[HN Gopher] The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products tha...
___________________________________________________________________
The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't
happened
Author : dherls
Score : 206 points
Date : 2026-04-01 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| cmiles8 wrote:
| This is important context in the wake of yesterday's "raise"
| announcement. A lot of this stuff seems to just quietly never
| happen once the ink on the PR puff dries.
|
| The AI industry increasingly looks in scramble mode to keep the
| hype going as those storm clouds of financial and business
| reality get darker and darker on the horizon.
| dgellow wrote:
| Anthropic does look healthier, with their enterprise focus. Or
| am I missing something?
| cmiles8 wrote:
| They nominally come across as a more stable ship with less
| clouds over its leadership.
|
| However all of the major privately held AI players are
| struggling to paint a business and financial picture that
| doesn't look "terrible" at best and "verge of market moving
| implosion" at worst.
|
| For now the only thing keeping this all alive is more and
| more irrational cash being thrown on the pile in the faint
| hope that something stops the implosion from happening.
| adventured wrote:
| The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars
| in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of
| margins (not as good as Google search used to be). If GPT is
| a leader in that, they'll take a sizable share of that pot.
|
| There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or
| Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there
| is in being Anthropic -> enterprise.
|
| Just take a look at the enterprise. Amazon's ad business
| alone is already a better business than Oracle or SAP or
| Salesforce, with superior margins, and it's growing faster
| too.
|
| And of course everybody knows the Google & Meta ad monsters.
|
| The only question remaining is who is going to extract all
| those LLM ad dollars, how will that break out. Right now it's
| Gemini and GPT in the obvious lead, with Anthropic in third,
| and Meta & Grok nowhere to be found (permanent situation for
| those).
| cmiles8 wrote:
| "The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of
| dollars in ad revenue"
|
| And yet every attempt to extract even minimal ad revenue
| has been canned to date as something nobody wants with AI
| providers retreating in failure.
|
| I don't doubt that there's "some" ad revenue to be had but
| there's little evidence that ads are going to save the day
| here.
| bdangubic wrote:
| These exact words were said tens of thousands of times
| about Facebook (am old enough to remember those
| discussions :) ), "no way they can monetize on mobile"
| (this was the most fun).
|
| rules are simple, if you have Xbn or XXXm users on your
| system, you will make big bank in ads eventually
| iAMkenough wrote:
| At that time, Facebook provided a free service without
| any real competitors. The masses will switch to Meta AI
| or Gemini or Claude at the drop of an ad that annoys them
| enough.
| adventured wrote:
| Gemini, GPT and Claude will all have ads on the consumer
| side. They will go together in quasi lock-step into the
| ad future, because that money is gigantic and they're
| going to need it.
|
| The masses will have no say in the matter. Just as they
| had no say in the matter with Google's ads getting ever
| more intrusive, or cable prices previously, or streaming
| prices going perpetually higher in the present, or
| YouTube ads, or anything else. Consumers will have no say
| in the matter, they'll take it and that's that.
|
| With only three relevant competitors (maybe Mistral in
| Europe), there will be nowhere to flee the deployment of
| ads.
| bdangubic wrote:
| amazing this is even a debate, we have now decades of
| this across everything that reaches enough users, it is a
| certainty as much that the Sun will rise tomorrow
| morning. as probably many people here on HN I am
| designated computer-fixer for all my family so any family
| gathering I have to look at someone's computer about
| something. years ago I started checking whether
| browser(s) anything ad-blocking in place and I am 0 for
| million by now. while HN crowd might be theoretically
| pushing back on ads (even with like "I won't use this if
| there are ads" nonsense) general public is so used to ads
| that I sometimes feel it is welcomed change when some new
| service etc gets ads. I remember the first time I saw an
| ad on Amazon Prime Video and my daughter and I were like
| "no f'ing way!!!" and my wife was like "oh, ____ is on
| sale this weekend, cool!" :)
| harmonic18374 wrote:
| It's tempting to look at trends and assume there must be
| a rule behind them, but it's also intellectually lazy.
| Please do the hard work of justifying your stance like
| GGP did.
| bdangubic wrote:
| it is a simple stance - if you have a product that is
| used by hundreds of millions of people ad monetization
| strategy will be found cause there are people a lot
| smarter than you and me that will get it done. here's
| intellectual challenge - find a business with comparable
| number of users to openai which is not swimming in ad
| revenue - one will do
| harmonic18374 wrote:
| Snapchat
| bdangubic wrote:
| Total Quarterly Revenue (Q4 2024): $1.55 billion in total
| revenue, with $1.41 billion coming from advertising
|
| Basically all their revenue is ad revenue and not too bad
| flextheruler wrote:
| A counterpoint is that there are many products with
| significant usage that fail or never attempt advertising
| monetization. They just increase the cost of the product.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Such as?
| adventured wrote:
| For several early years search was thought to have no
| great business model (banner ads and similar). And then
| it did.
|
| GoTo.com -> Google -> $$$
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of
| dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in
| terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be).
|
| This seems like ... not the situation we are in. LLMs are
| great for coding now but their text generation capabilities
| aren't exactly capturing the masses or replacing their jobs
| yet. People are already tired of the deluge of fake content
| on the internet, it's not going to drive a second
| revolution in web ads.
|
| The $20-200 LLM plans are all subsidized and aren't paying
| for themselves. Something has to give here.
| adventured wrote:
| LLM usage will largely replace traditional search, and
| that's stage one. To be specific, search will be consumed
| by the LLMs, it'll be merely an aspect of what they do
| for the user, and that'll include handling the more
| intricate details of the search, refining the search,
| understanding the results of search, etc. The age of the
| typical user handling any of that is about to end. Search
| will more be a feature of Gemini in the not very distant
| future, rather than Gemini being bolted onto/into search.
