the USA will likely continue to be office-based
| because the work that can be done 100% remotely will likely go
| over seas."
|
| He responded:
|
| "Pee pee poo poo aaaaaaaaaaa peeeeee peeeeee poop poop poop."
|
| I don't know if he was taking drugs or what. I find his persona
| on Twitter to be baffling.
| thereitgoes456 wrote:
| He was wryly communicating, "your argument was so stupid I
| don't even need to engage with it".
|
| In my experience he has a horrible response to criticism.
| He's right on the AI stuff, but he responds to both
| legitimate and illegitimate feedback without much
| thoughtfulness, usually non-sequitur redirect or _ad
| hominem_.
|
| In his defense though, I expect 97% of feedback he gets is
| Sam Altman glazers, and he must be tired.
| tptacek wrote:
| Is he right on the AI stuff? Like, on the OpenAI company
| stuff he could be? I don't know? But on the technology? He
| _really_ doesn 't seem to know what he's talking about.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > But on the technology? He really doesn't seem to know
| what he's talking about.
|
| That puts him roughly on-par with everyone who isn't
| Gerganov or Karpathy.
| nemothekid wrote:
| He's right on the AI stuff? How do you figure that? As far
| as I can tell, OpenAI is still operating. It sounds like
| you _agree_ with him on the AI stuff, but he could be
| wrong, just like how he was wrong about remote work.
|
| I'm actually more inclined to believe he's wrong if he gets
| so defensive about criticism. That tells me he's more
| focused on protecting his ego than actually uncovering the
| truth.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| The fact that OpenAI is still operating and the argument
| that it is completely unsustainable are not two
| incompatible things.
| nemothekid wrote:
| Wether or not OpenAI is sustainable or not is only a
| question that can be answered in hindsight. If OpenAI is
| still around in 10 years, in the same sort of capacity,
| does OP become retroactively wrong?
|
| My point is, you can agree that OpenAI is unsustainable,
| but it's not clear to me that is a decided fact, rather
| than an open conjecture. And if someone is making that
| decision from a place of ego, I have greater reason to
| believe that they didn't reason themselves into that
| position.
| thereitgoes456 wrote:
| I don't think he's right about everything. He is
| particularly weak at understanding underlying technology,
| as others have pointed out. But, perhaps by luck, he is
| right most of the time.
|
| For example, he was the lone voice saying that despite
| all the posturing and media manipulation by Altman, that
| OpenAI's for-profit transformation would not work out,
| and certainly not by EOY2025. He was also the lone voice
| saying that "productivity gains from AI" were not clearly
| attributable to such, and are likely make-believe. He was
| right on both.
|
| Perhaps you have forgotten these claims, or the claims
| about OpenAI's revenue from "agents" this year, or that
| they were going to raise ChatGPT's price to $44 per
| month. Altman and the world have seemingly memory-holed
| these claims and moved on to even more fantastical ones.
|
| He has never said that OpenAI would be bankrupt, his
| position (https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/,
| Jul 2024) is:
|
| _I am hypothesizing that for OpenAI to survive for
| longer than two years, it will have to (in no particular
| order):_
|
| _- Successfully navigate a convoluted and onerous
| relationship with Microsoft, one that exists both as a
| lifeline and a direct source of competition._
|
| _- Raise more money than any startup has ever raised in
| history, and continue to do so at a pace totally unseen
| in the history of financing._
|
| _- Have a significant technological breakthrough such
| that it reduces the costs of building and operating GPT
| -- or whatever model that succeeds it -- by a factor of
| thousands of percent._
|
| _- Have such a significant technological breakthrough
| that GPT is able to take on entirely unseen new use
| cases, ones that are not currently possible or
| hypothesized as possible by any artificial intelligence
| researchers._
|
| _- Have these use cases be ones that are capable of both
| creating new jobs and entirely automating existing ones
| in such a way that it will validate the massive capital
| expenditures and infrastructural investment necessary to
| continue._
|
| _I ultimately believe that OpenAI in its current form is
| untenable. There is no path to profitability, the burn
| rate is too high, and generative AI as a technology
| requires too much energy for the power grid to sustain
| it, and training these models is equally untenable, both
| as a result of ongoing legal issues (as a result of
| theft) and the amount of training data necessary to
| develop them._
|
| He is right about this too. They are doing #2 on this
| list.
