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They have gone from being a niche research company to being (probably) the fastest growing start-up in history. I suspect they do care about communicating with
by Closi 3y ago
They have gone from being a niche research company to being (probably) the fastest growing start-up in history.
I suspect they do care about communicating with customers, but it's total chaos and carnage internally.
- joshstrange 3y ago> I suspect they do care about communicating with customers, but it's total chaos and carnage internally. This is my best guess as well, they are rocketing down the interstate at 200mph and just trying to keep the wheels on the car. When you're absolutely killing it I guess making X% more by being better at messaging just isn't worth it since to do that you'd have to take someone off something potentially more critical. Still makes me a little sad though.
- vdfs 3y ago> When you're absolutely killing it Aren't they unprofitable? and have fierce competition from everyone?
- dcow 3y agoWhether or not you’re profitable has very little to do with how valuable others think you are. And usually having competitors is something that validates your market.
- hef19898 3y agoThe same can be said about food delivery start ups.
- Tactician_mark 3y ago> And usually having competitors is something that validates your market. Don't users validate your market? ChatGPT has plenty of users, so I would think competitors only hurt their value.
- michaelt 3y agoWell, it depends. Clearly, you can be a company like Microsoft where nobody is challenging your dominance in PC operating systems, and you can make huge sums of money. So competitors certainly aren't vital. Or if you've cleverly sewn up a market with patents or trade secrets or a giant first-mover advantage or network effects, and nobody's got any chance of challenging your dominance in your specific market niche - again that could be highly profitable. On the other hand, if you're selling ten-dollar bills for five dollars, you might have millions of satisfied paying customers, but no competitors because nobody else thinks your unit economics make sense. Or if you run a DVD rental store, you might be profitable and have many return customers, but you might not attract competitors because they don't think DVD rental is a growth business. So some people consider a lack of competition an ominous sign.
- iudqnolq 3y ago> And usually having competitors is something that validates your market a whole bunch of AI startups were founded around the same time. surely each can't validate the market for the others and be validated by the others in turn
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThe surviving ones can. The same way that multiple species of trees, growing on the same patch of the ground, desperately competing for sunlight, together validate that the soil underneath is fertile.
- tomjen3 3y agoEven if they are unprofitable they can get VC money very easily. Plus they make 20 dollars a month from a lot of people.
- jprete 3y agoWhen dealing with a tech where people have credible reasons to believe it can be enormously harmful on every possible time scale, maybe it would behoove them to not rocket down the interstate at 200mph?
- dcow 3y agoThats not what the analogy means. 200mph refers to funding.
- tomjen3 3y agoThere is always going to be people who against any new technology and who makes up reasons to be against it. The best defence is to move so quickly that you are an established part of the business framework by the time these forces can gather, or to go so slowly that nobody takes you as a threat. No startup can go slowly.
- isx726552 3y agoIn other words, make your money and ride off into the sunset before anyone can catch on to how much damage you’re doing to society. Otherwise known as the AirBnB playbook.
- tomjen3 3y agoNo, successfully navigate past this version of Covid vacine deniers, 5g conspiracists etc. In ten years we will enjoy a higher productivity due to AI and a richer society as a result. We have already seen it with protein folding which AI is amazing at[0]. The only reasonable fear of AI is for some jobs and that China gets their first. [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02083-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02083-2
- ilaksh 3y agoMaybe there is a state somewhere between "total chaos and carnage" and "emails users when new features are enabled for their account". Such as "decided it wasn't an operational priority to email users when features were enabled for them".
- londons_explore 3y agoEmailing users when a new feature is enabled for their account isn't even the kind of thing that would distract an existing very busy developer. You could literally hire an entirely new guy, give him instructions to build such an email system, and let him put the right triggers on the user account permissions database to send out the right emails at the right time. And then, when it's built, you can start adding more features like sending the emails only when demand is low and/or at times of day when you get the best click through rate. And then next you can start measuring the increase in revenue from sending those emails. Before long, you have a whole marketing and comms team. Which you probably want as a big company anyway.
- mattkrause 3y agoHeck, dogfood your own product and hire someone to ask ChatGTP to do it!
- hombre_fatal 3y agoThe peanut gallery could (and does) say this about 1000 little features that 1000 different people claim to be so necessary that OpenAI is incompetent for not having, yet none of those people agree that those other features are priorities.
- ZiiS 3y agoThey could hire 1000 new developers a month and still be understaffed vs any company in history with thier valuation.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
- jimbokun 3y ago> fastest growing start-up in history. What are some metrics that justify this claim?