|
| Fuller integration into the user's life will bring ever
| more ad opportunities (and it doesn't matter if the HN
| base hates that notion, it's going to happen regardless).
| That'll happen over the next decade gradually.
|
| Shopping, home management, tasks (taxes, accounting,
| lifestyle, reminders, homework, work work, 800 other
| things), travel (obvious), advice & general conversation
| (already there), search (being consumed now), gaming
| (next 3-5 years to start), full at-work integration
| (gradual spread across all industries, with more narrow
| expertise), digital world building (10-15+ years out for
| mass user adoption). And on the list goes. It's pretty
| much anything the user can or does touch in life.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| > To be specific, search will be consumed by the LLMs,
| it'll be merely an aspect of what they do for the user,
| and that'll include handling the more intricate details
| of the search, refining the search, understanding the
| results of search, etc. The age of the typical user
| handling any of that is about to end.
|
| We already have the tech for that, why hasn't it
| happened? People are revolted by the AI results in
| Google. AI isn't going to make people use their computers
| more. It's not opening up a new consumer market. This is
| just making each search infinitely more expensive.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Who is revolted? I use the AI Google results every day
| when asking for specific questions, I rarely visit the
| webpages before anymore. Also Google already injects ads
| into conversations in the form of Google Shopping
| affiliate links.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| >I rarely visit the webpages before anymore.
|
| And what do you think this'll do for future LLM models
| that need to train on new content if web page traffic
| collapses?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I understand the concern but it's frankly not my problem
| as a user, that is for the authors and corporations to
| figure out. No one would (or should) blame car buyers for
| putting horse and buggies out of business, they're merely
| participating in the market as a consumer not the
| producer.
| MadxX79 wrote:
| They won't figure it out. It's the tragedy of the
| commons.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Then that is how it will be, it's a self correcting
| problem in that if they don't figure it out, their models
| won't continue improving.
| esafak wrote:
| And web sites will collapse along with them. What do you
| think the 'corrected' state will look like? If you use
| the web it is your problem.
| eisa01 wrote:
| I find searching chatgpt.com and asking for sources, then
| visiting them, works much better than Google to find
| niche topics
| Marazan wrote:
| Every year I ask the latest version of Chat GPT a basic
| facts question about rugby results. It almost always gets
| it wrong - even when it does web search and cites
| sources. Wrong scores, hallucinated matches, wrong
| locations - just gob smacking amounts of wrongness.
|
| The latest "Thinking" version gets it reliably right but
| spent about 3 minutes coming up with the answer that 10
| seconds of googling answers.
|
| So I don't believe we are currently in a situation where
| LLMs are an effective replacement for search engines.
| greenchair wrote:
| yep google ai results are old too.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| Google is already dumping LLMs into search and it works
| well and is free.
| sylos wrote:
| It doesn't work well. The searches are wrong and
| uninformative much of the time.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Any examples of bad ones? I find them perfectly fine for
| my queries.
| vesrah wrote:
| Search for anything mechanically car related and the
| results are terrible or wrong.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Do you have a concrete example I can reproduce? I
| searched for things like how to change the filter of X
| make and model and it seems correct, not sure if that's
| what you meant.
| staticman2 wrote:
| I'm not the person you replied to but I'm wondering which
| Google AI product you are referring to that you use for
| search which is so excellent that you need someone to
| find for you an example of it failing?
|
| I think Google has several ai products with search
| features?
|
| Which one in your experience "seems correct"?
|
| I'm fascinated because I've never found any LLM to be
| particularly error free at search.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Google.com with the AI overview or whatever they call it
| now. It seems to source web page information for
| grounding so it's reasonably correct and doesn't
| hallucinate recently at least.
| mrhottakes wrote:
| It works very poorly
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You see it already with how many people use LLMs for
| everything these days. Google Gemini can also integrate
| with your other Google apps to personalize further, and
| Gemini already has product placement ads.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| > The $20-200 LLM plans are all subsidized and aren't
| paying for themselves. Something has to give here.
|
| Whats interesting to me as well as much as companies are
| pushing AI adoption, i have started to hear AI token
| spend limits enforced across a few companies, so its not
| entirely clear that b2b can make them profitable yet
| either.
|
| If all the models reach good enough, then low cost
| provider would win. Gemini seems like a safer bet since
| Google controls more of the stack / has more efficiencies
| / cross selling / etc.
|
| It's not like "best" has won any other b2b arms race in
| the past.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| In large part because most companies have a set budget
| for IT spend. Thats how "normal" profitable companies
| operate outside this cash burning bonanza that's going
| on.
|
| And in that reality one can't just magically spend a
| bunch more on some fancy new thing, especially when said
| fancy new thing isn't retuning value. So "token limits"
| and cost controls on B2B is entirely expected here.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| > especially when said fancy new thing isn't retuning
| value
|
| I think this is the key element. Either they can't
| measure the value, or it's far far lower than anyone
| wants to believe, or both.
|
| I think the problem is less that it makes some coding
| tasks XX% faster, but that the end to end of a SWEs roles
| tasks is only improved by some much smaller Y%.
|
| If a CTO sets $10k/year spend limits on $500k SWEs.. they
| must not believe any of the hype.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The problem is that AGI fantasy aside, CTOs at companies
| are expected to deliver results today and tomorrow.
| Better to let somebody else hold the bag and train
| models, then once it finally works as advertised you can
| ease on the brakes.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >If all the models reach good enough, then low cost
| provider would win. Gemini seems like a safer bet since
| Google controls more of the stack / has more efficiencies
| / cross selling / etc.
