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To recap OpenAI's decisions over the past year: * They burned up the hype for GPT-5 on 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can'

To recap OpenAI's decisions over the past year: * They burned up the hype for GPT-5 on 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate. * They dissolved the safety team. * They switched to for profit and are poised to give Altman equity. * All while hyping AGI more than ever. All of this suggests to me that Altman is in short-term exit preparation mode, not planning for AGI or even GPT-5. If he had another next generation model on the way he wouldn't have let the media call his "discount GPT-4" and "tree of thought" models GPT-5. If he sincerely thought AGI was on the horizon he wouldn't be eyeing the exit, and he likely wouldn't have gotten rid of the superalignment team. His actions are best explained as those of a startup CEO who sees the hype cycle he's been riding coming to an end and is looking to exit before we hit the trough of disillusionment. None of this is to say that AI hasn't already changed a lot about the world we live in and won't continue to change things more. We will eventually hit the slope of enlightenment, but my bet is that Altman will have exited by then.

Analemma_ 2y ago
Yeah, everything from OpenAI in the last year suggests they have nothing left up their sleeve, they know the competition is going to catch up very soon, and they're trying to cash out as fast as possible before the market notices. (In the Gell-Mann amnesia sense, make sure you take careful note of who was going "OAI has AGI internally!!!" and other such nonsense so you can not pay them any mind in the future)
- deleted 2y ago
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lrg10aa 2y ago
It does look like an exit. Employees were given the chance to cash in some of their shares at $86 billion valuation. Altman is getting shares. New "investors" are Microsoft and Nvidia. Nvidia will get the money back as revenue and fuel the hype for other customers. Microsoft will probably pay in Azure credits. If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably means bankruptcy. But at that stage all parties have already got what they wanted.
- jameslk 2y ago
  > If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably means bankruptcy. I don’t believe this is accurate. I think this is what you’re referring to?: Under the terms of the new investment round, OpenAI has two years to transform into a for-profit business or its funding will convert into debt, according to documents reviewed by The Times. That just means investors want the business to be converted from a nonprofit entity into a regular for-profit entity. Not that they need to make a profit in 2 years, which is not typically an expectation for a company still trying to grow and capture market share. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/openai-valuation-150-billion.html?unlocked_article_code=1.PE4.zFlk.U9zKlbwKU6dO&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/openai-valuati...
- agentcoops 2y ago
  I think for anyone who has been intimately involved with this last generation of "unicorns", it really does not look like an "exit" if that means bankruptcy, end of the company, betrayal of goals, or what have you: for a high-growth startup of approximately ten years, finding liquidity for employees is perhaps counter-intuitively a sign of deep maturity and that the company is concerned for the long haul (and that investors/the market believe this is likely). At about the ten year mark, there has to be a changing of the guards from the foot soldiers who give their all that an unlikely institution could come to exist in the world at scale to people concerned more with stabilizing that institution and ensuring its continuity. In almost every company that has reached such scale in the last decade, this has often meant a transition from an executive team formed of early employees to a more senior C-team from elsewhere with a different skillset. In a world context where the largest companies are more likely to stay private than IPO, it's a profoundly important move to allow some liquidity for longterm employees, who otherwise might be forced to stay working at the company long past physical burnout.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    > In a world context where the largest companies are more likely to stay private than IPO Which world is this?
Mistletoe 2y ago
For people that don't get the references, this graph is so helpful for understanding the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle It just keeps happening over and over. I'd say we are at "Negative press begins".
- deleted 2y ago
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__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I don't really follow Altman's behavior much, but just in general: > If he sincerely thought AGI was on the horizon he wouldn't be eyeing the exit If such a thing could exist and was right around the corner, why would you need a company for it? Couldn't the AGI manage itself better than you could? Job's done, time to get a different hobby.
- lolinder 2y ago
  If such a thing was right around the corner, the person who controlled it would be the only person left who had any kind of control over their own future. Why would you sell that?
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I'm not a believer in general intelligence myself, all we have are a small pile of specific intelligences. But if it does exists then it would be godlike to us. I can't guess at the motivations of somebody who would want to bootstrap a god, but I doubt that Altman is so strapped for cash that his primary motivator is coming up with something to sell.
- azinman2 2y ago
  Let’s say you got AGI, and it approximated a not so bright impulsive 12 year old boy. That would be an insane technological leap, but hardly one you’d want running the show. AGI doesn’t mean smarter than the best humans.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    For an intelligence to be "General" there would have to be no type of intelligence that it did not have access to (even if its capabilities in that domain were limited). The idea that that's what humans have strikes me as the same kind of thinking that led us to believe that earth was in the center of the universe. Surely there are ways of thinking that we have no concept of. General intelligence would be like an impulsive 12 year old boy who could see 6 spatial dimensions and regarded us as cartoons for only sticking to 3.