| karel-3d wrote:
| I generally don't agree with him on much; it's just nobody
| really talks about how much money those companies burn, and
| are expected to burn, in bigger perspective.
|
| For me 10 billion, 100 billion and 1 trillion are all very
| abstract numbers - until you show much unreal 1 trillion is.
| tim333 wrote:
| It helps if you divide by the world population. Say ~10bn
| for this purpose so that's $1, $10 or $100 per head
| roughly.
| moistoreos wrote:
| You could literally eliminate homelessness, world hunger, and
| fully pay health care costs in that same timeframe with much
| less cash.
| codyb wrote:
| Fully pay health care costs for _who_ for four years with 1
| trillion dollars?
|
| Doesn't America alone already spend 2 or 3 trillion a year on
| healthcare?
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Doesn't America alone already spend 2 or 3 trillion a
| year on healthcare?
|
| There's a _huge_ difference between "paying for
| healthcare" and "paying a healthcare provider" here in the
| United States. Oftentimes the latter has 2 or 3 additional
| zeroes attached.
| smcin wrote:
| Sure, but Congress invariably pretend to say the former
| but mean the latter. You're asking for single-payer
| instead of privatized health insurance, they will sooner
| bankrupt the country than switch to sanity. Congress and
| its funding sources are now captured by privatized health
| insurance:
|
| In 2023-4, Health came #7 in total political donations,
| #8 is Lawyers & Lobbyists; the combined
| "Finance/Insur/RealEst" is #1; would be useful to see
| "Insurance" broken out by health insurers vs non-health
| (can anyone cite a more granular breakdown?).
| [https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/sectors]
| whodidntante wrote:
| America spends $5T on healthcare per year.
|
| That is twice as much per capita as our "peer" nations (UK,
| France, Canada, Germany, etc) and we have poorer outcomes.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Cash is just paper. You can't eat paper.
| walkabout wrote:
| You can't eat AI, either.
|
| Yet another hidden benefit of a human workforce, that AI
| can't match.
| fragmede wrote:
| It seems to me that you're suggesting cannablism, but
| maybe I'm reading you wrong?
| legostormtroopr wrote:
| It does seem like a rather modest proposal.
| psychoslave wrote:
| You mean like, at least we can eat the human workforce?
| lovich wrote:
| It's more recyclable than old gpus and out of date models
| dougdonohoe wrote:
| Soylent Green is people!
| 113 wrote:
| Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods and Services
| wilg wrote:
| If that's true, all you have to do is convince other people
| that it's true and they can just vote for someone to deploy
| that money. Don't need to wait for someone else to do it.
| exolymph wrote:
| Homelessness and world hunger are not bottlenecked by money.
| There's a stronger case for healthcare, but that's also
| substantially a political issue.
| llbbdd wrote:
| There's a stronger case for world hunger being bottlenecked
| than healthcare. World hunger is a logistics problem now,
| but no amount of money lets you print doctors.
| Mon0t0n wrote:
| Actually funding education via wealth distribution is a
| great way of "printing doctors".
| llbbdd wrote:
| I don't know what wealth distribution means in this
| context, or why it's relevant at all, but food grows fast
| and doctors take like 20 years to grow no matter how much
| money you throw at it or where you get the money. And the
| context above was more specifically "fully pay health
| care costs" which is a comical fantasy the moment you try
| to actually define what that means, because the limit is
| not the price.
| Mon0t0n wrote:
| simply, we have a scarcity of healthcare because we don't
| invest the wealth we collectively produce in healthcare.
| dgfitz wrote:
| With a little bit of lag time (school) we could have a
| metric fuckton of doctors. We have a metric fuckton of
| shitty lawyers. Doctors are artificially gated in the US
|
| What's the joke? "What do you call the person who
| graduated last in their class from med school? A doctor."
