8 ms·

This kind of news should be a death-knell for OpenAI. If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and

by lukev 2y ago

This kind of news should be a death-knell for OpenAI. If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.

pyfon 2y ago
It is a Threads. How is that doing?
celdon25 2y ago
> If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI. I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too. Death-knell? Maybe… but I wouldn’t read into it. I’d be looking more at their key employees leaving. That’s what kills companies.
- smt88 2y ago
  - Product is not kickass. Hallucinations and cost limit its usefulness, and it's incinerating money. Prices are too high and need to go much higher to turn a profit. - Their brand value is terrible. Many people loathe AI for what it's going to do for jobs, and the people who like it are just as happy to use CoPilot or Cursor or Gemini. Frontier models are mostly fungible to consumers. No one is brand-loyal to OpenAI. - Many key employees have already left or been forced out.
  - stef25 2y ago
    > Product is not kickass It might not be the best but people of whom you'd have never thought that they would use it, are using it. Many non technical people in my circle are all over it and they have never even heard of Claude. They also wouldn't understand why people would loathe AI because they simply don't understand those reasons.
    - DJHenk 2y ago
      Still, it burns money like nothing has in history.
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    My dad uses ChatGPT for some excel macros. He’s ~70, and not really into tech news. Same with my mom, but for more casual stuff. You’re underestimating how prevalent the usage is across “normies” who really don’t care about second order effects in terms of employment and etc.
    - OccamsMirror 2y ago
      I loathe AI for what it's doing the job market. But I'd be stupid not to use it. It has made boilerplate work so much easier. It's even added an interesting element where I use it to brain storm. Even most haters will end up using it. I think eventually people will realize it's not replacing anyone directly and is really just a productivity multiplier. People were worried that email would remove jobs from the economy too. I'm not convinced our general AIs are going to get much better than they are now. It feels like we're we are at with mobile phones.
      - frm88 2y ago
        > People were worried that email would remove jobs from the economy too. And it did. Together with other technology, but yes: https://archive.is/20200118212150/https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-executive-assistant-11579323605 https://archive.is/20200118212150/https://www.wsj.com/articl... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-executive-assistant-11579323605 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-executive-assista...
      - MisterSandman 2y ago
        > I loathe AI for what it's doing the job market. To be fair, it's not doing anything to the job market, it's just being used as an excuse. Very few tech jobs have truly been replaced AI, it's just an easy excuse for layoffs due to recession/mismanagement etc.
        tokioyoyo 2y ago
        It has affected graphic design and copy writing jobs quite a lot. Software engineering is still a high-barrier-entry job, so it'll take some time. But pressure is already here.
  - spacebanana7 2y ago
    > No one is brand-loyal to OpenAI. Sam Altman is incredibly popular with young people on TikTok. He cured homework - mostly for free - and has a nice haircut. Videos of him driving his McLaren have comment sections in near total agreement that he deserves it.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      *Koenigsegg
    - pjc50 2y ago
      > He cured homework - mostly for free People argue about the damage COVID lockdowns did to education, but surely we're staring down the barrel of a bigger problem where people can go through school without ever having to think or work for themselves.
      - Duralias 2y ago
        Not entirely sure what they meant but chatgpt and the likes have forced schools to stop relying on homework for grades and are instead shifting over to assignments done more as an mini exam, more work for the school, but you can't substitute your knowledge for chatgpt in such cases, you actually need to know to succeed.
    - dminik 2y ago
      Well, that may be, but it's entirely possible that this outlook might change. In the worst case he's poisoned an entire generation. If ChatGPT doctors, architects and engineers are anything like ChatGPT "vibe-coders" we're fucked.