m3kw9 2y ago
Dissolve the safety team. You just made everyone stop reading the rest of your post by falsely claiming that
- whamlastxmas 2y ago
  I don’t even know how this fake news started
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Maybe the fact that they actually did dissolve the safety team formerly led by Ilya Sutskever in the aftermath of Altman's coup [0]? I'm genuinely unsure what part of this you're questioning. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-17/openai-dissolves-key-safety-team-after-chief-scientist-ilya-sutskever-s-exit https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-17/openai-di...
    - whamlastxmas 2y ago
      Like literally the third sentence makes it clear it was restructuring team dynamics but not eliminating safety goals or even losing the employees that are safety focused. There are many safety focused people at OpenAI and they never fired or laid off people in a safety team which is what people infer from “dissolve the safety team” when it’s used as a bullet point of criticism
      - lolinder 2y ago
        It's pretty obvious to most of us that "integrating the group more deeply across its research efforts to help the company achieve its safety goals" is the corporate spin for what was actually "disperse the group that thought its job was to keep Altman himself accountable to safety goals and replace them with a group that Altman personally leads". Eliminating Ilya's team was part of the post-coup restructuring to consolidate Altman's power, and every tribute to "safety" paid since then is spin.
      - richk449 2y ago
karmakaze 2y ago
Let's go with the no next gen models, then we'd be looking at an operationalized service. I might be up for paying $20/month for one. Certainly more value than I get from Netflix. All I would want from the service is a simple low-friction UI and continued improvements to keep up with or surpass competitors. They could manage that. The long-term problem may be access to quality/human-created training data. Especially if the ones that control that data have AI plans of their own. Even then I could see OpenAI providing service to many of them rather than each of them creating their own models.
- from-nibly 2y ago
  I doubt $20 a month is going to cover it. How much would you.pay before you weren't getting a good deal?
  - titanomachy 2y ago
    If we’re talking about inference costs alone (minimal new training) I think it would cover it. I started doing usage-based pricing through openrouter instead of paying monthly subscriptions, and my modest LLM use costs me about $3/month. Unless you think that the API rates are also priced below cost.
    - mikeocool 2y ago
      According the New York Times [1], OpenAI told investors that they're costs are increasing as more people use their product, and they are planning to increase the cost of ChatGPT from $20 to $44 over the next five years. That certainly suggests that they're selling inference at a loss right now. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt-investors-funding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt...
      - karmakaze 2y ago
        My bigger concern isn't the financial cost, it's that the amount represents a degree of energy expenditure. A flat rate might not be advisable and having usage-based pricing may limit energy waste. OTOH I don't know how much energy some of the other recurring things I consume monthly are either. Maybe we can have a service that's an LLM with shared/cached responses as well as training on its own questions/answers for the easy stuff. Currently my usage is largely as a better search engine as google has gotten so much worse than it ever was, though I imagine I'll find custom things it's useful for as well.
ForOldHack 2y ago
Every single word he says Public is his product.
- BryanLegend 2y ago
  And he doesn't even use the shift key!
  - slashdave 2y ago
    Actually, his blog is correctly capitalized. Although, you would think he could hire a proper editor, since the em-dashes are not formatted correctly. Baby steps.
getpost 2y ago
I don't know anything, but isn't Sam already rich? And, if OpenAI is in a position to capture profits in an expanding AI industry, isn't this the best possible time to lock-in equity for long term gains and trillionaireship? For many people, sadly, one can never be rich enough. My point is, planning for both short term exit, and long term gains, is essentially the same in this particular situation. What a boon! Nice problem to have!
- mirekrusin 2y ago
  For some people the question "how much?" has only one answer – "more."
  - michaelcampbell 2y ago
    And this seems to be mostly positive feedback.
- gizmo 2y ago
  Sam was already a billionaire years ago. He is one of SV most prolific investors, with equity in hundreds of startups. He writes big checks as well from time to time, Helion for instance he gave 375 million.
  - GolfPopper 2y ago
    To be clear, Altman invested $375 million in Helion Energy's 2021 funding round. Helion Energy a for-profit fusion energy company of which he is the chairman.
    - baking 2y ago
      He is the Executive Chairman at Helion, which means he keeps a tight grip on that particular purse string.
  - danga 2y ago
    He also got weird facial plastic surgery and looks like a wanted mobster now.
wslh 2y ago
I see it differently. ChatGPT holds a unique position because it has the most important asset in tech: user attention. Building a brand and capturing a significant share of eyeballs is one of the hardest challenges for any company, startup or not. From a business standpoint, the discussion around GPT-5 or AGI seems secondary. What truly matters is the growing number of users paying for ChatGPT, with potential for monetization through ads or other services in the future.
- semi-extrinsic 2y ago
  > What truly matters is the growing number of users paying for ChatGPT, with potential for monetization through ads or other services in the future. If the end goal is monetization of ChatGPT with ads, it will be enshittified to the same degree as Google searches. If you get to that, what is the benefit of using ChatGPT if it just gives you the same ads and bullshit as Google?
  - wslh 2y ago
