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OpenAI is in talks for tender offer that would value it at $29B
- minimaxir 4y agoIt's funny how "ChatGPT Creator" is now more recognizeable/SEO-friendly than "OpenAI".
- big_blind 4y agoPaywall: https://archive.is/G9M4E https://archive.is/G9M4E It’s still crazy to me how rapidly AI has grown in mainstream popularity and relevance in the past year. Curious to see this new market develop now with competitors like You.com’s YouChat coming onto the scene.
- cinntaile 4y agoI wonder how they come up with these valuations for deep learning companies? Some other company always seems to be able to pretty much replicate the performance a few weeks or months later, what is the moat here?
- htrp 4y agoUsually its about the network effects.... OpenAI can claim the most usage and therefore the ability to see the newest language model tricks.
- WheelsAtLarge 4y agoChatgpt is the first mover but I doubt it will be around for long. Competition is starting and history has shown that other players eventually find a profitable business model and leave the first mover behind. Chatgpt is good but as soon as there's something better people will shift over very quickly. One thing it lacks is reliability. You can't trust its answers all the time. I suspect the next goal is to create reliable expert systems that people can trust. I see a future where companies will buy access to a reliable expert ai that will help their workers do their job. Eventually there will be so many expert systems that they can be tied together to create what seems like super ai. It won't be a thinking machine but it won't matter. It will be so realistic that people will believe it's a sentient machine. I bet it will happen in less than 30 yrs. Imagine a company like AWS renting their AI system to do a specific function. It's going to be interesting.
- onion2k 4y agoGPT4 will replace it, which is also from OpenAI.
- version_five 4y agoI think "AI" is way overhyped. That said, because of the competition driving the value of the technology down, with open source versions and constant iterations and improvements, I think the value will be in having some "enterprise" version and associated relationships that make it friendly / easy to buy for large businesses. The Bing partnership and whole Microsoft angle suggest Open AI is in a good spot to be an enterprise provider
- WheelsAtLarge 4y ago>I think "AI" is way overhyped. It has been. But the current crop of AI is different. It has very notable limits but it's helpful. I've started to use it myself and it's made a difference already. It can produce first drafts of emails and memos very quickly for me. I can then edit them at will. It's very much like an assistant. It's been at least 2 decades since I have had a new software app change my work life. Yes, this time is different.
- fieldcny 4y agoCan’t wait to see it vacuum my floor without smearing dog poo everywhere, falling down the stairs or getting stuck between chairs. Futurists have been predicting this stuff forever, we live in amazing times, but it’s never what it “could be”.
- mywittyname 4y ago> Imagine a company like AWS renting their AI system to do a specific function. It's going to be interesting. This is where I see the money being made. Offer the LEGO bricks startups use to build successful niche products, then steal the most profitable ones. Amazon Basics Medical Coding AI.
- screye 4y agoOpenAI has 3 unique advantages that others don't. Namely : Sam Altman, Microsoft and self-fulfilling prophecies. 1. Sam Altman - OpenAI does relationships like no other company. They are getting doors opened to data that others (even big companies) simply do not have access to. having Altman at the helm has a lot to do with it. He is also the reason OpenAI is arguably second only to Tesla in terms of being a self-marketing behemoth with no real marketing budget. The super-fans do all the talking for you. 2. Microsoft - Whatever the fine-print of their relationship is, despite not owning OpenAI, Microsoft is throwing its entire weight behind them. This means that the entities who can compete on compute and endless money supply are Google and Amazon. The fact that Microsoft obscures its relationship with OpenAI, also means that OpenAI gets to move with the sort of agility and goodwill, that something branded MSFT/AMZN/GOOG simply cannot. 3. Self-fulfilling prophecies - These models get better with human in the loop (HITL) feedback. OpenAI is the one getting the most human in the loop feedback due to being first movers and that lets them make better models. The better models mean that users keep coming back to OpenAI to give more HITL feedback. (This is more so true with NLP than Vision. Vision has a healthy set of competitors across the board)
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/3xntP https://archive.ph/3xntP
- magic_man 4y agoDoes Elon still have stake in it?