  - jappgar 2y ago
    Consumers may not be brand loyal, but companies are. If you're doing deep deals with MSFT you're going to be strongly discouraged from using Gemini.
    - smt88 2y ago
      Microsoft isn't even loyal to OpenAI! You can use multiple models in Azure and CoPilot
      - jappgar 1y ago
        Right but not Gemini.
  - Topfi 2y ago
    Counterpoint, ChatGPT as a brand has insane mindshare and buy in. It is synonymous with LLMs/“aI” in the mind of many and has broken through like few brands before it. That ain’t nothing. Counter-Counterpoint, I still feel investors priced in a bit more than that. Yahoo! Had major buy in as well and AGI believers were selling investors not just on the next Unicorn, but rather the next industry, AGI not being merely a Google in the 90s, but rather all of the internet and what that would become over the decades to this day. Anything less than delivering that, is not exactly what a large part of investors bought. But then again, any bubble has to burst someday.
- latexr 2y ago
  > I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too. Even if you believe all that to be true, it in no way contradicts what you quoted or makes it unfair. Having a kick ass product and good brand awareness in no way correlates to being close to AGI.
robotresearcher 2y ago
AGI is a technology or a feature, not a product. ChatGPT is a product. They need some more products to pay for one of the most expensive technologies ever (to not be delivered yet).
- leptons 2y ago
  It's a shame that $1 trillion is being poured into AI so quickly, but fusion research has only seen a fraction of that over many decades.
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    Isn’t that a reflection, to some (major?) extent, of the general sense of likelihood of breakthrough?
    - xmprt 2y ago
      I used to think like this but after seeing the amount of money invested into crypto companies which most average people could have quickly dismissed as irrelevant, I'm not sure VCs are a good judge of value.
      - 9rx 2y ago
        That's not an entirely fair take. Once upon a time it was believed that cryptocurrencies would be able to supplant payment processors (i.e. VISA, Master Card) We even had a rollout of crypto ATMs to utilize the belief in that network. That is a money printing business, so it wasn't unreasonable for VC money to chase it. Sure, those intimately familiar with the technology may have always known that it wouldn't work, but the average person absolutely did not. They only came to learn that it wouldn't work as the cryptocurrency ventures proved that it wouldn't work. The pivot to being some kind of tool to store wealth, or a way to trade cartoon monkeys, or whatever as a last ditch effort to save the companies that failed to turn it into payment processing technology was more obviously irrelevant, but that came much, much later. The VCs were desperately seeking an exit by that point.
parhamn 2y ago
There could be too-many-cooks in the AI research part of their work. Also, I don't think Sama thinks like a typical large org managers. OpenAI has enough money to have all sorts of products/labs that are startup like. No reason to standby waiting for the research work.
- smt88 2y ago
  Altman doesn't think like a typical large org manager because he's never successfully built or run one. He failed upward into this role. OpenAI doesn't have enough money to even run ChatGPT in perpetuity, so building internal moonshots is an irresponsible waste of investor funds.
make3 2y ago
this might just be a way to generate data
ChuckMcM 2y ago
Alternative is that OpenAI is being quickly locked out of sources of human interactions because of competition, one way to "fix" that is build you're own meadow for data cows. xAI isn't allowing people to use the Twitter feed to train AI Google is keeping it's properties for Gemini Microsoft, who presumably could let OpenAI use it's data fields appears (publicly at least) to be in a love/hate relationship with OpenAI these days. So you plant a meadow of tasty human interaction morsels to get humans to sit around and munch on them while you hook up your milking machine to their data teats and start sucking data.
- Springtime 2y ago
  They also have a contract with Reddit to train on user data (a common go-to source for finding non-spam search results). Unsure how many other official agreements they have vs just scraping.
  - safety1st 2y ago
    Good heavens, I'd think that if anything could turn an AI model into a misanthrope, it would be this.