|
| Gemini is the best deal too. For $20: you get multiple
| quotas per day across the products (web, CLI,
| antigravity, AI Studio) 2tb of cloud storage, and you can
| family share the plan.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't know Gemini's pricing model in detail, but in
| general pricing doesn't generalize well between
| personal/hobbyist and enterprise use. Consumer pricing of
| variable costs is a balancing act, and most Gemini users
| aren't going to be anywhere near the quota; a company of
| 1000 can't always buy for $20,000 what 1000 random users
| with $20 personal plans are theoretically capped at.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Ultimately though in the long run.. They invented the
| tech, have a large cashflow generating business
| subsidizing R&D as well as sales, with network effect of
| existing B2B relationships.
|
| Further they have their own TPUs, datacenters, etc on
| which to run their models.
|
| Plus existing data they've squirreled away over the
| preceding 30 years from books, web, etc.
|
| Just seems like a lot of efficiencies if its going to
| come down to cost.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > The $20-200 LLM plans are all subsidized and aren't
| paying for themselves. Something has to give here.
|
| Expert systems were amazing. They were not cost
| effective.
|
| There might be another bitter lesson to be had here, and
| unless the accountants start talking we're not gonna know
| any time soon.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Not interested in a service with ads throughout my workday,
| which is why I switched to Anthropic.
|
| Billions in projected revenue is nothing but hype/cope.
| Google and Meta got their edge because their product was
| offered for "free" to the masses.
| bdangubic wrote:
| absolutely not the case. there isn't a single nerve in
| human brains that goes "oh imma tolerate ads cause this
| shit's free but if I pay a few bucks no way" - if the
| product you use has utility to you, you will tolerate ads
| provided no other acceptable alternative. not to tell you
| something you don't already know but anthropic is getting
| ads, eventually, it is a given. so while today you may
| have an alternative (arguably better even if no ads in
| the equation) at some point you won't have an alternative
| (other than running local) and you'll tolerate ads. the
| thing with LLM ads is that companies can make $$$$ from
| "ads" you don't see, i.e. I can (not now but in the
| future) companies to push my product, e.g. claude is
| setting up architecture and proposes upstash (which I own
| and am paying anthropic a lot of money) instead of any
| competitor. or even more silently adding dependencies on
| my NPM library which has free and commercial offering...
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Yeah sure, but for me the common man OpenAI doesn't add
| any value that Claude, Gemini or Meta AI doesn't also
| provide.
|
| If they want to out-ad those companies to the tune of
| billions, I'll go with the least annoying. OpenAI hasn't
| earned any loyalty.
| bdangubic wrote:
| to me and you sure, but what do you reckon how many of
| their MAU are just people for whom "AI" is ChaptGPT?
| 90+%?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Anthropic is already an ad - for Anthropic. The uniquely
| "friendly" personality of their user-facing AI chatbot is
| far from accidental.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| > Just take a look at the enterprise. Amazon's ad business
| alone is already a better business than Oracle or SAP or
| Salesforce, with superior margins, and it's growing faster
| too.
|
| You can say the same about AWS and then prove the b2b case
| instead of ad case as well
| adventured wrote:
| AWS is legitimately a giant and it should be considered
| in enterprise broadly. It's infrastructure more than
| enterprise software of course, which is where Anthropic
| is at. Anthropic is not trying to host the world's
| databases and services (at present anyway). Anthropic
| will however help you write software to compete with
| Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, et al.
|
| Google's ad business remains far larger and more
| profitable than AWS. And the advertising segment is
| drastically larger than the segment AWS is in. Just
| Google + Meta = nearing $600 billion in ad sales. Amazon
| will soon have their own $100 billion in ad sales.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I guess the question is how many more $100B of ad sales
| slots are available, aside from just stealing share from
| incumbents (who already took it from traditional media
| channels over last 20 years).
|
| At some point someone needs to add value to the real
| economy, not just take an ad tax off the top.
| bombcar wrote:
| I don't think advertising is entirely a zero-sum game
| (there is real value to everyone for steveBK123 to learn
| of a product _that actually solves a real need_ or saves
| money, etc) - but it has to be something akin to it - the
| economy can 't support five hundred trillion dollars in
| advertising spend.
| rchaud wrote:
| Google launched in 1998 and were running ads by 2000.
| Considering how much more access to adtech product talent
| there is for OAI a quarter of a century on, what explains
| their hesitation to pick that route and make billions?
| After all they had billions avaiable to acquire designer
| bauble maker Jony Ive's company.
| delecti wrote:
| The first AI company to cram their product full of ads
| will get roasted over the coals for it. My guess is
| they're all playing chicken and waiting to be the
| _second_ to do it. I 'd also guess that they're all
| already thinking about ways to introduce it that will
| generate the least backlash.
|
| Google could do it in 2000 because their search was
| legitimately so much better, and also because their ads
| were comparatively more relevant and unobtrusive than
| modern ads. In comparison, LLMs are relatively similar in
| performance unless you're picky enough that you're
| probably already paying and thus wouldn't be in the ad-
| supported tier.
|
| That said, I wonder if ads are even lucrative enough to
| move the needle relative to how much training costs are
| increasing with each generation.
| bombcar wrote:
| People forget it took Google _years_ of frog-boiling to
| get us to where we are now.
|
| The first AI to insert blatant ads will be dumped for
| some other model overnight. Look at the Copilot
| "backlash" over their "product announcements".
| df2sdf wrote:
| Yep. Finally someone who knows how to think straight.