| llbbdd wrote:
| Sure, I think that helps my point. You can't create
| "good" doctors out of thin air with money, just "more"
| doctors, and it takes forever.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| All that money and they've been trying to shy away from talk of
| AGI recently to lower expectations.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| A lot of this is because there isn't a good definition of
| AGI. Look at Sama's recent interviews, that's how he
| deflects, along with the statement about the Turing test
| having ultimately been inconsequential. They have an internal
| definition of AGI that is "the model can perform the vast
| majority of economically viable tasks at the level of the
| highest humans" which isn't the story the investors are
| expecting when they hear AGI, so they're trying to stay mum
| to truthfully roadmap AGI while not blatantly lying to
| capital.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| The AI is getting better at things like maths. I recently
| asked it about iterating the Burrows-Wheeler transform, and
| it appeared to really understand that. It's not super easy to
| reason about why it's reversible, etc. and I felt that it got
| it.
|
| This is obviously not AGI, and we're very far from AGI as we
| can see by trying out these LLMs on things like stories or on
| analyzing text, or dealing with opposing arguments, but for
| programming and maths performance is at a level where it's
| actually useful.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| My answer to this is - so what? What are the effects in the
| real economy?
|
| Theres probably a good 2-3 years left of runway for
| substantial progress before things really fall off a cliff.
| There has to be some semblance of GDP (real) growth.
| gooodvibes wrote:
| > OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to
| keep existing.
|
| More like $115 billion based on your own link. The $1T is a
| guess based on promises made, far from "needs to spend that
| much just to exist".
|
| Spending $30 billion a year doesn't sound that apocalyptic.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Spending $30 billion a year doesn't sound that apocalyptic.
|
| they have $1000billion in future liabilities.
| https://www.ft.com/content/5f6f78af-
| aed9-43a5-8e31-2df7851ce...
|
| they have income of about 4billion a half, with a loss of
| $13bn.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Those numbers still fall way short of $1T and the $4.3b in
| rev is only the first half of 2025 - they're projecting
| $12-13b for the year.
|
| I have my own reservations about the company, but there's a
| pretty real path toward huge revenues and profitability for
| them that seems pretty obvious to me.
| tim333 wrote:
| "signed about $1tn in deals" doesn't have to mean you have
| $1tn in future liabilities. It depends on what deals you've
| done.
| AgentME wrote:
| Hasn't he been saying that OpenAI is going to shut down every
| year for the last few years now? And that models are never
| going to get better than they were in 2022? I think he's pretty
| clearly a grifter chasing an audience that wants to be
| reassured that big tech is going away soon.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| Ed Zitron may be many things but he is no grifter. He writes
| what he believes and believes what he says, and I basically
| agree with all of it. The chattering class in SV has been
| wildly wrong for years, and they'll really look foolish when
| the market crashes horribly and these companies collapse.
| tptacek wrote:
| He's saying more than that the companies are going to
| collapse; he's making pronouncements about the underlying
| technology, which are claims that are much harder to
| defend. I'm not entirely sure he understands the
| distinction between the companies and the technology,
| though.
| B56b wrote:
| Respectably...what?? Ed at this point is one of the most
| well read people on Earth for this topic. Of course he
| knows the difference between the companies and the
| technology. He goes in depth both on why he think the
| companies are financially unviable AND why he's
| unimpressed by LLM's technologically alllll the time.
| remich wrote:
| Having a large audience does not imply being the most
| well informed or correct.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| "Saying what a lot of people want to hear" is not a good
| proxy for truthfulness or correctness.
| tim333 wrote:
| I don't think he fundamentally gets what's going on with
| AI on the tech level and how the Moore's law type
| improvements in compute have driven this and will keep
| doing so. He just kind of sees that LLM chatbots are not
| much good and assumes things will stay like that. If that
| were so investing $1tn would make no sense. But it's not
| true.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Lecun pretty much says the same things, as most experts
| actually. Only the execs and marketing teams keep yapping
| about AGI
| tptacek wrote:
| I didn't say anything about AGI. I think AGI is very
| silly.
| fragmede wrote:
| How do you want to define grifter? He shows up, makes a lot
| of big promises, talks a lot of shit, doesn't actually
| engage with any real criticism, gets paid for it, and then
| exits, stage left. He could be right, he could be wrong,
| but he leaves no room for debate. If all you want is
| someone to yell at you about how right your feelings on
| something are, I mean, hey, I have a therapist too. I don't
| ask her for financial advice though.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Does Ed produce anything other than a newsletter?