    I mentioned ads as just one potential avenue for monetization. My main point is that OpenAI's current market position and strong brand awareness are the real differentiators. They're in a unique spot where they have the user's attention, which offers a range of monetization options beyond just ads. The challenge for them will be to balance monetization with maintaining the user experience that made them successful in the first place. Also, don't forget the recent Apple partnership [1], a very strong signal of their strategic positioning. Aligning with Apple reinforces their credibility and opens up even more opportunities for innovation and expansion, beyond just monetizing through ads. I just searched through this thread, and it seems the Apple partnership isn't being recognized as a significant achievement under Sam Altman's tenure as CEO, which is surprising given its importance. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40328927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40328927
- deepfriedchokes 2y ago
  The internet has destroyed the value of user attention and brands; everyone has the attention span of a gnat and the loyalty of an addict. They will very quickly move on to the next shiny thing.
wildermuthn 2y ago
The only reason Sam would leave OpenAI is if he thought AGI could only be achieved elsewhere, or that AGI was impossible without some other breakthrough in another industry (energy, hardware, etc). High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention — the holy grail of technology. Nothing could be more ambitious, and if we know anything about Altman, it is that his ambition has no ceiling. Having said all of that, OpenAI appears to be all in on brute-force AGI and swallowing the bitter lesson that vast and efficient compute is all you need. But they’ve overlooking a massive dataset that all known biological intelligences rely upon: qualia. By definition, qualia exist only within conscious minds. Until we train models on qualia, we’ll be stuck with LLMs that are philosophical zombies — incapable of understanding our world — a world that consists only of qualia. Building software capable of utilizing qualia requires us to put aside the hard problem of consciousness in favor of mechanical/deterministic theories of consciousness like Attention-Schema Theory (AST). Sure, we don’t understand qualia. We might never understand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t replicate.
- talldayo 2y ago
  > High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention Citation? ...or are you just assuming that AGI will be able to solve all of our problems, appropos of nothing but Sam Altman's word? I haven't seen a single credible study suggest that AGI is anything more than a marketing term for vaporware.
  - mrmetanoia 2y ago
    Their marketing hyperbole has cheapened much of the language around AI, so naturally it excites someone who writes like the disciple of the techno-prophets " High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention" What? I could certainly see all kinds of entertaining arguments for this, but to write it so matter of fact was cringe inducing.
    - wildermuthn 2y ago
      It’s true by definition. If we invent a better-than-all-humans inventor, then human invention will give way. It’s a fairly simple idea, and not one I made up.
bitshiftfaced 2y ago
> All while hyping AGI more than ever. Maybe not, since Altman pretty much said they no longer want to think it terms of "how close to AGI?". Iirc, he said they're moving away from that and instead want to move towards describing the process as hitting new specific capabilities incrementally.
bitcharmer 2y ago
It's funny and somehow disappointing how a year ago HN jerked off to Altman and down-voted any critical opinions of him. Just shows no social platform is free of strong group-think and mass hysteria.
- kevinventullo 2y ago
  It’s almost like people changed their opinions based on observed behaviors.
hintymad 2y ago
> They dissolved the safety team. I still don't get the safety team. Yes, I understand the need for a business to moderate the content they provide and rightly so. But elevating the safety to the level of the survival of humanity over a generative model, I'm not so sure. And even for so-called preventing harmful content, how can an LLM be more dangerous than the access of the books like The Anarchist Cookbook, the pamphlets on how to conduct guerrilla warfare, the training materials of how to do terrorisms, and etc? They are easily accessible on the internet, no?
- lolinder 2y ago
  Having a dedicated safety team (or as they called it "superalignment") makes sense if and only if you believe that your company is pursuing an actual sci-fi style artificial superintelligence that could put humanity itself at risk [0]: > Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. > How do we ensure AI systems much smarter than humans follow human intent? This is a question that naturally arises if you are pursuing something that's superhuman, and a question that's pointless if you believe you're likely to get a really nice algorithm for solving certain kinds of problems that were hard to solve before. Getting rid of the superalignment team showed which version Altman believes is likely. [0] https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/
  - arlcode 2y ago
    And importantly it's also a question that would need an answer if the alignment should be with "individual groups" rather than "humanity". It won't do Sam Altman and friends any good if they are the richest corpses after an unaligned AI goes rogue. So it would be in their were egoistical self interest to make sure it doesn't.
stainablesteel 2y ago
i disagree that it looks like an exit, i think altman is here for the long haul. he's got a great platform and a lot of AI competitors are also preparing for the long term. no one cares about who has the best model for the next year or two, they care who has it for the next 20.
gojomo 2y ago
I think you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality here. Altman's actions are even more consistent with total confidence & dedication to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever. Plus, a desire to retain more personal control over that outcome – & not just conventional wealth! – than was typical with prior breakthroughs.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality I'm a software engineer comfortably drawing a decent-but-not-FAANG paycheck at an established company with every intention of taking the slow-and-steady path to retirement. I'm not projecting, I promise. > to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever Except that OpenAI isn't a faraway leader. Their big news this week was them finally making an effort to catch up to Anthropic's Artifacts. Their best models do only marginally better in the LLM Arena than Claude, Gemini, and even the freely-released Llama 3.1 405B! Part of why I believe Altman is looking to cash out is that I think he's smart enough to recognize that he has no moat and a very small lead. His efforts to get governments to pull up the ladder have largely failed, so the next logical choice is to exit at peak valuation rather than waiting for investors to recognize that OpenAI is increasingly just one in a crowd. [0] https://lmarena.ai/ https://lmarena.ai/