|
| Google built up immense surplus and ate into it slowly.
|
| OAI can't suddenly start cramming Ads as it fights to
| survive. Im sure they are employing questionable tactics
| to keep users hooked. Won't really work on a large enough
| user base to make the economics viable given the
| competition they face.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Outwardly it looks much better.
|
| But between their token curtailment and time of day
| restrictions, and some of the clues in the code leak (regex
| for sentiment, telling the public client to be "brief") it
| seems like they are facing some capacity issues.
|
| Im guessing that the accountants at all the AI incumbents
| drink heavily.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Anthropic can't prop up Nvidia and the chip industry itself.
| If AI as an industry can't start turning a dollar into $1.05,
| a _lot_ of stuff starts falling in value
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Nvidia will be fine, same for the chip makers. They're
| selling shovels during the gold rush and they stand to gain
| even if local/on prem AI eventually dominates for casual
| users.
| paxys wrote:
| If/when the bubble bursts Anthropic is going down as well.
| There's nothing unique that sets it apart from OpenAI. Their
| cash burn is similarly egregious.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Relative to OAI they are healthier.
|
| That isn't saying much.
| Razengan wrote:
| Holy f'n Hell, there's such a blatant bias on HackerNews in
| favor of Anthropic and against OpenAI.
|
| I'm just a user, and in my experience Claude has been
| consistently crap compared to ChatGPT/Codex.
|
| I use both side-by-side, and have paid for a ChatGPT
| subscription every month for around 1 year, but only 2 months
| for Claude; once last year, and again since last month.
|
| Everything from the sign up, the sign in, the payment, the
| UI, the UX, gosh, just sucks on Claude.
|
| And the AI itself: SO. MUCH. "OoPs you're right! I was
| mistaken" BACKTRACKING! It's downright DANGEROUS to listen to
| it! God I can post screenshots of working on the same project
| and the same prompts with both agents and prove how worse
| Claude is.
|
| Of course this comment will be downvoted by Anthropic's paid
| PR machine, because there's no way actual users who have
| tried both products would be so in favor of Claude.
| p1esk wrote:
| I've been a paid subscriber for all three players since day
| 1. CC (Opus) has been a clear winner for agentic coding
| starting about 6 months ago. GPT5.4 reduced the gap
| somewhat but the gap is still there.
| jmye wrote:
| > Of course this comment will be downvoted by Anthropic's
| paid PR machine, because there's no way actual users who
| have tried both products would be so in favor of Claude.
|
| Sure, it couldn't possibly be that others have had a
| different experience. It couldn't even be that some people
| think OpenAI is nearly as gross as Palantir. It's that
| they're shills.
|
| High-end analysis.
| greenchair wrote:
| Yes I dont get it either. probably bots, paid posts.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > healthier
|
| Correct. As compared to other AI companies. Tangible product,
| specific market segment and stable user base.
|
| But whether it is worth a trillion dollars (like some of the
| peers are pretending to be) is yet to be seen. A lot of
| companies are using Anthropic products, but whether the spend
| is worth it, is also yet to be seen. A more realistic end
| state for Anthropic would be that they'd enterprise
| customers, with limited but steady spend due to Anthropic
| finally having to stop subsidizing tokens and a valuation in
| around $200-350B.
| nacozarina wrote:
| sell the roadmap, deliver a sku, sell/comp consulting services
| on escalations
|
| the silicon valley shuffle, tried & true
| cj wrote:
| For a company bringing a new technology from zero to
| mainstream, I think it's pretty normal that there will be a lot
| of failed attempts at productization.
|
| The thing that isn't normal is the degree of experimentation
| relative to company valuation. Normally once a company reaches
| $700 B+ valuation, they've figured out their product and
| monetization strategy. ChatGPT is clearly still iterating
| heavily on that - not normal for a company that size.
| mandevil wrote:
| And not normal for a company that has been at it this long.
|
| The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went
| on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two.
| ChatGPT was opened to the public on November 30th, 2022,
| which was 1219 days ago- almost 50% more time has elapsed
| than between the Apple II and Visicalc.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Without me trying to be snarky why do you feel spreadsheet
| software launching is comparable to this scenario?
| Marazan wrote:
| VisiCalc was the killer app.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Ah got it. I wasn't drawing that connection. Thanks
| zozbot234 wrote:
| VisiCalc was "the" killer app for early micros, but being
| able to edit a written text on screen and then print it
| out with letter-like quality was nothing to sneeze at,
| either. This was plausibly a key gain in efficiency for
| the service sector, perhaps comparable to the 10%~25%
| that's now being talked about re: LLM's (which is huge on
| a secular basis).
| mandevil wrote:
| Visicalc is often described as the killer app of the
| first generation Personal Computer(1). It was the product
| that drove them into every small business in the country,
| that blew up sales of personal computers and brought them
| out of the realm of hobbyists into enterprise. And,
| honestly, I think Visicalc and spreadsheets are still a
| greater benefit than what I've seen out of generative AI
| today. And that happened a lot faster than where we are
| today with generative AI. Apple had enormous actual
| profits by 1980 (Apple IPO'd in 1980 with a 21% operating
| margin). So I think that a lot of the "just got to give
| it more time" argument misses that the previous computer
| based revolutions that we know about productized and
| threw off gobs of cash a heck of a lot faster than this
| one has.
