6 ms·

A lot of people got laid off. Companies are all looking to get to profitable or break even in the next 12 months. There isnt a lot of cash flowing around for bu

A lot of people got laid off. Companies are all looking to get to profitable or break even in the next 12 months. There isnt a lot of cash flowing around for business to borrow for survival or growth. Then there is the AI hype. You see someone like rabbit selling a lot and getting more money... and that's turning into another Jucero. And that makes OpenAI look a LOT like Theranos... all hype and no substance. I have a pretty solid argument that this is likely the case. Lets go back to GPT 3... Sam in front of congress, where all talking about the singularity. The deal with M$. That MS deal had ONE interesting bargain in it. They could have everything till OpenAI got to AGI. Thats a pretty drastic bet to make. And here we are, after board fiasco, where any one who might have said the word safety 12 months ago has quit. It's the google engineer who thought their efforts were AGI, it's the MS paper saying hints of AGI. I think everyone at open AI got high on their own supply. I think they had an idea that if they just fed it enough info, if they gave it EVERYTHING that some how real AGI, or sentience or sapience would emerge. Candidly from where they sat it probably looked pretty close, and it's hard not to have rose colored glasses. More so with Sam as the hype man on TV. The problem is that it completely ignores the history of every AI effort that has gone on since the 50's ... where they think they are close and then reality swiftly kicks the project in the balls. It's not like this very thing hasn't happened every time before. Us getting close to AGI is like fusion being 10 years or 25 years away, always... you wont ever get there if you keep covering half the distance to the goal. Meanwhile google, FB, M$ cut staff and bought hardware on this bet. The thing is no one has ANYTHING good to show for it. And for as much promise as it has, I haven't seen a "reduces hallucinations" paper, or one that has an inkling of how to make the systems more honest. My bet, that there are a bunch of engineers out there working on cool shit. They are bootstrapping because they dont need VC's any more. There isnt a massive investment upfront in "infrastructure" and most of them are skilled enough to tie scale to revenue and do it so there is margin. I suspect that you won't get another google or FB out of this one... you're going to get 1000 companies that do 5-10 million a year with sub 10 total staff.

AbstractH24 2y ago
The difference between Theranos and OpenAI is the later has created a product which, while imperfect, does something. While conversational AI is nowhere near as good as people are made to think, there are two places where it has really shown itself to be good: 1. Writing the first draft of things. Be it code or a email. 2. Turning unstructured data into structured data By and large, those use cases aren’t very sexy, but the have the potential to accelerate the speed at which many things are done. And with less manpower. Talking this through with you, I’m starting to think that two things are going to happen: 1. A significant number of people who are or will be laid off in an effort to reach profitability are going to either found new companies or take senior roles on newly founded ones. 2. A mild recession will occur for some reason (be it layoffs, consumer debt, political unrest, a long tail event, etc). That’ll finally lead the fed to lower interest rates, which in turn starts the process of a true VC driven boom cycle. Reinforces my suspicion that we are very early on in a super-cycle.
- talldayo 2y ago
  Well, I admire your optimism. Here's a short story about Datadog: Datadog sold what startups wanted. You want an observability platform, they would sell it to you piece-by-piece. This was great to the higher-ups; in an era when data science and dashboards were all the craze, every startup you went to had a monthly Datadog bill in the thousands. They were hooked. Then the economy went to shit, and you know what everyone realized? Datadog was useless. They were taking our money hand-over-fist to give us features that didn't matter and detracted from developer funding. When the higher-ups decided to stop trend-chasing, they made the call to drop Datadog and usually replace it with something else (some lumbering Prometheus stack). The moral of the story isn't that you can see a need and fill a need; the moral is that people will abandon half-measure solutions. OpenAI isn't filling a need, they aren't directly addressing a problem people have been demanding a solution for. They're selling a trend that you can join-in on for a per-call fee from their API. Much like Datadog, one day startups will start removing ChatGPT to replace it with local LLMs, and then probably remove LLMs altogether later down the line. Mark my words, the most successful businesses that come out of the next 10 years will barely even mention AI as a footnote in their product description.
  - zer00eyz 2y ago
    Your right about local, but I think your gonna have some LLM around for a long time to come. Video games having rich NPC dialog (so many memes are gonna come from this). An agent that can have some sense of prioritizing email/text/chat to alert you. Someone to proof your emails. DOCUMENTATION has been the bane of every dev's existence, LLM's are useful here. LLM's aren't fire, they arent steel. I suspect that they are going to fit into our lives much the same way "maps on cell phones" did, and just make a lot of stuff smoother.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      We'll see. I'm not quite so optimistic; when you pitch these ideas individually, AI storytelling, AI email generation, AI-generated documentation, they sound scary. I like human storytelling, I like human prose, I like reading carefully-designed documentation. I don't think AI will be generating exemplary content for a while, and given the pace of things I see no reason for that to change; it's just too unpredictable to rely on. I think LLMs will be the robocalling of the 2020s. You'll stand in the self-checkout at the pharmacy, waiting 5 seconds for an LLM to generate a unique, awkwardly-worded way of asking you to clear the bagging area. This is what we're damned to, not necessarily because AI is bad but because executives don't know what to use it for.
scrollaway 2y ago
Calling OpenAI "no substance" and comparing it to Theranos is... baffling, to say the least. Overhyped? Sure. Compare them to TSLA at least. But they quite literally changed the world by mainstreaming a single tool, and got entire continents suddenly making a sector a priority by sheer existence. Very few companies can claim this - NONE other than OpenAI can claim it in such a short lifetime.
- AbstractH24 2y ago
  Tesla is a great comparison
rubenvanwyk 2y ago
Personally, I think a future with a 1000 smaller but profitable bootstrapped companies are way better. Hopefully tech can become less centralised, truly.
- AbstractH24 2y ago
  I think this is the future also. But makes me think about how things like social media were supposed to lead to various positive outcomes that they certainly haven't.