  - hanspeter 2y ago
    Even if you were right in his intentions, can you outline the scenario where Sam is able to make an exit? I don't see how it could happen at current valuation. Who would want to pay $150 bil. for an OpenAI, where Sam is no longer part of it?
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > where Sam is no longer part of it? It can be an "exit" in that it makes Sam extremely wealthy while he still hangs on as CEO.
QuantumGood 2y ago
His recent statement that AGI may "only be a few thousand days away" is clearly an attempt to find a less quotable way of extending estimates while barely reducing hype. History generally shows that estimates of "more than five years away" are meaningless.
- renegade-otter 2y ago
  4000 days is just a few thousand days, but it's [checks notes] over 10 years away.
  - QuantumGood 2y ago
    He knows as well as anyone about the 5 year hueristic (length too long to be meaningful), so he's trying to say "over 5 years", but still hold onto the sense of "meaningful estimate". My sense about Sam is that he trusts his PR instinct to be usefully manipulative enough that he doesn't think he has to plan it carefully in order for his statements to be maximally opaquely manipulative. (He speaks cleverly and manipulatively without a lot of effort.)
- CurrentB 2y ago
  "a few thousand days away" feels like such a duplicitous way to phrase something when "a few years" would be more natural to everyone on the planet. It just seems intentionally manipulative and not even trying to hide it. I've never been an anti-ceo type person but something about Altman sketches me out
falcor84 2y ago
> ... 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate. Where did that assertion come from? Has anyone come close to replicating either of these yet (other than possibly Google, who hasn't fully released their thing yet either), let alone "quickly"? I wouldn't be surprised if it's these "sideways" architectural changes actually give OpenAI a deeper moat than just working on larger models.
- dcre 2y ago
  Claude 3.5 Sonnet is at least as good as 4o.
  - stavros 2y ago
    Much better than 4o, in my experience. I've stopped using 4o almost completely, except for cases where I need good tooling more than I need good performance (PoCs and the like).
    - disiplus 2y ago
      it's better at coding for me, and it looks like because it was trained on more data. i have this problem with a library that i use, and it was trained on python2 version but python3 version is completely different. Python3 versions is relatively new, but out from at leaset 2020 and you would mostly find examples with Python2 version if you googled. They both produce garbage code in this solution. Claude versions is just 20% less garbage, but still useless. The code mixes those two, even if i specify i want the python3 version or directly specifying a version.
  - falcor84 2y ago
    Oh, sorry I wasn't clear, I was referring to the advanced (speech-to-speech) voice mode, which for me is the highlight of this "omni" thing, rather than to the "strength" of the model.
    - dcre 2y ago
pj_mukh 2y ago
Except the article makes none of these points. The article is saying: a) "the technology is overhyped", based on some meaningless subjective criteria, if you think a technology is overhyped, don't invest your money or time in it. No one's forcing you. b) "child abuse problems are more important", with a link to an article that clearly specifies that the child abuse problems have nothing to do with OpenAI. c) "it uses too much energy and water". OpenAI is paying fair market price for that energy and what's more the infrastructure companies are using those profits to start making massive investments in alternative energy [1]. So if everything about this AI boom fails what we'll be left with is a massive amount of abundant renewable energy (the horror!) Probably the laziest conjecture I have endured from The Atlantic. [1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/artificial-intelligence-power-alternative-energy-1.7343074 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/artificial-intelligen...
- baking 2y ago
  >So if everything about this AI boom fails what we'll be left with is a massive amount of abundant renewable energy Except that someone has to pay for it. AI companies are only willing to pay for power purchase agreements, not capital expenses. Same with the $7T of chip fab. Invest your money in huge capital expenditures and our investors will pay you for it on an annual basis until they get tired of losing money.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Power purchase agreements are what renewables developers use to obtain financing for construction. The contract is collateral. Worst case, the developer might need to be prepared to find a substitute offtaker for the power if a PPA with a gen AI offtaker goes bust (if brought up by whomever is underwriting the financing, if there are debt covenants, etc). I absolutely support AI companies signing as many PPAs for low carbon energy even if they implode in the future. The PV panels, wind turbines, and potentially stationary storage will already be deployed at that point. https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/financing-navigator/option/power-purchase-agreement https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/financing-n...
throwoutway 2y ago
Don't forget the board coup, the coup-reversal, complete takeover, then co-founders leaving, and Mira leaving
- lolinder 2y ago
  Yes, all of that definitely plays into the sense that not all is well at OpenAI. Slight nit: a board can't start a coup because a coup is an illegitimate attempt to take power and the board's main job is to oversee the CEO and replace them if necessary. That's an expected exercise of power. The coup was when the CEO reversed the board's decision to oust him and then ousted them.
  - throwoutway 2y ago
    Yes thats a better way to say it