|
| If the end result of this is "certain classes of white
| collar workers are 10-25% more productive" (which is the
| best results I can extrapolate from what I've seen so
| far) then it's really hard to imagine how OpenAI can
| return a profit to their investors.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc#Killer_app is
| pretty much the normal narrative on Visicalc and its
| importance to the Personal Computer.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Thanks for the in depth explanation. I was definitely not
| up on my tech history here. :)
| mandevil wrote:
| Sorry, I forgot that for many engineers this is, in fact,
| their first time going through a technology cycle like
| this, and so would need more explanation. I am too young
| for Visicalc myself, but the cycle that I saw while I was
| in high school- the dot-com bubble- doesn't have
| convenient, easy to mark out dates like the PC does.
|
| Thinking... Thinking... Tim Berners-Lee proposing HTTP in
| 1989 is kinda like the original Attention is All You Need
| paper, I guess? Netscape 1.0 release in December 1994 is
| ChatGPT 1.0? And then Amazon.com opened up to the public
| in July 1995 and then IPO'd in May 1997 (after raising
| less than 10 million dollars in two funding rounds). But
| once again we have the business side of these previous
| cycles moving much faster than this one.
| piker wrote:
| WOW. That does really drive home the perspective. I was
| an adolescent during those years and it did seem quick
| then, but that's an insane pace in retrospect.
|
| Amazon is perhaps a counter-example to your point,
| though, to be fair. It seems to me they did a lot of
| spaghetti throwing while making accounting losses for a
| good number of years. Granted, they did it on OpenAI's
| dining budget.
| df2sdf wrote:
| "It seems to me they did a lot of spaghetti throwing
| while making accounting losses for a good number of
| years."
|
| They actually didn't. They knew what they were doing.
| Bezos had a proper background in Finance, unlike Altman.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Yeah I started programming in 2006 as a kid and then
| entered professional work in 2016 I guess as still a kid
| depending on your perspective :P
|
| This is really the first meteoric rise in tech I've seen
| / am experiencing first hand.
| mandevil wrote:
| All I will say is make sure to enjoy your knees while
| they don't hurt, whippersnapper.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >If the end result of this is "certain classes of white
| collar workers are 10-25% more productive" (which is the
| best results I can extrapolate from what I've seen so
| far) then it's really hard to imagine how OpenAI can
| return a profit to their investors.
|
| If we take this as face value, and say that the absolute
| best case scenario is there are literally no other uses
| for AI but helping programmers program faster, given 4.4
| million software devs, with an average cost to the
| company of $200,000 (working off the US here, including
| benefits/levels/whatever should be close), those 4.4
| million devs with 20% productivity would save roughly 176
| billion dollars a year.
|
| Some companies will cut jobs, some will expand features,
| but that's the gist. And it's hard not to see the
| magnitude of improvement that's come in just 3 years,
| though if that leads to a 'moat' is yet to be seen.
| notahacker wrote:
| > If we take this as face value, and say that the
| absolute best case scenario is there are literally no
| other uses for AI but helping programmers program faster,
| given 4.4 million software devs, with an average cost to
| the company of $200,000 (working off the US here,
| including benefits/levels/whatever should be close),
| those 4.4 million devs with 20% productivity would save
| roughly 176 billion dollars a year.
|
| I don't think that's necessarily out of line with
| struggling to return a profit to investors though: an
| individual company is only ever going to capture a tiny
| fraction of the productivity improvements it enables its
| customer base to make[1], its own cost base is unusually
| high for tech, and investors are seeking a 10x+ return on
| an $852B valuation for a company that isn't even the
| market leader in that segment (which isn't the only
| segment, but it's the optimum B2B one). You can have a
| great business with a great value proposition and a
| sustainable moat and still not generate the desired
| returns on investment at a $852B valuation.
|
| [1]and that's productivity improvements over the best-
| known free models, not productivity improvements over
| reading StackOverflow
| bombcar wrote:
| I took it the other way, spreadsheets shook up the world
| _way more_ than AI has (to date) - it 's possible that
| history will look back and count AI as the bigger "thing"
| but if I had to pick a killer app, VisiCalc and computer
| spreadsheets in general would beat ChatGPT.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| Visicalc is widely regarded to be the first "killer app"
| for the Apple computer. Perhaps even the first "killer
| app" period.
| beachy wrote:
| The Apple II was so simple (by today's standards) that it
| came with a complete printed circuit diagram. Visicalc was
| so simple it was written by two guys in a year.
|
| AI is so many orders of magnitude more complex that the
| comparison is not really useful.
| mandevil wrote:
| This complexity requires a lot of money- from investors-
| to sustain. If those investors don't see a return on
| their investment before they get too anxious, then no
| more money will be invested and the business is dead. So
| that would suggest that there will be even less patience
| from the money than the investors in Apple had. If you
| are correct that this greater complexity actually makes
| it harder to productize, then it is hard to see how
| frontier model generative AI will be viable under a VC
| funded domain.
|
| It is entirely plausible to me that there are great
| technologies that are impossible to reach via the normal
| means of VC/investor financed capitalism. I certainly
| have encountered market failures requiring extremely
| patient money (usually in the form of government
| subsidies) to produce a useful product that eventually
| does have market value. That has worked many times in the
| past. But so far generative AI has not had that, and
| looking at my non-technology friends, I very much doubt
| that there would be much support among them for
| government subsidies of AI companies. AI companies have
| made too many people unhappy, served as too much of a
| punching bag, to be in a good position politically for
| that.
| skydhash wrote:
| IMO, the AI companies are trying to be both T-Mobile and
| Google Doc at the same time. Even Apple is struggling with
| being both the platform and the product. The issue with
| OpenAI is that the platform has no moat (other than money)
| and the product can be easily copied. In the game console
| world, the platforms have patents and trademarks, and games
| are not easily produced.
| ai-x wrote:
| Which is a good thing. Elon has showed the world, the only
| thing that limits the upper bound is bureaucracy, extreme
| risk-averse and no culture for experimenting.
