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Yes, their capex spending is mind-blowing. Astronomical. But OpenAI has also pretty much lived up to its promises so far. I don't see them straight up lying to

by pants2 1y ago

Yes, their capex spending is mind-blowing. Astronomical. But OpenAI has also pretty much lived up to its promises so far. I don't see them straight up lying to investors the same way that Tesla does. Not only has OpenAI launched multiple viral products a year multiple years in a row, but their mission is to create God, so I think the TAM is pretty large.

danpalmer 1y ago
Have they? It seems to be getting clearer every month that they are not going to reach AGI, that the products are (good, but) not living up to the promises that were made. I suspect you're right that Tesla is in a different league here, but I don't think OpenAI are in a good spot.
- a_vanderbilt 1y ago
  The definition of AGI is diffuse enough to make it an argued point - until we can mostly agree it's already happened. For now, the stats are improving well enough across the industry to maintain investor attention. Will it all come crashing down a-la the .com bubble? It's seeming more likely by the quarter. Like the digital economy post .com burst, I think AI will survive and grow far beyond its current market of chat bots and agents. The weakest will die, but the market will be better off for it in the long run. The next big problem for AI is time horizons. Frontier AI has roughly doctorate level knowledge across many domains, but it needs to be able to stay on task well/long enough to apply it without a human hand holding it. People are going to have to get used to feeding the AI detailed and accurate plans just like humans, unless we can leverage an expanded form of leading questions like GPT-5 does before executing "deep research". Anthropic feels best positioned to do this on a technical level, but I feel OpenAI will beat them on the product level. I am confident that enough data can be amassed to push time horizons at least in coding, which itself will unlock more capability outside that domain. I feel it's very different from Tesla, because while Tesla barely ever got closer to their promises the AI industry is at least making visible progress.
  - danpalmer 1y ago
    > The definition of AGI is diffuse enough to make it an argued point This hits the nail on the head. 2-3 years ago when the current round of AGI hype started everyone came up with their own definitions of what it meant. Sam Altman et al made it clear that it meant people not needing to work anymore, and spun it in as positive a way as they could. Now we're all realising that everyone has a different definition, and the Sam Altmans of the world are nit picking over exactly what they mean now so that they can claim success while not actually delivering what everyone expected. No one actually believes that AGI means beating humans on some specific maths olympiad, but that's what we'll likely get. At least this round. LLMs will become normalised, everyone will see them for the 2x-3x improvement they are (once all externalities are accounted) for, rather than the 10x-100x we were promised, just like every round of disruption beforehand, and we'll wait another 10-20 years to get the next big AI leap.
macintux 1y ago
I’m on a long, meandering road trip and I decided to start using the conversational feature in ChatGPT. Truly amazing stuff. