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OpenAI ignored the ‘have a problem to solve’ rule, says president Greg Brockman
- flappyeagle 4y agoIt sounds like they solved a wide problem instead of a narrow one
- TeMPOraL 4y agoThey demonstrated that "build it, and they will come" works if what you build turns out to be useful enough.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoSurvivor bias. You can have enough money, time, and talent to tackle a category without a precise milestone plan, but it's not the wisest move if you're struggling to stay alive. "Build a survivable business first" should be the general rule.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- satisfice 4y agoI also ignore this rule, in my life and work. As do most of us. I will accept my billion-dollar valuation now. Thanks.
- njoubert 4y agothis is a pretty silly fluff piece.
- aduffy 4y agoThe conditions that created OpenAI (oodles of money from some of the wealthiest people on the planet) are not reproducible for the vast majority of businesses. If you have oodles of money from the wealthiest people on the planet to spend on the worlds best researchers, you too can ignore this rule.
- seizethecheese 4y agoOodles of money helps but is neither necessary nor sufficient. What matters here is having a product that’s captivating and revolutionary.
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- spookthesunset 4y agoExactly. This is shown by metaverse. Tons of money thrown at a product that never had a defined market fit. You cannot just throw reams of cash at something and expect it to be a hit.
- jimhi 4y agoThey literally had 10+ millions to spend on research with no prototype and only a vague idea of how to produce a profitable product by saying they will create an AGI and "ask it how to make money." for several years
- oldstrangers 4y agoDidn't work out too well for the Metaverse.
- rasz 3y agoMagic Leap
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BudaDude 4y agoIt's too early to say it hasn't worked out. Apple is planned to reveal their headset this year. If thats the case, VR/AR may become the norm the same way Smart Phones and Smart Watches are. If you don't think Meta will release Horizon on Apple's headset, then you havn't been watching.
- JamesBarney 4y agoIt seems like the problem they tried to solve is "people cost more than GPU's". It's a large an ambitious problem but they pulled it off.
- xracy 4y agoWhere have they replaced people with GPUs? Or made people cost less than GPUs?
- JamesBarney 3y agoI'm already seeing people reduce the number of people they need to hire based on chatgpt.
- xracy 3y agoRight... but where? If you can't say what industry, then I don't believe you.
- Incipient 4y agoNow you pay a gpu to complete your homework, not a person. That's one example.
- xracy 3y agoYeah, I guess I still stand by my statement given the point of homework is to learn, and not just to get it done.
- meghan_rain 4y agoDid they really succeed economically though? Or did they jump-start crowd-sourced open source LLM assistant work that will end up giving people ChatGPT for free on their phones. OpenAI seems to have a slight first mover advantage as of May 2023, but it's not a real moat.
- seizethecheese 4y agoTheir brand value is worth billions of dollars, right now. Sure they could screw it up, but they objectively have produced a massively positive ROI
- dekhn 4y agoif only you could convert brand value into actual dollars.
- jlund-molfese 4y agoYou can. You just sell it to another company that wants to start from OpenAI/ChatGPT instead of starting from scratch.
- cj 4y ago> massively positive ROI This feels like a stretch considering the massive investments they've received. Massive investments = massive growth expectations
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago> Or did they jump-start crowd-sourced open source LLM assistant work that will end up giving people ChatGPT for free on their phones Given the computer power required behind ChatGPT isn't that unlikely at this point? Aren't they one of the few games in town with both the software and required hardware?
- mxwsn 4y agohttps://archive.is/FjDbo https://archive.is/FjDbo
- m3kw9 4y agoAI can potentially solve a lot of problems as OpenAI is from get go targeting AGI
- thih9 4y agoElsewhere we have “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” [1] and it doesn't paint a bright future for OpenAI. If they didn't target any problem, will OpenAI continue to be worth $30 billion if/when LLMs become as accessible as, say, relational databases? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322
- RC_ITR 4y agoRDMS are a solved problem, but Oracle is still a quarter-trillion dollar company.
- sebzim4500 4y agoThat article makes a convincing argument that there is no moat around GPT-3.5 or Bard, but at present no one else is anywhere near GPT-4.
- atlgator 4y agoThis reminds me of the unabomber manifesto. He claimed that 'have a problem to solve' was not the rule, that technology advances for its own end. Humans adapt to changing technology rather than technology advancing to support humans.