- LeonM 3y agoThey have been the fastest company ever to go from 0 to 100 million users. [0] They are also on pace to exceed $1B in revenue. [1] [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-faste... [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-passes-1-billion-revenue-pace-as-big-companies-boost-ai-spending https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-passes-1-bill...
- blibble 3y agoboth of those are either estimated or anonymous sources not credible
- Closi 3y agoWell they are a private company so you are going to have to evaluate it on that basis, but reuters is generally considered credible.
- blibble 3y ago> Well they are a private company so you are going to have to evaluate it on that basis, but reuters is generally considered credible. well that would be good if Reuters were the source of the figure but they're not, they're simply reporting on what SimilarWeb has estimated https://www.similarweb.com/website/chatgpt.com/#technologies https://www.similarweb.com/website/chatgpt.com/#technologies and that estimate is essentially based on nothing
- itsoktocry 3y agoAre either of those things indicative of "fastest growth ever"? Maybe 100 million users, but we live in a world where it's hard to know how meaningful that is (ie Tucker's X videos getting 300 million views).
- nwoli 3y agoAt what point to you go from startup to not when you have 10 billion invested and countless employees and is practically a sub branch of microsoft. Sounds cooler though I guess
- sebzim4500 3y agoI think you stop being a startup when there are engineers who do not know the CEO. I would guess OpenAI is still a startup by that definition (they don't have that many engineers IIRC) but I don't actually know.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThat's really a function of what kind of CEO the company has, and what do you mean by "know". I worked remotely for a company employing hundreds of people, around for couple decades and with offices in different regions of the world, and I still got to talk to the CEO a couple times, and he knows me by name, all by virtue of bumping into him a couple times on corridor while on one of my infrequent visits to the office.
- imacomputertoo 3y agoI'm not sure when a company begins to not be a start up, but by the time they have a wave of news claiming their product kills teenagers, or they're engaging in antitrust, or they're effectively using space labor, that's when they are definitely no longer a start up. That hasn't happened yet for OpenAI, but I'm sure it will happen eventually, and then we'll know.
- skeeter2020 3y agoConsidering the field and progress that is being made I find this idea terrifying. All the big problems like "How will we actually control what we're building?" being answered "that's too hard; let's punt and solve that after we figure out how to consume voice data". One way or another this is likely the last technological advance that humans will make.
- kranke155 3y agoThe last technological advance that humans will make? What gives you that impression
- ZiiS 3y ago_if_ it is better at making advances then us then everything in human nature points to us letting it make all future advances.
- kranke155 3y agoIm not sure. I suspect it might be better at some advances but not necessarily better at everything.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoAs long as it's better at some of the advances that would make it even better at those advances, or better at more advances, then it'll quickly become better than us in approximately everything, and at that point humans become NPCs of their own story.
- kranke155 3y agoIs that how apes feel? You think apes look at us and feel like NPCs? My perception is apes still feel like the main character, each and every one of them.
- ben_w 3y ago
- kaliqt 3y agoYeah but to be honest, I'd wonder how such a simple thing falls to the wayside.
- Lutger 3y agoThis happens when there are thousands other simple things and a lot of complicated things. When your devs are stretched, you sort by priority and I can tell you this is not that important.
- RivieraKid 3y agoI think their main goal is to be perceived as the most advanced AI company. Why? Because that's how you get the best people working for you. The main determinant of success for companies like OpenAI is people.
- wongarsu 3y agoBut this issue far predates their current success. GPT2 was held back for a while. GPT3 launched as "waitlist only" with an application process, and so did GPT3.5. This is a large part of what held them back: GPT3.5 had most of the capabilities of the initial ChatGPT release, just with a different interface. Yet GPT3.5 failed to get any hype because the rollout was glacial. They made some claims that it was great, but to verify this for yourself you had to wait months. Only when they finally made a product that everyone could try out at the same time, with minimal hassle, did OpenAI turn from a "niche research company" to the fastest growing start-up. And this seems to have been a one-time thing, now they are back to staggered releases.
- pixl97 3y agoTurns out that getting enough compute power to meet demand for AI is hard.
- MillionOClock 3y ago> GPT3.5 had most of the capabilities of the initial ChatGPT release, just with a different interface I believe two other factors were the cost (especially of fine tuned models, IIRC fine tuned davinci cost $0.20 per thousand tokens) and also that OpenAI hadn't very clearly shown just how much higher the quality could get once RLHF'd. I remember asking davinci-instruct to parse some data, and the reliability really seemed much lower than ChatGPT at launch, to the point that, at the time, I thought GPT-4 was secretly powering ChatGPT.
- Hoasi 3y agoThey could send over ChatGPTed newsletters. Marketing bullshit is one thing ChatGPT excels at.