AbstractH24 2y ago

The difference between Theranos and OpenAI is the later has created a product which, while imperfect, does something. While conversational AI is nowhere near as good as people are made to think, there are two places where it has really shown itself to be good: 1. Writing the first draft of things. Be it code or a email. 2. Turning unstructured data into structured data By and large, those use cases aren’t very sexy, but the have the potential to accelerate the speed at which many things are done. And with less manpower. Talking this through with you, I’m starting to think that two things are going to happen: 1. A significant number of people who are or will be laid off in an effort to reach profitability are going to either found new companies or take senior roles on newly founded ones. 2. A mild recession will occur for some reason (be it layoffs, consumer debt, political unrest, a long tail event, etc). That’ll finally lead the fed to lower interest rates, which in turn starts the process of a true VC driven boom cycle. Reinforces my suspicion that we are very early on in a super-cycle.

talldayo 2y ago
Well, I admire your optimism. Here's a short story about Datadog: Datadog sold what startups wanted. You want an observability platform, they would sell it to you piece-by-piece. This was great to the higher-ups; in an era when data science and dashboards were all the craze, every startup you went to had a monthly Datadog bill in the thousands. They were hooked. Then the economy went to shit, and you know what everyone realized? Datadog was useless. They were taking our money hand-over-fist to give us features that didn't matter and detracted from developer funding. When the higher-ups decided to stop trend-chasing, they made the call to drop Datadog and usually replace it with something else (some lumbering Prometheus stack). The moral of the story isn't that you can see a need and fill a need; the moral is that people will abandon half-measure solutions. OpenAI isn't filling a need, they aren't directly addressing a problem people have been demanding a solution for. They're selling a trend that you can join-in on for a per-call fee from their API. Much like Datadog, one day startups will start removing ChatGPT to replace it with local LLMs, and then probably remove LLMs altogether later down the line. Mark my words, the most successful businesses that come out of the next 10 years will barely even mention AI as a footnote in their product description.
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  Your right about local, but I think your gonna have some LLM around for a long time to come. Video games having rich NPC dialog (so many memes are gonna come from this). An agent that can have some sense of prioritizing email/text/chat to alert you. Someone to proof your emails. DOCUMENTATION has been the bane of every dev's existence, LLM's are useful here. LLM's aren't fire, they arent steel. I suspect that they are going to fit into our lives much the same way "maps on cell phones" did, and just make a lot of stuff smoother.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    We'll see. I'm not quite so optimistic; when you pitch these ideas individually, AI storytelling, AI email generation, AI-generated documentation, they sound scary. I like human storytelling, I like human prose, I like reading carefully-designed documentation. I don't think AI will be generating exemplary content for a while, and given the pace of things I see no reason for that to change; it's just too unpredictable to rely on. I think LLMs will be the robocalling of the 2020s. You'll stand in the self-checkout at the pharmacy, waiting 5 seconds for an LLM to generate a unique, awkwardly-worded way of asking you to clear the bagging area. This is what we're damned to, not necessarily because AI is bad but because executives don't know what to use it for.

scrollaway 2y ago

Calling OpenAI "no substance" and comparing it to Theranos is... baffling, to say the least. Overhyped? Sure. Compare them to TSLA at least. But they quite literally changed the world by mainstreaming a single tool, and got entire continents suddenly making a sector a priority by sheer existence. Very few companies can claim this - NONE other than OpenAI can claim it in such a short lifetime.

AbstractH24 2y ago
Tesla is a great comparison

rubenvanwyk 2y ago

Personally, I think a future with a 1000 smaller but profitable bootstrapped companies are way better. Hopefully tech can become less centralised, truly.

AbstractH24 2y ago
I think this is the future also. But makes me think about how things like social media were supposed to lead to various positive outcomes that they certainly haven't.