- rogerkirkness 4y agoIt does feel like the manifesto is taking the opposite side of the same argument. Goes right back to Prometheus giving the humans fire in Greek mythology...
- williamtrask 4y agoFwiw - I’m not sure it’s wise to ground one’s moral philosophy from mass murderers. The invisible hand in economics seems both more causal to technology’s advancement and less dubious. Also there’s a fantastic BBC docuseries called “Connections” by James Burke that makes the case that nothing in tech could have happened sooner or later than it did, and that each progression was an inevitable next step from the previous. It has interesting implications.
- atlgator 4y agoI'm not here to have a Death of the Author debate. Aristotle said the mark of an educated mind is the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it. I just thought the parallel was particularly insidious in the context of AI.
- yowlingcat 4y agoIf you can't intellectually critique Ted Kaczynski's philosophy (or Adolf Hitler's philosophy) without critiquing the person, then you don't really have a critique in the first place. FWIW, I think both philosophies are deeply flawed AND that the actions each individual took were horrific, but a critique of their actions is not necessary to critique their ideologies; the ideologies themselves are deeply flawed in and of themselves. To GP's point, the idea of technology evolving for its own end is thought provoking and perhaps a little scary /because/ it does have historical basis, if for no other reason than for war, the ongoing constant of historical life. I guess it's most thought provoking to me because I want deeply to believe in the enlightenment, which seems diametrically opposed to the idea of technology evolving for its own end. But it's hard to convince myself of the realism of intrinsic technoprogressivism. It seems to me that progressivism in technological development must be very deliberately crafted and diplomatically achieved through global pacts between many nations and the will of their people.
- dekhn 4y agoIt might be my imagination, but it seems like the team over there has some smart people but they happened to hit the ML lottery at the right time, really don't have a clue about business, and now they have to scramble to top what they did before. Brockman and a few of the ML researchers are definitely good at what they do. I don't see the company itself really turning into something profitable when faced with sustained competition.
- sebzim4500 4y agoWhat do you base this on exactly? At the time of the GPT-3.5 release, they didn't really have much technology-wise that every other tech company didn't have. And yet OpenAI is the only one to have released a useful product.
- dekhn 4y agoI base it on sevearl things- I worked at Google on TPUs and regularly saw google training so I would expect they likely have GPT-4 parity or better internally but can't figure out how to productize it. I was also an evaluator for Google Ventures, which meant I'd go look at all the details in a startup and decide if it made sense to invest. I've seen many companies with similar splashy hype who failed to reach orbit.
- sebzim4500 4y ago> I've seen many companies with similar splashy hype who failed to reach orbit. Really? Because I don't think I can think of a single company in the last decade that has achieved this level of hype. Maybe Tesla.
- tunesmith 4y agoIt seems like it definitely solves a problem, though, that of automatically expressing, summarizing, and refining ideas. Those are interesting problems, though, like where it doesn't seem like it's a problem at first, but then you find the solution, and then you're like... holy moly, how did I ever manage? The hidden problems.
- kevin_b_er 4y agoThe problem they're to solve is labor costs.
- bigmattystyles 4y agoWell they have them now, from regulators to critics and everyone in between.
- d--b 4y agoOpenAi is peaking though. We’ll see how not having a problem to solve and a technology that’s easily reproduced plays out in the long run.
- ianbutler 4y agoI don't know about that, we've been trying to solve natural language as an interface to computing for like 30 years or more. OpenAI is just the first case where this is so good it's viable and lo and behold it took off like fire. That is a well defined established problem that anyone paying attention said there was money in. I was trying to get seq2seq networks to take english and generate API calls all the way back in 2016.
- ecnahc515 4y agoI think their view point is that AGI "can solve any problem" so the problem they're solving for is "all of them", to which AGI is "the answer".
- dogma1138 4y agoI’m not entirely sure that AGI being able to solve any problem is a correct assumption, humans are fairly intelligent and aren’t able to solve every problem either. Some problems are likely to be too big for AGI to solve, many others would be bottlenecked by the same thing that bottlenecks human intelligence - real world evidence/experimentation. The idea that somehow the right answer is hidden in preexisting data and that a sufficiently complex algorithm would be able to find it is amusing and quit likely wrong.