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| I like reading Zitron's output, but this remark stood out to me
| as him weighing in on a domain he's basically clueless about.
|
| Spread across 4 years, there's way more than $1tn in available
| private capital. Berkshire Hathaway alone has 1/3 of that
| sitting in a cash pile right now. You don't have to look at
| many balance sheets to see that the big tech companies are all
| also sitting on huge piles of cash.
|
| I don't personally believe OAI can raise that money. But the
| money exists.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Isn't that every domain?
|
| The dude is a living embodiment of "overconfident and wrong".
| He picks a side, then cherry picks until he has it all lined
| up so that his side is Obviously Right and anything else is
| Obviously Wrong.
|
| Then reality happens and he's proven wrong, but he never
| fucking learns.
| fishmicrowaver wrote:
| He is following a very well worn path of writing
| histrionically about a bubble and making money off it.
| Point out the obvious that it's a bubble. Throw out a lot
| of figures supporting it. Get your emotional hooks in (prey
| on fears of job loss, hatred of corporate
| mismanagement/execs etc) and charge a subscription for it.
| I liked an article or two of his but he's basically
| meatGPTing The Information with cursing.
| fragmede wrote:
| Everyone's got to make a living somehow, I guess.
| yibg wrote:
| I think it's pretty smart actually.
|
| Altman has sort of linked the fate of OpenAI to that of Nvidia,
| AMD, Oracle, Microsft etc with these huge deals / partnerships.
| We've seen the impact of these deals on stock prices before
| even a penny has changed hands.
|
| Tracks with his reputation for power play and politics.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| That certainly explains why Microsoft is so desperate to
| force everyone into using their AI whether they want to or
| not. I'm wondering if the deal will end Microsoft when OpenAI
| goes belly up.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Difficult to say for certain.
|
| It depends on the extent to which the promise was peddled
| and whether MSFT can be trusted with the cash balance -
| investors will reflect that in the stock price in future if
| there is a bubble bursting event. If that scenario pans
| out, Apple will be sitting there very pretty given it has
| not spent any real money on pursuing LLMs.
| noir_lord wrote:
| It's rapidly ending my deal with Microsoft.
|
| I want windows to play games, for computing I use Linux but
| they keep foisting shite I don't want on me just to play
| games, AI and sodding OneDrive can piss off.
|
| I've kept windows around because it was less painful to
| game on than Linux but Linux is better than ever and
| windows is getting worse, at some point those lines are
| gonna cross and for the first time in 30 odd years I'll not
| be running a single device with a Microsoft operating
| system on.
|
| And they deserve it.
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| OpenAI WANTS 1 trillion dollars.
|
| They do not need it. Arguably no one needs it. I am at best
| luke-warm on LLMs, but how are any sane people rationalizing
| these requests? What is the opportunity cost of spending a
| billion or even a hundred billion dollars on compute instead of
| on climate tech or food security or healthcare or literally
| anything else?!
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Well, it's the rich's money, dedicated to replacing as many
| people as possible in the Great war on labor.
|
| I easily see the rich betting a trillion dollars especially
| if it's not their money and they start employing government
| funds in the name of a fictitious AI arms race.
|
| They smell blood in the water. Reducing everyone to as
| minimum wage as possible.
|
| Capital is already concentrated, aligned along monopolies and
| cartels, oligarchical control, and AI is the final key to
| total control to whatever degree they desire.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Well, it's the rich's money, dedicated to replacing as
| many people as possible in the Great war on labor.
|
| A lot of "the rich's" money is actually backed by the
| pension funds, 401k and similar investment vehicles.
|
| That's the dirty secret in most of today's world. A lot of
| ultra-large companies would absolutely deserve getting
| broken up just for being way too powerful, the problem is
| any such attempts would send the stonk markets and, with
| them, people's pensions tanking.