|
| More and more companies will start operating on the correct
| reward/risk curve or else getting crushed by firms who do.
| OpenAI has forced Google, Apple, Meta out of their comfort
| zone because they know OpenAI will eat their lunch
| mrhottakes wrote:
| True, Elon has really been achieving win after win with
| Tesla and Twitter.
| jmye wrote:
| Literally every part of this comment is confusing. Elon
| hasn't shown anyone anything interesting in at least a
| decade. OpenAI hasn't forced Apple to do anything - LLMs
| aren't impinging on hardware or bundled services, and this
| literally seems right up Google's alley (and they're
| arguably better at it than OpenAI has demonstrated, now
| that first-mover-ish is long past).
|
| I suppose Meta's recent comfort zone was simply a stupid
| bet on VR, so sure, maybe one part of the comment isn't
| confusing.
|
| I don't understand what you think you're seeing.
| convexly wrote:
| For most companies an $850B valuation means you figured out
| the business model. Here it seems to mean you convinced
| enough people that figuring it out is inevitable. Those are
| very different bets.
| sharadov wrote:
| The circular deals are getting old - it's like rearranging the
| chairs on the Titanic's deck.
| therobots927 wrote:
| All the "raises" consist of "committed capital" and all of the
| revenue is annualized.
|
| Welcome to dot com 2.0
| xnx wrote:
| OpenAI != The AI industry
|
| OpenAI has stagnated technologically, and is a financial
| zombie, but that's not true for every part of the industry.
| Once these early movers flame out, there will be more stability
| with Google, Microsoft, and AWS.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| And if Forbes is reporting this, that means the actual movers and
| shakers were talking about this months ago.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| And that people are going to end up in jail - but only if they
| are under 30.
| et-al wrote:
| Keep in mind this is a Forbes "Site", so basically a personal
| blog with some minor vetting.
| guzfip wrote:
| Interesting. I never had much of an opinionon Forbes till a
| few years ago I noticed them posting nearly exclusively
| NYPost style clickbait. I didn't think it was that bad of a
| publication.
| bombcar wrote:
| Forbes "the publication" is still around somewhere and has
| some standards.
|
| Forbes "sites" are just the bastard love child of LinkedIn,
| Medium, and Substack, and should be treated with the
| respect that deserves.
| therobots927 wrote:
| I'm not a mover and a shaker. I just have critical thinking
| skills.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Has there ever been a period o time where people saw a bubble
| coming and that we were in one, but it just inexorably refused to
| pop/drug out this long? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm
| wondering how this period compares to other irrational periods of
| the economy like railroad fever etc.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| It's not been that long really. The dot com bubble was called a
| bubble for a while before it finally imploded. And just like
| now folks were in massive denial that it was a bubble.
|
| One of the challenges here is that a lot of folks simply
| weren't around then and haven't seen what happens when
| everything implodes overnight. Those that have experienced it
| know what that looks like and know it will happen again.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| It's no coincidence that daytrading ascended with the dotcom
| era.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| What makes this time weird though is back then (and in most
| bubbles) the bubble was creating jobs - supposedly (I'm too
| young) anyone who could write a bit of HTML could get hired
| in the dot com boom.
|
| Whereas this is a very weird bubble where it creates big
| pumps in some equity prices but apart from a tiny number of
| people who are directly involved in AI research etc. it's not
| created any jobs, in fact by creating uncertainty it's
| probably caused fewer jobs to be created.
|
| What that means for labour market dynamics when it pops I
| really don't know
| banannaise wrote:
| Bubbles don't pop overnight. In the aftermath of any collapse,
| you can generally see a pretty clear pattern of red flags (and
| attempts to minimize them or cover them up). Some parties
| notice earlier than others, but the realization is generally a
| much more gradual process than the collapse.
| df2sdf wrote:
| Its obvious its coming soon simply because the mismatch
| between hype and expectations is far too large now. Hype is
| necessary to lure in investment but now its reached its peak
| imo.
|
| The question is, is it a big bang or a slow release?
| neaden wrote:
| Not at all, there is a famous saying (often attributed to
| Keynes but as far as I can tell he never said) "Markets can
| remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
| guzfip wrote:
| "But can the markets remain solvent longer than I can remain
| rational" is the real question.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| NFTs lasted a lot longer than they should have.
| chasd00 wrote:
| yes they did, Salesforce even came out with an "NFT Cloud"
| product.
| simianwords wrote:
| The bubble bursting has almost become eschatological for
| deniers. Keep praying that it will happen. It won't.
| banannaise wrote:
| That's also what NFT hypebros said.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| LLMs can be a massively transformative and valuable
| technology, and this would still be a bubble, there's no
| reason those two things can't be true at once.
|
| In fact "pure" bubbles where the focus item is of literally
| no value (tulips, NFTs) are quite rare. Much more common are
| the bubbles based on an actual real transformative innovation
| (canals, railways, radio, internet, LLMs).
|
| Railways did absolutely transform how travel worked in the
| UK, while simultaneously almost everyone who invested in them
| lost their shirts
| greenchair wrote:
| Why the sudden pivot to agents and subagents? One shotting
| not good enough? Was a tech plateau reached? Or maybe one
| related to cost?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Has there ever been a period o time where people saw a bubble
| coming and that we were in one, but it just inexorably refused
| to pop/drug out this long?
|
| The housing bubble that peaked in 2006 was raised as an issue
| at least as early as 2000 and became a big topic of
| conversation in mid-to-late 2002, which is comparable to if we
| had started talking about an AI bubble roughly simultaneously
| with the release of GPT-3 and it had become a topic of wide
| concern shortly after the release of GPT-3.5.