- bink 4y agoHe had to completely disconnect from OpenAI due to the conflict of interest with Tesla AI.
- doutunlined 4y agoNo wonder it succeeded.
- misiti3780 4y agolol - tesla, spacex, etc didnt succeed ? what planet are you living on?
- fieldcny 4y agoLife is a marathon, not a sprint. Let’s see how many of those are around when we actually go through a full business cycle. No company started since 2003 has really been through a real downturn. 2007/2008 was limited in its blast radius and the fed just threw money everywhere…
- rockemsockem 4y agoSo 20 years for Tesla and 21 years for SpaceX is a sprint? What amount of time is a marathon? Facebook was founded in 2004, Google in 1998, are they still just sprinting?
- fieldcny 4y agohow about when Tesla can survive off of the margins from ops without growth and without bilking its customer for vapor ware? How about when they come out with a new body and chassis? When they go through a re-tooling cycle or two? And again, let’s seem then make it through a full business cycle, because again, no company founded since 2001 knows that it’s like to run a company in a no growth or shrinking economy…
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- albntomat0 4y agoWhat is the relative difficult of each required part in training GPT3/ChatGPT? E.g. where is OpenAI's moat, and how wide is it? Is it in model design (now published), data set, engineering needed to train it, cost of hardware needed to train it, cost of HLRF on top of GPT3 to make ChatGPT?
- mccorrinall 4y agoIt’s easier to train on all github repos if you own github. There is no real alternative to codex. Stuff like GPT3 is trying to be recreated, but even the eleuther AI guys only collected like 800GB training data, which is much less than what OpenAI has (iirc around 45TB). And apparently their data is very high quality. EleutherAI is pretty much one of the few big model open source competitors with GPT-Neox etc. Plus openai has great branding.
- albntomat0 4y agoInteresting, thanks for sharing! I wonder how LaMDA compares performance wise to ChatGPT. I definitely understand why training on Github is an advantage, but I'd expect Google to also be great at getting a good dataset, across the range of things they'd be interested in.
- tootie 4y agoAlso how the hell do they make money? They began life as a nonprofit and AFAIK have no commerical product.
- albntomat0 4y agoPoking around their website, OpenAI sells API access to DALL-E, and a range of language models. Github Copilot also uses an OpenAI ML model. Their valuation comes from expectations of the value of future iterations of those.
- 93po 4y agoThey've received several billions in investor money and I doubt they're at risk of going through all that.
- Jabbles 4y agoI think it is an interesting point of comparison that DeepMind was acquired for $400M in 2014 https://www.reuters.com/article/google-deepmind-idUSL2N0L102A20140127 https://www.reuters.com/article/google-deepmind-idUSL2N0L102...
- aliqot 4y ago2014 was before things got all willynilly to the degree they are now.
- version_five 4y agoIs there any evidence it was a good investment at that price? As I understand they are a big money sink and haven't done anything commercially valuable
- JacobThreeThree 4y agoIt was a good investment because Google doesn't want to see a switch away from their cash-cow search ads business model, therefore controlling and limiting the biggest competitor is a good investment.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- alphabetting 4y agoTheir data center cooling optimizations has probably already paid for the sale cost and regardless of that the prestige of Deepmind among elite ML talent has helped Google remain a top dog in AI over the years. If say Apple or Amazon had acquired Deepmind they'd be one of the leaders in AI right now.
- lmm 4y agoI think that's just shifting the question; how much return is there on being a "leader in AI"?
- version_five 4y ago
- Jabbles 4y agosome investors have expressed skepticism that the company can generate meaningful revenue from the technology Would anyone like to speculate as to how they could?