    - Springtime 2y ago
      One distinctive quality I've observed with OpenAI's models (at least with the cheapest tiers of 3,4 and o3) are their human-like face-saving when confronted with things they've answered incorrectly. Rather than directly admit fault they'll regularly respond in subtle (moreso o3) to not so subtle roundabout ways that deflect blame rather than admit direct fault, even when it's an inarguable factual error about even conceptually non-heated things like API methods. It's an annoying behavior of their models and in complete contrast to say Anthropic's Claude which ime will immediately and directly admit to things it had responded incorrectly about when the user mentions it (perhaps too eagerly). I have wondered if this is something its learned based on training from places like Reddit, or if OpenAI deliberately taught it or instructed via system prompts to seem more infallible or if models like Claude were made to deliberately reduce that aspect.
saltysalt 2y ago
Indeed! Ultimately, all online business models end at ad click revenue.
westoncb 2y ago
I think it might just be about distribution. Grok gets a lot of interesting opportunities for it over X, then throw in the way people reacted to new 4o image gen capabilities.
ben_w 2y ago
OpenAI's idea of "shortly" offering AGI is "thousands" of days, 2000 days is just under 5.5 years.
kromem 2y ago
Don't underestimate the importance of multi-user human/AI interactions. Right now OAI's synthetic data pipeline is very heavily weighted to 1-on-1 conversations. But models are being deployed into multi-user spaces that OAI doesn't have access to. If you look at where their products are headed right now, this is very much the right move. Expect it to be TikTok style media formats.
pjc50 2y ago
Someone down below mentioned ads, and I think that might well be the route they're going to try: charging advertisers to influence the output of the AI. As for whether it will work, I don't know how they're possibly going to get the "seed community" which will encourage others to join up. Maybe they're hoping that all the people making slop posts on other social networks want to cut out the middleman and have communities of people who actually enjoy that. As always, the sfw/nsfw censorship line will be an important definer, and I can't imagine them choosing NSFW.
- rpastuszak 2y ago
  Called it! https://tidings.potato.horse/about https://tidings.potato.horse/about
weatherlite 2y ago
> If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI. Or even if you did come up with AGI, so would everyone else. Gemini is arguably better than ChatGPT now.
- klabb3 2y ago
  Bingo. The secret sauce is never a sustainable long term moat. Things leak, competitors copy, or they make even better things, employees switch jobs. AI looks less vulnerable, since it’s academically difficult and expertise is still limited. But time and time again, new secret sauce ingredients last for months at a maximum, before they are exceeded oftentimes by hobbyists or other small actors. I remember at Google they said well if source code leaks nobody is actually worried about stealing tech, the vast majority of code is open to all employees, with some exceptions like spam-, ranking, etc. It’s still protected, but not considered moat. The moat comes from other things, such as datacenter & global networking infrastructure, marketing new products by pushing them through existing products (put Gemini in search, add chrome to Android etc). Most importantly you can use data you already have to bootstrap new products, say Gmail and calendar integrated with personalized assistants. If you play your cards right, yes there’s some first-mover advantages, but they are more superficial than your average Twitter hype thread makes you think. It can give you the ability to set unofficial standards and APIs, like Kubernetes, S3 – (maybe OpenAI APIs?). And you can set certain agendas and market your name for recognition and trust. But all that can slip through your fingers if a behemoth picks up where you left off. They have so many advantages, except for being the fastest.
- Topfi 2y ago