Analemma_ 2y ago

Yeah, everything from OpenAI in the last year suggests they have nothing left up their sleeve, they know the competition is going to catch up very soon, and they're trying to cash out as fast as possible before the market notices. (In the Gell-Mann amnesia sense, make sure you take careful note of who was going "OAI has AGI internally!!!" and other such nonsense so you can not pay them any mind in the future)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

lrg10aa 2y ago

It does look like an exit. Employees were given the chance to cash in some of their shares at $86 billion valuation. Altman is getting shares. New "investors" are Microsoft and Nvidia. Nvidia will get the money back as revenue and fuel the hype for other customers. Microsoft will probably pay in Azure credits. If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably means bankruptcy. But at that stage all parties have already got what they wanted.

jameslk 2y ago
> If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably means bankruptcy. I don’t believe this is accurate. I think this is what you’re referring to?: Under the terms of the new investment round, OpenAI has two years to transform into a for-profit business or its funding will convert into debt, according to documents reviewed by The Times. That just means investors want the business to be converted from a nonprofit entity into a regular for-profit entity. Not that they need to make a profit in 2 years, which is not typically an expectation for a company still trying to grow and capture market share. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/openai-valuation-150-billion.html?unlocked_article_code=1.PE4.zFlk.U9zKlbwKU6dO&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/openai-valuati...
agentcoops 2y ago
I think for anyone who has been intimately involved with this last generation of "unicorns", it really does not look like an "exit" if that means bankruptcy, end of the company, betrayal of goals, or what have you: for a high-growth startup of approximately ten years, finding liquidity for employees is perhaps counter-intuitively a sign of deep maturity and that the company is concerned for the long haul (and that investors/the market believe this is likely). At about the ten year mark, there has to be a changing of the guards from the foot soldiers who give their all that an unlikely institution could come to exist in the world at scale to people concerned more with stabilizing that institution and ensuring its continuity. In almost every company that has reached such scale in the last decade, this has often meant a transition from an executive team formed of early employees to a more senior C-team from elsewhere with a different skillset. In a world context where the largest companies are more likely to stay private than IPO, it's a profoundly important move to allow some liquidity for longterm employees, who otherwise might be forced to stay working at the company long past physical burnout.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > In a world context where the largest companies are more likely to stay private than IPO Which world is this?

Mistletoe 2y ago

For people that don't get the references, this graph is so helpful for understanding the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle It just keeps happening over and over. I'd say we are at "Negative press begins".

deleted 2y ago
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__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

I don't really follow Altman's behavior much, but just in general: > If he sincerely thought AGI was on the horizon he wouldn't be eyeing the exit If such a thing could exist and was right around the corner, why would you need a company for it? Couldn't the AGI manage itself better than you could? Job's done, time to get a different hobby.

lolinder 2y ago
If such a thing was right around the corner, the person who controlled it would be the only person left who had any kind of control over their own future. Why would you sell that?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  I'm not a believer in general intelligence myself, all we have are a small pile of specific intelligences. But if it does exists then it would be godlike to us. I can't guess at the motivations of somebody who would want to bootstrap a god, but I doubt that Altman is so strapped for cash that his primary motivator is coming up with something to sell.
azinman2 2y ago
Let’s say you got AGI, and it approximated a not so bright impulsive 12 year old boy. That would be an insane technological leap, but hardly one you’d want running the show. AGI doesn’t mean smarter than the best humans.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  For an intelligence to be "General" there would have to be no type of intelligence that it did not have access to (even if its capabilities in that domain were limited). The idea that that's what humans have strikes me as the same kind of thinking that led us to believe that earth was in the center of the universe. Surely there are ways of thinking that we have no concept of. General intelligence would be like an impulsive 12 year old boy who could see 6 spatial dimensions and regarded us as cartoons for only sticking to 3.