|
| So, in short, not only "this long", but much longer.
| EGreg wrote:
| So is OpenAI on track to overtake Google for discontinuing
| projects?
| woah wrote:
| My guess is Sam Altman is a better VC than CEO. Better at hype,
| networking, fund raising, and back room political hijinks than
| shipping a focused product
|
| He seems to be trying to take almost a "venture studio" approach
| by throwing shit at the wall, but the problem with these things
| is always that the "internal startups" are "founded" by people
| who don't have enough incentive or control over their product to
| perform as well as an actual startup, and are distracted by
| internal politics. And frankly, it may also be that the really
| good founders will just do their own startup vs working on a
| quasi-startup inside a large org so there's some selection bias
| as well.
| jmkni wrote:
| I'd say he's a better CTO than CEO
| mbesto wrote:
| He ran a small (30 employee) tech startup for 7 years
|
| He was a partner at YC for 8 years
|
| He has no research/PhD background in AI and is the CEO of an
| AI company
|
| There is no objective data point in which he's a better CTO
| than a CEO
| tokai wrote:
| What he would be truly amazing at is shitcoin rug-pulling.
| paxys wrote:
| Isn't he already doing that with his Worldcoin thing?
| raincole wrote:
| > GPT-4o
|
| Why is this on the list? Like... what? How about including GPT
| 3.5 and GPT 2 here too?
| adrian_b wrote:
| In TFA it is put on the list because some of the users of this
| GPT version were discontent with its cancellation, which caused
| even OpenAI to oscillate in its decision, so they first
| cancelled it, then they resurrected it and then they cancelled
| it permanently, probably because continuing to run it would
| have cost more than the generated revenue.
|
| Nothing similar happened when the earlier, presumably worse
| versions were discontinued.
| kingleopold wrote:
| Gemini models even in last month add this 4o to any text I can
| bet that that is added by Gemini :D
| aerhardt wrote:
| It's Forbes, lads.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Who is the person in the portrait at the top of the page?
| adrian_b wrote:
| The CEO himself.
|
| For some reason, he does not look like a man whom I would trust
| with my money, but it appears that there are enough rich
| investors who disagree.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Threw me off because I have no idea what Altman looks like
| and the article opened with "OpenAI's CEO of applications
| Fidji Simo..."
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I think the VC/investor community needs to take A LOT of blame
| here. They've created an insane rush to financialize everything
| to moon at the drop of a hat.
|
| I mean, even Andresson-Horowitz was taking NFT's seriously as
| though they weren't a scam only a few years ago
| (https://a16z.com/the-nft-starter-pack-tools-for-anyone-to-
| an...).
|
| These people are also looking (and funding) quantum computing
| companies as though quantum computing is right around the corner
| after AGI.
|
| They need to cool their jets. AI is certainly a worthwhile and
| super important development, but it's still possible to go
| overboard with it.
| jexe wrote:
| I'm not an OAI fanboy by a longshot - but I'd view lots of
| experiments that didn't work out as a healthy thing, especially
| for a company trying to find footing in a new industry.
| shimman wrote:
| It's not an experiment if you publicly showcase and create tens
| of millions worth of marketing materials on it.
|
| Usually company "experiments" are typically hush hush, not
| blasted on every corporate media channel as a means to boost
| your company holdings.
| yanis_t wrote:
| It's missing the voice mode that never reached the level they
| demoed, and then gradually went to shit from that.
| moron4hire wrote:
| "Disney's then-CEO Bob Iger... was sold on Sora, too. He lauded
| Altman's ability to "look around corners"..."
|
| WTF is that supposed to mean? I'm sorry, maybe I'm being dense. I
| can't figure out what "look around corners" is supposed to mean.
| "Think outside the box," I guess? Why "look around corners?"
|
| I mean, maybe I do get it. Altman has a weird face that looks
| like you can't predict where his eyes are based on where his head
| is. "Shifty," one might say. But I doubt that's what Iger meant.
|
| It's dumb. It's dumb corporate speak. I'm so sick of this kind of
| stuff getting a pass. We used to bully people over using the word
| "synergy." Let's make america anti-corporate-weasel again.
| lucianbr wrote:
| I read it as being able to see the future, which is still
| bullshit par excellence. The future is just around the corner
| as it were, but us normal people cannot see it, on account of
| both it being the future, and around a corner.
|
| To be very clear, I think it's completely stupid.
| TimLeland wrote:
| Unfortunately I would bet OpenClaw is going to be on the list
| soon
| TimLeland wrote:
| Unfortunately I would bet OpenClaw will be on the list soon
| 6510 wrote:
| Before he left I use to enjoy enraging a manager several layers
| above me. In one instance I explained that asking us to cut a few
| corners to get things done was fine, usually we can figure out
| acceptable ways of doing it. But then, it is your job to take
| those fake numbers and figure out how we are doing. No matter how
| much effort you make if bullshit goes in you know what will come
| out.
|
| Now imagine an entire economy working like that. Like say, LLM's
| are good enough to run entire companies but you don't get to run
| a company because you are good at it. LLM's can perfectly manage
| employee schedules but the real job is more like marriage
| counseling or group therapy. Somewhere along the road we forgot
| which jobs make the economy go. They are probably the ones with
| the lowest salaries as those lack the effort of conjuring the job
| into existence.