| wubrr wrote:
| > A lot of "the rich's" money is actually backed by the
| pension funds, 401k and similar investment vehicles.
|
| Not really clear what you mean by this. But arguably all
| of the rich's money (and all money in general) is backed
| by labour/the ability to exchange that money for someone
| else's labour.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Not really clear what you mean by this.
|
| The amount of shares in many a large company that are
| held by passive or semi-passive investment vehicles.
|
| It's not just high net worth individuals and nation-state
| entities (wealth funds) that pump money into YC, Meta,
| Apple, NVidia, Microsoft and god knows what else, the
| bulk of the ownerships is held indirectly by the wide
| masses via one sort or another of pension schemes.
|
| Elon Musk doesn't play with his own money on xAI, he
| plays with the money of his investors, and so do all the
| other actors in the AI bubble.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There will be at least one trillionaire within the next
| 12-24 months, and likely there will be multiple
| trillionaires within 5 years, the way wealth is
| consolidating at an accelerated rate. These amounts of
| investment don't seem to be fictional anymore.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to
| keep existing. That's more than all currently available
| capital, together, from all private equity.
|
| Recent estimates I've seen of _uninvested_ private equity
| capital are ~$1.5 trillion and total private equity $5+
| trillion, with several hundred million in new pricate equity
| funds raised annually, so this simply seems incorrect even
| assuming either only currrent "dry powder " is considered, or
| _only_ new funds available over the next four years, much less
| both and /or the rest of private equity.
| sublimefire wrote:
| The question is if the company can add more value to the models
| than someone else. I still see a lot of gaps in the ecosystem, eg
| evaluation/testing systems and integrations beyond chat interface
| and active control to get good results, not to mention other
| types of models that deal with 3d world or temporal data. There
| is an opportunity for an outsider to come and grab parts of the
| pie whilst the biggest are competing.
|
| They do look like trying to grab the market with tooling but if
| you can use their tools (oss) and switch the models then where is
| the moat?
| I_complete_me wrote:
| May I interject with my pathetic attempt at a Classification of
| Intelligences ala Linnaeus
|
| Pre-AI :: Examples :: Timeline
|
| -----------------------------------------------------------------
| ----
|
| NHI Non-human Intelligence :: e.g. dolphins, apes, crows etc. ::
| millions of years
|
| HI Human Intelligence :: e.g. Einstein, Trump, Confuscius, Homer
| :: thousands of years
|
| Post-AI
|
| -----------------------------------------------------------------
| ----
|
| AI Artificial Intelligence :: ChatGTP, Gemini, many others ::
| countable months
|
| AGI :: Artificial General Intelligence ; not there yet; :: zero
|
| AIApHI AI Assisted/Approved/Audited Human Intelligence :: See AI
| :: countable months
|
| HIApAI Human Intelligence Assisted/Approved/Audited AI :: The
| Future? :: zero
|
| I have mentioned no individuals here to avoid legal action. My
| point on AI is ... wait and see. Chill.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| My feeling is that the tech industry has been in, "hot water"
| since at least 2018 and has been using private equity and
| bullshit hype-trains to garner interest in new technologies in
| lieu of the public getting hip to the fact that mostly computers
| are spying on you, making you mentally ill, and stealing your
| data in exchange for, "being able to participate." As pointed out
| by others OpenAI and the rest of the AI ecosystem will need a
| financial miracle to stay afloat and offer their products for a
| competitive price.
|
| There's so much of what, "AI" is becoming that just seems like a
| massive psy-op to breathe one last breath of life into what is
| the skeleton of the old Silicon Valley. Innovation is possible
| but if the future really is liberal authoritarianism/oligarchy
| there's no room in the contrived market for, "innovative products
| that greatly improve human life."
|
| There's hope in: https://worrydream.com/
| ramon156 wrote:
| I mean we transitioned from the product to the brand, with no
| reason to. Soon it will just flow back into a product. I don't
| care if a Samsung fridge has gemini GPT or openai GPT, as long as
| it works
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