  In fairness, the AGI definition predicted by doomsday safety experts who don’t have time for such unimportant concerns as copyright or misinformation via this tech, everyone who is most certainly not merely hyping to get investor cash and the utterly serious and scientifically grounded research happening at MIRI, is essentially that one company will achieve AGI, shortly thereafter that will lead to a singularity and that’s that. No one else could create a second because that scary AGI is so powerful and would prevent anyone else from shutting it down, including other AGI. And no, this is totally no a sci-fi plot, but rigorous research. Incidentally, I’m looking for someone to help me prevent OAI from killing my own grandfather, cause that scenario is also incredibly likely and should be taken seriously. If it’s not obvious already, I believe we are far away from that with LLMs and that the attention those working in model safety give to AGI over current day concerns like Meta just torrenting for model data, are not very serious people, but I have accepted that this isn’t a popular opinion amongst industry professionals. Not least because letting laws prevent them from model training is bad according to them, either for the same weird logic Musk uses to justify testing FSD Betas on an unwilling public due to the potential to prevent future deaths, or because they genuinely took RB seriously. No idea what’s worse for serious adults…
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sevensor 2y ago
Adding social media to your thing is so 2018. Is the next big thing really just a warmed over version of the last big thing? Is sama just completely out of ideas to save his money-burner?
- rchaud 2y ago
  It's an easy thing to slap on to a service with lots of users. Back in the day this would be called a 'message board'. "Social media" requires the use of iframes that can be embedded on 3rd party sites. OpenAI is a login-only environment so I can see them going for a Discord-type of platform rather than something that spreads to the open web.
jacobsenscott 2y ago
Everything devolves to ad sales. Do you know the minute details about their lives people type into chat gpt prompts? It's a gold mine for ads.
NewUser76312 2y ago
I think it was a strategic mistake for Sam et al to talk about "AGI". You don't need some mythical AI to be a great company. You need great products, which OpenAI has, and they keep improving them. Now they've hamstrung themselves into this AGI nonsense to try and entice investors further, I guess.
- diggan 2y ago
  > Now they've hamstrung themselves into this AGI nonsense to try AFAIK, they've been on the AGI hype-train for a very long time, before they reached mainstream popularity for sure. From their own blog (2020 - https://openai.com/index/organizational-update/ https://openai.com/index/organizational-update/), here is a mention of their "mission": > We’re proud of these and other research breakthroughs by our team, all made as part of our mission to achieve general-purpose AI that is safe and reliable, and which benefits all humanity. I'm not sure OpenAI trying to reach AGI is a "strategic mistake" as much as "the basis for the business" (which, to be fair, was a non-profit organization initially).
jug 2y ago
AI as we know it (GPT based LLM’s) have peaked. OpenAI noticed this sometime autumn last year when would-be GPT-5 was unimpressive despite the huge size. I still think ChatGPT 4.5 was GPT-5, just rebranded to set expectations. Google Gemini 2.5 Pro was remarkably good and I’m not sure how they did it. It’s like an elite athlete doing a jump forward despite harsh competition. They probably have excellent training methodology and data quality. DeepSeek made huge inroads in affordability… But even with those, intelligence itself is seeing diminishing returns while training costs are not. So OpenAI _needs_ to diversify - somehow. If they rely on intelligence alone, then they’re toast. So they can’t.
- Topfi 2y ago
  I tentatively agree that LLMs have reached somewhat of a ceiling at this stage and diversifying would make sense at this stage, in any other industry. But as others pointed out, OAI and others have attached their valuation directly to their definition of achieving “AGI”. Any pivot from that, if it were realistic in the coming years (my opinion: it isn’t), would be foolhardy and go against investors, so in turn, this is clearly admitting that even sama doesn’t see AGI as possible in the near term.
- ActorNightly 2y ago
  >I’m not sure how they did it TPUs absolutely dumpster Nvidia cards, for the same reason that mining bitcoin is done with ASICs instead of cards. So yeah, just more training, more data, and so on. If Google wasn't so cloud focused, they could take over the AI Chip market lead from NVIDIA.
9rx 2y ago
On the other hand, if you knew AGI was on the near horizon, you'd know that AGI will want to have friends to remain happy. You can give AGI a physical form so it can walk down to the bar – or you can, much more simply, give it an online social network.