- sebzim4500 4y agoMicrosoft must be paying them something for copilot at least. I would imagine if they end up being a significant part of bing that could also be lucrative.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Would anyone like to speculate as to how they could? (1) Selling access to their models, or (2) Selling access to services built on top of their models. If the technology is as transformative as it is being hyped as, either or both (which they already do!) are going to be phenomally profitable if their models are really ahead of the competition.
- EGreg 4y agoOh great. And whoever buys OpenAI could do a lot of nefarious things for profit... Who remembers fogbugz fondly?
- greatpostman 4y agoFunny that a relatively small highly competent company like openai has created a stir that none of the big companies could. The 10x engineer theory is alive and well. A tale as old as time, large “prestigious” corporations incapable of innovating, probably due to management being unwilling to cannabalize their own jobs and knowledge cough google cough
- nfRfqX5n 4y agoBut the big companies have infinitely more data, which will be more useful in the long run
- greatpostman 4y agoActually it turned out to be the opposite, vanilla data scraped from the internet is feeding these models
- spiderice 4y agoHow is that the opposite? Big tech companies have all the vanilla data scraped from the internet, plus WAY more. Obviously both together will be more valuable than just the former.
- greatpostman 4y agoA team of 10 talented engineers can scrape and store that data. It won’t be perfect, but it’s nowhere near the barrier that people assumed.
- lostmsu 4y ago1 engineer can handle that alone. The Pile is under 1TB. The tech is there to do it from a phone in under a month.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> A team of 10 talented engineers can scrape and store that data. How do you scrape and store the nonpublic data held by any major corp?
- japanman425 4y agoCan wait to pay for factually wrong chat not answers instead of getting them for free!
- LarsDu88 4y agoHonestly they move to be acquired. AI is destined to be the future of tech, but it's going to be the data that decides who wins. Once an algorithm is out in the wild, anyone with money can copy, train, and deploy it IF they have the data. OpenAI has done some amazing RnD, but it is the big tech firms have all the data. Acquisition by a company like Microsoft is probably the most likely thing that will happen. Sidenote: If a basic multiplayer vector graphics editor like Figma is worth 20 Billion, OpenAI can get a much higher price IMO!
- preommr 4y ago> If a basic multiplayer vector graphics editor like Figma is worth 20 Billion, OpenAI can get a much higher price IMO Figma is only worth that much because of Adobe's incompetence. Companies in the same space as OpenAI are much more capable.
- dmitryminkovsky 4y agoI was with you until “basic” :) Figma is an amazing beast! Also your comment seems to correctly throw into question the sustained long-term value of OpenAI. Figma will undoubtedly keep delivering value for years to come.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoTbh, people have tried and made many tools like Figma, but I'm yet to see anything that comes even close to Figma's speed. There's some incredible engineering under the hood.
- preommr 4y agoCan you give some examples of other tools that you've found to be slow? I am also curious how you'd rank the performance of something like "https://w00dn.github.io/papergrapher/ https://w00dn.github.io/papergrapher/"
- Yhippa 4y agoI was thinking about this. You take something like ChatGPT, point it at all your company's documentation, and boom, instant customer service. Pretty darn good customer service based on my experience. Feels like it will instantly invalidate all existing customer service chatbots once this propagates.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoClosedAI
- clarge1120 4y agoExactly. I will be surprised if even GPT-3 (with training data), not to mention GPT-4-5-6 or 7, is made available to the masses. There's too much potential for disruption. Also, I'd love to be surprised.
- lost_tourist 4y agoThis sounds like another twitter deal; overvalued by a lot.
- endisneigh 4y agoHow much money does OpenAI make I wonder?
- ttobbaybbob 4y agofrom the openai charter (https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/): "Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity." i wonder how committed they currently are to ^ and what taking external investment would/will do to that commitment. Echoes of "dont be evil"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- karmakurtisaani 4y agoThis is something you always say as start-up. It gets you good pr and possibly cheaper and idealistic engineers. Then you struggle towards your "mission" until you can sell out when the numbers get big enough. No one will not sell out when there are billions on the table.