|
| Humanity needs obvious things cloths, food, housing,
| transportation etc but that isn't where the money is. The people
| cooking the books have the money and they are looking for
| something like a book cooking book. The market for openAI will be
| in lying convincingly for the benefit of the investor. Reality
| must be auctioned off like domain names or search engine
| placements. Altman is really the perfect guy for the job no one
| wants. ha-ha
|
| Alternatively we could humble ourselves, ask the Chinese how
| reality works and attempt to steal their fu. It's just a thought.
| bcooke wrote:
| They've lost a whole lot of people in prominent roles over the
| past few years. I wonder how much of the misfires and general
| thrash in product direction is a result of brain drain and/or so
| many hands changing. Or maybe I'm confusing cause and effect...
| hard to tell
| guzfip wrote:
| That's pretty crazy, I swear it wasn't that long ago these
| companies were about the only people hiring and the comp
| packages looked absolutely deranged.
|
| For a brief moment I regretted wasting any time of my life on
| anything but ML research. But I guess the bigger they come...
| nope1000 wrote:
| What they really should focus on is making those models more
| efficient. With them most likely losing money on inference
| (+model training + salaries + building data centers), I can't see
| why they would want more compute and more products, since more
| tokens spent is actually bad for them.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Making existing models more efficient won't make them God in a
| Box.
| nope1000 wrote:
| True but neither will going bankrupt.
| bombcar wrote:
| They're all in a race to bankrupt the others, and then
| pivot and raise prices and go efficient fast enough to
| avoid their own bankruptcy.
|
| We'll see if it works!
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Ye of little faith. God in a Box will tell them how to not
| go bankrupt.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Except they already did this: if they had scaled 4.5 with RL,
| 5 would probably have been the leap we expected
|
| If anything 4.5 being abandoned so they could sell India a $3
| a month subscription was the first crack in The Box
| freehorse wrote:
| Did you really mean to say 4.5? Gpt 4.5 used to cost
| $75/$150 per million tokens input/output. And it did not
| even seem to be _that_ good to justify that. I would not
| expect many people were using it, and I doubt that
| "expanding to india" was what killed it (if it was that
| useful/popular they would have kept the api, or keep it for
| higher end subscriptions).
|
| If anything it should have been no1 in the "openAI
| graveyard" website.
| yalogin wrote:
| The stargate, nvidia and amd deals are all linked together and
| the fallout is not public. Nvidia and amd stock seems to not care
| about it at all. Oracle fired 30000 employees, not sure if it's
| to fund that initiative or a fall out of that
| guzfip wrote:
| Lying is a virtue.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| The future of ChatGPT maybe well be as a Microsoft product.
| Hansenq wrote:
| Lots of critiques here! Something missing in this discussion is
| people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who
| work there aren't stupid!
|
| I think this is a disconnect between people who think that large
| companies are static entities with established products vs. large
| companies that still operate like a startup and are trying to
| grow. When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you
| don't know what will work! You try different things, you [launch
| over and over again](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-
| to-launch-again-a...)...all in hopes of something that works,
| sticks, and starts to grow.
|
| In every example here, I see OpenAI trying something new, hoping
| it will grow, and shutting it down after it doesn't. Sora is the
| pre-eminent example of this. They make news, but you don't talk
| about the things they launch that successfully grow!
|
| OpenAI isn't shutting down Codex or ChatGPT, because those were
| launches that they did that actually worked! When you go look at
| the tweets and communication from OpenAI employees when ChatGPT
| launched, nobody was sure that it would work. But it did. And if
| they hadn't launched, we would have never known how valuable it
| was.
|
| All that is to say...you don't know what will work until you
| launch. Most things fail, and it's correct to shut them down. But
| focusing on the products that haven't worked instead of the
| products that have gets you more clicks, but actually depresses
| innovation by making future launches less likely.
| piker wrote:
| People are much more willing to give the benefit of the doubt
| on things like that when the flagbearers of your industry
| aren't running around sucking all of the oxygen out of the
| system and telling people things are "solved": that your
| product will obsolete them in the next 6-12 months.
|
| We get it. They say that stuff to raise money, make sales and
| keep the party going. But don't expect too much sympathy when
| the strategy falters a bit.
| chromacity wrote:
| I'm not sure your criticism is quite fair. I think everyone
| here is willing to cut more slack to the underdog. But when
| your company represents an outsized chunk of the digital
| economy and employs 10k+ people, and only then says "sooo,
| let's try to build some sort of a profitable product here", I
| can see why people are rolling their eyes.
|
| OpenAI also burned a lot of goodwill by pretending to be a
| nonprofit foundation focused on the betterment of mankind and
| then executing one of the most spectacular rugpulls in modern
| history. So yeah, people will be giving them a hard time even
| if it turns out that the valuation is justified.
| lefty2 wrote:
| Sora was losing 15M a day and it was running at least 3 months,
| so that's a total 1.3 Billion. That's a pretty expensive
| experiment. It sounds like a company with lots of VC to burn
| and no discipline. Even Jensen Huang accused them of lack of
| discipline in business approach.
| notahacker wrote:
| Yeah. $1.3B isn't scrappy startup pivots, it's the sort of
| money Google/Meta/Microsoft/Yahoo/Salesforce burn on
| strategic acquisitions. And those entities _absolutely_ get
| and deserve the sneers when they "sunset" the product 6-18
| months later having concluded that it wasn't even showing
| enough signs of being a market they should bother with
| keeping the lights on. At least Sora was novel and
| technically impressive, I guess.
| groby_b wrote:
| > When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you
| don't know what will work!
|
| When you announce a post money valuation of $852 billion, you
| should probably be a bit better at figuring out what works,
| though. You're not a scrappy startup any more, even if you like
| cosplaying as one.
| wpferrell wrote:
| Had to move away from this thing. Claude is so much better. In
| every respect.
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