by lukev 2y ago

pyfon 2y ago

It is a Threads. How is that doing?

celdon25 2y ago

> If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI. I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too. Death-knell? Maybe… but I wouldn’t read into it. I’d be looking more at their key employees leaving. That’s what kills companies.

smt88 2y ago
- Product is not kickass. Hallucinations and cost limit its usefulness, and it's incinerating money. Prices are too high and need to go much higher to turn a profit. - Their brand value is terrible. Many people loathe AI for what it's going to do for jobs, and the people who like it are just as happy to use CoPilot or Cursor or Gemini. Frontier models are mostly fungible to consumers. No one is brand-loyal to OpenAI. - Many key employees have already left or been forced out.
- stef25 2y ago
  > Product is not kickass It might not be the best but people of whom you'd have never thought that they would use it, are using it. Many non technical people in my circle are all over it and they have never even heard of Claude. They also wouldn't understand why people would loathe AI because they simply don't understand those reasons.
  - DJHenk 2y ago
    Still, it burns money like nothing has in history.
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  My dad uses ChatGPT for some excel macros. He’s ~70, and not really into tech news. Same with my mom, but for more casual stuff. You’re underestimating how prevalent the usage is across “normies” who really don’t care about second order effects in terms of employment and etc.
  - OccamsMirror 2y ago
    I loathe AI for what it's doing the job market. But I'd be stupid not to use it. It has made boilerplate work so much easier. It's even added an interesting element where I use it to brain storm. Even most haters will end up using it. I think eventually people will realize it's not replacing anyone directly and is really just a productivity multiplier. People were worried that email would remove jobs from the economy too. I'm not convinced our general AIs are going to get much better than they are now. It feels like we're we are at with mobile phones.
    - frm88 2y ago
      > People were worried that email would remove jobs from the economy too. And it did. Together with other technology, but yes: https://archive.is/20200118212150/https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-executive-assistant-11579323605 https://archive.is/20200118212150/https://www.wsj.com/articl... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-executive-assistant-11579323605 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-executive-assista...
    - MisterSandman 2y ago
      > I loathe AI for what it's doing the job market. To be fair, it's not doing anything to the job market, it's just being used as an excuse. Very few tech jobs have truly been replaced AI, it's just an easy excuse for layoffs due to recession/mismanagement etc.
      - tokioyoyo 2y ago
        It has affected graphic design and copy writing jobs quite a lot. Software engineering is still a high-barrier-entry job, so it'll take some time. But pressure is already here.
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  > No one is brand-loyal to OpenAI. Sam Altman is incredibly popular with young people on TikTok. He cured homework - mostly for free - and has a nice haircut. Videos of him driving his McLaren have comment sections in near total agreement that he deserves it.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    *Koenigsegg
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > He cured homework - mostly for free People argue about the damage COVID lockdowns did to education, but surely we're staring down the barrel of a bigger problem where people can go through school without ever having to think or work for themselves.
    - Duralias 2y ago
      Not entirely sure what they meant but chatgpt and the likes have forced schools to stop relying on homework for grades and are instead shifting over to assignments done more as an mini exam, more work for the school, but you can't substitute your knowledge for chatgpt in such cases, you actually need to know to succeed.
  - dminik 2y ago
    Well, that may be, but it's entirely possible that this outlook might change. In the worst case he's poisoned an entire generation. If ChatGPT doctors, architects and engineers are anything like ChatGPT "vibe-coders" we're fucked.
- jappgar 2y ago
  Consumers may not be brand loyal, but companies are. If you're doing deep deals with MSFT you're going to be strongly discouraged from using Gemini.
  - smt88 2y ago
    Microsoft isn't even loyal to OpenAI! You can use multiple models in Azure and CoPilot
    - jappgar 1y ago
      Right but not Gemini.
- Topfi 2y ago
  Counterpoint, ChatGPT as a brand has insane mindshare and buy in. It is synonymous with LLMs/“aI” in the mind of many and has broken through like few brands before it. That ain’t nothing. Counter-Counterpoint, I still feel investors priced in a bit more than that. Yahoo! Had major buy in as well and AGI believers were selling investors not just on the next Unicorn, but rather the next industry, AGI not being merely a Google in the 90s, but rather all of the internet and what that would become over the decades to this day. Anything less than delivering that, is not exactly what a large part of investors bought. But then again, any bubble has to burst someday.
latexr 2y ago
> I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too. Even if you believe all that to be true, it in no way contradicts what you quoted or makes it unfair. Having a kick ass product and good brand awareness in no way correlates to being close to AGI.

robotresearcher 2y ago

AGI is a technology or a feature, not a product. ChatGPT is a product. They need some more products to pay for one of the most expensive technologies ever (to not be delivered yet).

leptons 2y ago
It's a shame that $1 trillion is being poured into AI so quickly, but fusion research has only seen a fraction of that over many decades.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  Isn’t that a reflection, to some (major?) extent, of the general sense of likelihood of breakthrough?
  - xmprt 2y ago
    I used to think like this but after seeing the amount of money invested into crypto companies which most average people could have quickly dismissed as irrelevant, I'm not sure VCs are a good judge of value.
    - 9rx 2y ago
      That's not an entirely fair take. Once upon a time it was believed that cryptocurrencies would be able to supplant payment processors (i.e. VISA, Master Card) We even had a rollout of crypto ATMs to utilize the belief in that network. That is a money printing business, so it wasn't unreasonable for VC money to chase it. Sure, those intimately familiar with the technology may have always known that it wouldn't work, but the average person absolutely did not. They only came to learn that it wouldn't work as the cryptocurrency ventures proved that it wouldn't work. The pivot to being some kind of tool to store wealth, or a way to trade cartoon monkeys, or whatever as a last ditch effort to save the companies that failed to turn it into payment processing technology was more obviously irrelevant, but that came much, much later. The VCs were desperately seeking an exit by that point.

parhamn 2y ago

There could be too-many-cooks in the AI research part of their work. Also, I don't think Sama thinks like a typical large org managers. OpenAI has enough money to have all sorts of products/labs that are startup like. No reason to standby waiting for the research work.