m3kw9 2y ago

Dissolve the safety team. You just made everyone stop reading the rest of your post by falsely claiming that

whamlastxmas 2y ago
I don’t even know how this fake news started
- lolinder 2y ago
  Maybe the fact that they actually did dissolve the safety team formerly led by Ilya Sutskever in the aftermath of Altman's coup [0]? I'm genuinely unsure what part of this you're questioning. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-17/openai-dissolves-key-safety-team-after-chief-scientist-ilya-sutskever-s-exit https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-17/openai-di...
  - whamlastxmas 2y ago
    Like literally the third sentence makes it clear it was restructuring team dynamics but not eliminating safety goals or even losing the employees that are safety focused. There are many safety focused people at OpenAI and they never fired or laid off people in a safety team which is what people infer from “dissolve the safety team” when it’s used as a bullet point of criticism
    - lolinder 2y ago
      It's pretty obvious to most of us that "integrating the group more deeply across its research efforts to help the company achieve its safety goals" is the corporate spin for what was actually "disperse the group that thought its job was to keep Altman himself accountable to safety goals and replace them with a group that Altman personally leads". Eliminating Ilya's team was part of the post-coup restructuring to consolidate Altman's power, and every tribute to "safety" paid since then is spin.
    - richk449 2y ago

karmakaze 2y ago

Let's go with the no next gen models, then we'd be looking at an operationalized service. I might be up for paying $20/month for one. Certainly more value than I get from Netflix. All I would want from the service is a simple low-friction UI and continued improvements to keep up with or surpass competitors. They could manage that. The long-term problem may be access to quality/human-created training data. Especially if the ones that control that data have AI plans of their own. Even then I could see OpenAI providing service to many of them rather than each of them creating their own models.

from-nibly 2y ago
I doubt $20 a month is going to cover it. How much would you.pay before you weren't getting a good deal?
- titanomachy 2y ago
  If we’re talking about inference costs alone (minimal new training) I think it would cover it. I started doing usage-based pricing through openrouter instead of paying monthly subscriptions, and my modest LLM use costs me about $3/month. Unless you think that the API rates are also priced below cost.
  - mikeocool 2y ago
    According the New York Times [1], OpenAI told investors that they're costs are increasing as more people use their product, and they are planning to increase the cost of ChatGPT from $20 to $44 over the next five years. That certainly suggests that they're selling inference at a loss right now. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt-investors-funding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt...
    - karmakaze 2y ago
      My bigger concern isn't the financial cost, it's that the amount represents a degree of energy expenditure. A flat rate might not be advisable and having usage-based pricing may limit energy waste. OTOH I don't know how much energy some of the other recurring things I consume monthly are either. Maybe we can have a service that's an LLM with shared/cached responses as well as training on its own questions/answers for the easy stuff. Currently my usage is largely as a better search engine as google has gotten so much worse than it ever was, though I imagine I'll find custom things it's useful for as well.

ForOldHack 2y ago

Every single word he says Public is his product.

BryanLegend 2y ago
And he doesn't even use the shift key!
- slashdave 2y ago
  Actually, his blog is correctly capitalized. Although, you would think he could hire a proper editor, since the em-dashes are not formatted correctly. Baby steps.

getpost 2y ago

I don't know anything, but isn't Sam already rich? And, if OpenAI is in a position to capture profits in an expanding AI industry, isn't this the best possible time to lock-in equity for long term gains and trillionaireship? For many people, sadly, one can never be rich enough. My point is, planning for both short term exit, and long term gains, is essentially the same in this particular situation. What a boon! Nice problem to have!

mirekrusin 2y ago
For some people the question "how much?" has only one answer – "more."
- michaelcampbell 2y ago
  And this seems to be mostly positive feedback.
gizmo 2y ago
Sam was already a billionaire years ago. He is one of SV most prolific investors, with equity in hundreds of startups. He writes big checks as well from time to time, Helion for instance he gave 375 million.
- GolfPopper 2y ago
  To be clear, Altman invested $375 million in Helion Energy's 2021 funding round. Helion Energy a for-profit fusion energy company of which he is the chairman.
  - baking 2y ago
    He is the Executive Chairman at Helion, which means he keeps a tight grip on that particular purse string.
- danga 2y ago
  He also got weird facial plastic surgery and looks like a wanted mobster now.

wslh 2y ago

I see it differently. ChatGPT holds a unique position because it has the most important asset in tech: user attention. Building a brand and capturing a significant share of eyeballs is one of the hardest challenges for any company, startup or not. From a business standpoint, the discussion around GPT-5 or AGI seems secondary. What truly matters is the growing number of users paying for ChatGPT, with potential for monetization through ads or other services in the future.

semi-extrinsic 2y ago
> What truly matters is the growing number of users paying for ChatGPT, with potential for monetization through ads or other services in the future. If the end goal is monetization of ChatGPT with ads, it will be enshittified to the same degree as Google searches. If you get to that, what is the benefit of using ChatGPT if it just gives you the same ads and bullshit as Google?
- wslh 2y ago
  I mentioned ads as just one potential avenue for monetization. My main point is that OpenAI's current market position and strong brand awareness are the real differentiators. They're in a unique spot where they have the user's attention, which offers a range of monetization options beyond just ads. The challenge for them will be to balance monetization with maintaining the user experience that made them successful in the first place. Also, don't forget the recent Apple partnership [1], a very strong signal of their strategic positioning. Aligning with Apple reinforces their credibility and opens up even more opportunities for innovation and expansion, beyond just monetizing through ads. I just searched through this thread, and it seems the Apple partnership isn't being recognized as a significant achievement under Sam Altman's tenure as CEO, which is surprising given its importance. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40328927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40328927
deepfriedchokes 2y ago
The internet has destroyed the value of user attention and brands; everyone has the attention span of a gnat and the loyalty of an addict. They will very quickly move on to the next shiny thing.