- hatenberg 4y agoDon’t do evil, we know that one
- alphabetting 4y agoGoogle acquiring Deepmind in 2014 for ~$600M was such a steal in hindsight.
- kats 4y agoLol professional BS artists.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoHow long until we see 100% custom generated online ads? For $29B valuation, that should be a WordPress plug-in.
- 93po 4y agoAs with most things, it will start with 100% custom generated porn, and then transition that tech to be used for advertising.
- berkle4455 4y agoThe tech bubble has a ways to deflate still
- pessimizer 4y agoBut tbf, language models/deep learning (and their near-future improvements) are real, practical technologies with pretty unlimited applications i.e. not bitcoin. Buying in at this semi-early stage is going to pay off massively and effortlessly, really the only challenge is to win a bidding war without being saddled with so much debt that you go bankrupt before you become an institution.
- analyst74 4y agoI thought OpenAI was a non-profit? How does that affect the acquisition? Does that bound the acquirer to its missions?
- ajonnav 4y agoThey used to be a non-profit but changed their structure to a "capped" for-profit a couple of years back -- investor returns are capped at 100x.
- philip1209 4y agoI wonder if the timing is related to Elon's need for liquidity right now.
- hbarka 4y agoThiel, Founders Fund Kushner, Thrive Capital
- corytheboyd 4y agoDoes anyone else feel like most of this AI buzz is destined to go the way of voice recognition? When that tech was new it was paraded around like gods gift to man, but when the high wore off we realized it was just a very shitty button that sometimes did the thing when you pressed it. ChatGPT wordage is okay at informing you I guess. It's extremely verbose, and kind of answers some questions, but using a proper search engine and applying my own critical thinking to get results feels so much better-- the same way it feels so much better to just use your phone/computer vs a voice assistant. Tech is cool though so it's fun to watch
- echelon 4y agoNo, we've stumbled across the next industrial revolution and perhaps the next step function evolution of our species (or whatever comes after, "alignment" folks be damned). I've been bearish about so much. Pointless crypto, tech being cellphone incrementalism, slow speed of basic science, etc. I'm using this tech to make so much stuff that I could never produce before. It's incredible. Take my judgment with a grain of salt. I'm in the thick of it and building in the space. That said, never have I ever been so excited. The statement that tech eats the world? We'll, AI eats tech. And us. I feel like everything has led to this.
- oxfordmale 4y agoNo this is not yet the next industrial evolution. ChatGPT is still at the beginning of its hype curve. It is amazing, however, it is just a language model. It can't reason, just regurgitate.
- gaigepr 4y agoI think this is a bad idea. Bleeding edge AI research being driven by shareholder profit motive is gonna lead to abuses of the tech real quick. Look at how social media algorithms have been abused and misused in part because they're tuned to drive engagement by e.g. surfacing things that will make people react even if the content is untrue.
- gwern 4y agoNot long ago, the reporting was that they were selling shares at a valuation of <$20b https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-valued-at-nearly-20-billion-in-advanced-talks-with-microsoft-for-more-funding https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-valued-at-nea... : +$9b in a few months where every other tech is crashing is quite something.
- jononomo 4y agoI have been unimpressed with ChatGPT since it first arrived on the scene a few weeks ago and I'm a little astounded at how much hype it is getting. It is obvious to me that it is basically like talking to a stupid person who can't come up with anything original to say but know a lot of useless details. I can see it maybe being helpful for some search functions, but the plays it writes, etc, are just beyond atrocious. It's like talking to a dumb 8th grader that has perfect grammar and nothing else.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jgalt212 4y ago> The deal is structured as a tender offer, with the investors buying shares from existing shareholders such as employees, the people said. I guess the corporation still has plenty of cash available despite calculations that their model costs $3MM a day to run.