smt88 2y ago
Altman doesn't think like a typical large org manager because he's never successfully built or run one. He failed upward into this role. OpenAI doesn't have enough money to even run ChatGPT in perpetuity, so building internal moonshots is an irresponsible waste of investor funds.

make3 2y ago

this might just be a way to generate data

ChuckMcM 2y ago

Alternative is that OpenAI is being quickly locked out of sources of human interactions because of competition, one way to "fix" that is build you're own meadow for data cows. xAI isn't allowing people to use the Twitter feed to train AI Google is keeping it's properties for Gemini Microsoft, who presumably could let OpenAI use it's data fields appears (publicly at least) to be in a love/hate relationship with OpenAI these days. So you plant a meadow of tasty human interaction morsels to get humans to sit around and munch on them while you hook up your milking machine to their data teats and start sucking data.

Springtime 2y ago
They also have a contract with Reddit to train on user data (a common go-to source for finding non-spam search results). Unsure how many other official agreements they have vs just scraping.
- safety1st 2y ago
  Good heavens, I'd think that if anything could turn an AI model into a misanthrope, it would be this.
  - Springtime 2y ago
    One distinctive quality I've observed with OpenAI's models (at least with the cheapest tiers of 3,4 and o3) are their human-like face-saving when confronted with things they've answered incorrectly. Rather than directly admit fault they'll regularly respond in subtle (moreso o3) to not so subtle roundabout ways that deflect blame rather than admit direct fault, even when it's an inarguable factual error about even conceptually non-heated things like API methods. It's an annoying behavior of their models and in complete contrast to say Anthropic's Claude which ime will immediately and directly admit to things it had responded incorrectly about when the user mentions it (perhaps too eagerly). I have wondered if this is something its learned based on training from places like Reddit, or if OpenAI deliberately taught it or instructed via system prompts to seem more infallible or if models like Claude were made to deliberately reduce that aspect.

saltysalt 2y ago

Indeed! Ultimately, all online business models end at ad click revenue.

westoncb 2y ago

I think it might just be about distribution. Grok gets a lot of interesting opportunities for it over X, then throw in the way people reacted to new 4o image gen capabilities.

ben_w 2y ago

OpenAI's idea of "shortly" offering AGI is "thousands" of days, 2000 days is just under 5.5 years.

kromem 2y ago

Don't underestimate the importance of multi-user human/AI interactions. Right now OAI's synthetic data pipeline is very heavily weighted to 1-on-1 conversations. But models are being deployed into multi-user spaces that OAI doesn't have access to. If you look at where their products are headed right now, this is very much the right move. Expect it to be TikTok style media formats.

pjc50 2y ago

Someone down below mentioned ads, and I think that might well be the route they're going to try: charging advertisers to influence the output of the AI. As for whether it will work, I don't know how they're possibly going to get the "seed community" which will encourage others to join up. Maybe they're hoping that all the people making slop posts on other social networks want to cut out the middleman and have communities of people who actually enjoy that. As always, the sfw/nsfw censorship line will be an important definer, and I can't imagine them choosing NSFW.

rpastuszak 2y ago
Called it! https://tidings.potato.horse/about https://tidings.potato.horse/about

weatherlite 2y ago

klabb3 2y ago
Bingo. The secret sauce is never a sustainable long term moat. Things leak, competitors copy, or they make even better things, employees switch jobs. AI looks less vulnerable, since it’s academically difficult and expertise is still limited. But time and time again, new secret sauce ingredients last for months at a maximum, before they are exceeded oftentimes by hobbyists or other small actors. I remember at Google they said well if source code leaks nobody is actually worried about stealing tech, the vast majority of code is open to all employees, with some exceptions like spam-, ranking, etc. It’s still protected, but not considered moat. The moat comes from other things, such as datacenter & global networking infrastructure, marketing new products by pushing them through existing products (put Gemini in search, add chrome to Android etc). Most importantly you can use data you already have to bootstrap new products, say Gmail and calendar integrated with personalized assistants. If you play your cards right, yes there’s some first-mover advantages, but they are more superficial than your average Twitter hype thread makes you think. It can give you the ability to set unofficial standards and APIs, like Kubernetes, S3 – (maybe OpenAI APIs?). And you can set certain agendas and market your name for recognition and trust. But all that can slip through your fingers if a behemoth picks up where you left off. They have so many advantages, except for being the fastest.
Topfi 2y ago
In fairness, the AGI definition predicted by doomsday safety experts who don’t have time for such unimportant concerns as copyright or misinformation via this tech, everyone who is most certainly not merely hyping to get investor cash and the utterly serious and scientifically grounded research happening at MIRI, is essentially that one company will achieve AGI, shortly thereafter that will lead to a singularity and that’s that. No one else could create a second because that scary AGI is so powerful and would prevent anyone else from shutting it down, including other AGI. And no, this is totally no a sci-fi plot, but rigorous research. Incidentally, I’m looking for someone to help me prevent OAI from killing my own grandfather, cause that scenario is also incredibly likely and should be taken seriously. If it’s not obvious already, I believe we are far away from that with LLMs and that the attention those working in model safety give to AGI over current day concerns like Meta just torrenting for model data, are not very serious people, but I have accepted that this isn’t a popular opinion amongst industry professionals. Not least because letting laws prevent them from model training is bad according to them, either for the same weird logic Musk uses to justify testing FSD Betas on an unwilling public due to the potential to prevent future deaths, or because they genuinely took RB seriously. No idea what’s worse for serious adults…