wildermuthn 2y ago

The only reason Sam would leave OpenAI is if he thought AGI could only be achieved elsewhere, or that AGI was impossible without some other breakthrough in another industry (energy, hardware, etc). High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention — the holy grail of technology. Nothing could be more ambitious, and if we know anything about Altman, it is that his ambition has no ceiling. Having said all of that, OpenAI appears to be all in on brute-force AGI and swallowing the bitter lesson that vast and efficient compute is all you need. But they’ve overlooking a massive dataset that all known biological intelligences rely upon: qualia. By definition, qualia exist only within conscious minds. Until we train models on qualia, we’ll be stuck with LLMs that are philosophical zombies — incapable of understanding our world — a world that consists only of qualia. Building software capable of utilizing qualia requires us to put aside the hard problem of consciousness in favor of mechanical/deterministic theories of consciousness like Attention-Schema Theory (AST). Sure, we don’t understand qualia. We might never understand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t replicate.

talldayo 2y ago
> High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention Citation? ...or are you just assuming that AGI will be able to solve all of our problems, appropos of nothing but Sam Altman's word? I haven't seen a single credible study suggest that AGI is anything more than a marketing term for vaporware.
- mrmetanoia 2y ago
  Their marketing hyperbole has cheapened much of the language around AI, so naturally it excites someone who writes like the disciple of the techno-prophets " High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention" What? I could certainly see all kinds of entertaining arguments for this, but to write it so matter of fact was cringe inducing.
  - wildermuthn 2y ago
    It’s true by definition. If we invent a better-than-all-humans inventor, then human invention will give way. It’s a fairly simple idea, and not one I made up.

bitshiftfaced 2y ago

> All while hyping AGI more than ever. Maybe not, since Altman pretty much said they no longer want to think it terms of "how close to AGI?". Iirc, he said they're moving away from that and instead want to move towards describing the process as hitting new specific capabilities incrementally.

bitcharmer 2y ago

It's funny and somehow disappointing how a year ago HN jerked off to Altman and down-voted any critical opinions of him. Just shows no social platform is free of strong group-think and mass hysteria.

kevinventullo 2y ago
It’s almost like people changed their opinions based on observed behaviors.

hintymad 2y ago

> They dissolved the safety team. I still don't get the safety team. Yes, I understand the need for a business to moderate the content they provide and rightly so. But elevating the safety to the level of the survival of humanity over a generative model, I'm not so sure. And even for so-called preventing harmful content, how can an LLM be more dangerous than the access of the books like The Anarchist Cookbook, the pamphlets on how to conduct guerrilla warfare, the training materials of how to do terrorisms, and etc? They are easily accessible on the internet, no?

lolinder 2y ago
Having a dedicated safety team (or as they called it "superalignment") makes sense if and only if you believe that your company is pursuing an actual sci-fi style artificial superintelligence that could put humanity itself at risk [0]: > Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. > How do we ensure AI systems much smarter than humans follow human intent? This is a question that naturally arises if you are pursuing something that's superhuman, and a question that's pointless if you believe you're likely to get a really nice algorithm for solving certain kinds of problems that were hard to solve before. Getting rid of the superalignment team showed which version Altman believes is likely. [0] https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/
- arlcode 2y ago
  And importantly it's also a question that would need an answer if the alignment should be with "individual groups" rather than "humanity". It won't do Sam Altman and friends any good if they are the richest corpses after an unaligned AI goes rogue. So it would be in their were egoistical self interest to make sure it doesn't.

stainablesteel 2y ago

i disagree that it looks like an exit, i think altman is here for the long haul. he's got a great platform and a lot of AI competitors are also preparing for the long term. no one cares about who has the best model for the next year or two, they care who has it for the next 20.

gojomo 2y ago

I think you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality here. Altman's actions are even more consistent with total confidence & dedication to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever. Plus, a desire to retain more personal control over that outcome – & not just conventional wealth! – than was typical with prior breakthroughs.

lolinder 2y ago
> you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality I'm a software engineer comfortably drawing a decent-but-not-FAANG paycheck at an established company with every intention of taking the slow-and-steady path to retirement. I'm not projecting, I promise. > to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever Except that OpenAI isn't a faraway leader. Their big news this week was them finally making an effort to catch up to Anthropic's Artifacts. Their best models do only marginally better in the LLM Arena than Claude, Gemini, and even the freely-released Llama 3.1 405B! Part of why I believe Altman is looking to cash out is that I think he's smart enough to recognize that he has no moat and a very small lead. His efforts to get governments to pull up the ladder have largely failed, so the next logical choice is to exit at peak valuation rather than waiting for investors to recognize that OpenAI is increasingly just one in a crowd. [0] https://lmarena.ai/ https://lmarena.ai/
- hanspeter 2y ago
  Even if you were right in his intentions, can you outline the scenario where Sam is able to make an exit? I don't see how it could happen at current valuation. Who would want to pay $150 bil. for an OpenAI, where Sam is no longer part of it?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > where Sam is no longer part of it? It can be an "exit" in that it makes Sam extremely wealthy while he still hangs on as CEO.

