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I just don't understand how people can see "100 million signups in a week" and immediately dismiss it. We're not talking about fidget spinners. I don't get why
by sandspar 1y ago
I just don't understand how people can see "100 million signups in a week" and immediately dismiss it. We're not talking about fidget spinners. I don't get why this sentiment is so common here on HackerNews. It's become a running joke in other online spaces, "HackerNews commenters keep saying that AI is a nothingburger." It's just a groupthink thing I guess, a kneejerk response.
- pintxo 1y agoI assume, when people dismiss it, they are not looking at it through the business lens and the 100m user signups KPI, but they are dismissing it on technical grounds, as an LLM is just a very big statistical database which seems incapable of solving problems beyond (impressive looking) text/image/video generation.
- sandspar 1y agoMakes sense. Although I think that's an error. TikTok is "just" a video sharing site. Joe Rogan is "just" a podcaster. Dumb things that affect lots of people are important.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago> We're not talking about fidget spinners. We're talking about Hitler memes instead? I don't understand your feigned outrage. The actual valid commercial use case for generative images hasn't been found yet. (No, making blog spam prettier is not a good use case.)
- stavros 1y agoYou're right, nothing has value unless someone figures out how to make money with it. Except OpenAI, apparently, because the fact that people buy ChatGPT to make images doesn't seem to count as a commercial use case.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoOpenAI is not profitable and we don't know if it ever will be.
- stavros 1y agoHave we shifted the goalposts from "something people will pay for" to "needs to be profitable even with massive R&D" then?
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoOpenAI is not "something people will pay for" at the moment though.
- stavros 1y agoExcept lots of people are paying for it. I'll refer you to the other post on the front page for the calculation that OpenAI would have to get just an extra $10/yr from their users to break even.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoYour response reminds me of that joke about selling a dollar bill for ninety cents.
- stavros 1y agoYour response makes me think we have different definitions for profitability.
- dbdoskey 1y agoOpenAI is not profitable because it is spending resources into moving forward and training new models and creating new tools.
- simonw 1y agoEverything Everywhere All At Once won a bunch of Oscars. They used generative AI tools for some of their post-production work (achieved by a tiny team), for example to help clean up the backgrounds in the scene with the silent dialog between the two rocks.