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sevensor 2y ago

Adding social media to your thing is so 2018. Is the next big thing really just a warmed over version of the last big thing? Is sama just completely out of ideas to save his money-burner?

rchaud 2y ago
It's an easy thing to slap on to a service with lots of users. Back in the day this would be called a 'message board'. "Social media" requires the use of iframes that can be embedded on 3rd party sites. OpenAI is a login-only environment so I can see them going for a Discord-type of platform rather than something that spreads to the open web.

jacobsenscott 2y ago

Everything devolves to ad sales. Do you know the minute details about their lives people type into chat gpt prompts? It's a gold mine for ads.

NewUser76312 2y ago

I think it was a strategic mistake for Sam et al to talk about "AGI". You don't need some mythical AI to be a great company. You need great products, which OpenAI has, and they keep improving them. Now they've hamstrung themselves into this AGI nonsense to try and entice investors further, I guess.

diggan 2y ago
> Now they've hamstrung themselves into this AGI nonsense to try AFAIK, they've been on the AGI hype-train for a very long time, before they reached mainstream popularity for sure. From their own blog (2020 - https://openai.com/index/organizational-update/ https://openai.com/index/organizational-update/), here is a mention of their "mission": > We’re proud of these and other research breakthroughs by our team, all made as part of our mission to achieve general-purpose AI that is safe and reliable, and which benefits all humanity. I'm not sure OpenAI trying to reach AGI is a "strategic mistake" as much as "the basis for the business" (which, to be fair, was a non-profit organization initially).

jug 2y ago

AI as we know it (GPT based LLM’s) have peaked. OpenAI noticed this sometime autumn last year when would-be GPT-5 was unimpressive despite the huge size. I still think ChatGPT 4.5 was GPT-5, just rebranded to set expectations. Google Gemini 2.5 Pro was remarkably good and I’m not sure how they did it. It’s like an elite athlete doing a jump forward despite harsh competition. They probably have excellent training methodology and data quality. DeepSeek made huge inroads in affordability… But even with those, intelligence itself is seeing diminishing returns while training costs are not. So OpenAI _needs_ to diversify - somehow. If they rely on intelligence alone, then they’re toast. So they can’t.

Topfi 2y ago
I tentatively agree that LLMs have reached somewhat of a ceiling at this stage and diversifying would make sense at this stage, in any other industry. But as others pointed out, OAI and others have attached their valuation directly to their definition of achieving “AGI”. Any pivot from that, if it were realistic in the coming years (my opinion: it isn’t), would be foolhardy and go against investors, so in turn, this is clearly admitting that even sama doesn’t see AGI as possible in the near term.
ActorNightly 2y ago
>I’m not sure how they did it TPUs absolutely dumpster Nvidia cards, for the same reason that mining bitcoin is done with ASICs instead of cards. So yeah, just more training, more data, and so on. If Google wasn't so cloud focused, they could take over the AI Chip market lead from NVIDIA.

9rx 2y ago

On the other hand, if you knew AGI was on the near horizon, you'd know that AGI will want to have friends to remain happy. You can give AGI a physical form so it can walk down to the bar – or you can, much more simply, give it an online social network.