QuantumGood 2y ago

His recent statement that AGI may "only be a few thousand days away" is clearly an attempt to find a less quotable way of extending estimates while barely reducing hype. History generally shows that estimates of "more than five years away" are meaningless.

renegade-otter 2y ago
4000 days is just a few thousand days, but it's [checks notes] over 10 years away.
- QuantumGood 2y ago
  He knows as well as anyone about the 5 year hueristic (length too long to be meaningful), so he's trying to say "over 5 years", but still hold onto the sense of "meaningful estimate". My sense about Sam is that he trusts his PR instinct to be usefully manipulative enough that he doesn't think he has to plan it carefully in order for his statements to be maximally opaquely manipulative. (He speaks cleverly and manipulatively without a lot of effort.)
CurrentB 2y ago
"a few thousand days away" feels like such a duplicitous way to phrase something when "a few years" would be more natural to everyone on the planet. It just seems intentionally manipulative and not even trying to hide it. I've never been an anti-ceo type person but something about Altman sketches me out

falcor84 2y ago

> ... 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate. Where did that assertion come from? Has anyone come close to replicating either of these yet (other than possibly Google, who hasn't fully released their thing yet either), let alone "quickly"? I wouldn't be surprised if it's these "sideways" architectural changes actually give OpenAI a deeper moat than just working on larger models.

dcre 2y ago
Claude 3.5 Sonnet is at least as good as 4o.
- stavros 2y ago
  Much better than 4o, in my experience. I've stopped using 4o almost completely, except for cases where I need good tooling more than I need good performance (PoCs and the like).
  - disiplus 2y ago
    it's better at coding for me, and it looks like because it was trained on more data. i have this problem with a library that i use, and it was trained on python2 version but python3 version is completely different. Python3 versions is relatively new, but out from at leaset 2020 and you would mostly find examples with Python2 version if you googled. They both produce garbage code in this solution. Claude versions is just 20% less garbage, but still useless. The code mixes those two, even if i specify i want the python3 version or directly specifying a version.
- falcor84 2y ago
  Oh, sorry I wasn't clear, I was referring to the advanced (speech-to-speech) voice mode, which for me is the highlight of this "omni" thing, rather than to the "strength" of the model.
  - dcre 2y ago

pj_mukh 2y ago

Except the article makes none of these points. The article is saying: a) "the technology is overhyped", based on some meaningless subjective criteria, if you think a technology is overhyped, don't invest your money or time in it. No one's forcing you. b) "child abuse problems are more important", with a link to an article that clearly specifies that the child abuse problems have nothing to do with OpenAI. c) "it uses too much energy and water". OpenAI is paying fair market price for that energy and what's more the infrastructure companies are using those profits to start making massive investments in alternative energy [1]. So if everything about this AI boom fails what we'll be left with is a massive amount of abundant renewable energy (the horror!) Probably the laziest conjecture I have endured from The Atlantic. [1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/artificial-intelligence-power-alternative-energy-1.7343074 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/artificial-intelligen...

baking 2y ago
>So if everything about this AI boom fails what we'll be left with is a massive amount of abundant renewable energy Except that someone has to pay for it. AI companies are only willing to pay for power purchase agreements, not capital expenses. Same with the $7T of chip fab. Invest your money in huge capital expenditures and our investors will pay you for it on an annual basis until they get tired of losing money.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Power purchase agreements are what renewables developers use to obtain financing for construction. The contract is collateral. Worst case, the developer might need to be prepared to find a substitute offtaker for the power if a PPA with a gen AI offtaker goes bust (if brought up by whomever is underwriting the financing, if there are debt covenants, etc). I absolutely support AI companies signing as many PPAs for low carbon energy even if they implode in the future. The PV panels, wind turbines, and potentially stationary storage will already be deployed at that point. https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/financing-navigator/option/power-purchase-agreement https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/financing-n...

throwoutway 2y ago

Don't forget the board coup, the coup-reversal, complete takeover, then co-founders leaving, and Mira leaving

lolinder 2y ago
Yes, all of that definitely plays into the sense that not all is well at OpenAI. Slight nit: a board can't start a coup because a coup is an illegitimate attempt to take power and the board's main job is to oversee the CEO and replace them if necessary. That's an expected exercise of power. The coup was when the CEO reversed the board's decision to oust him and then ousted them.
- throwoutway 2y ago
  Yes thats a better way to say it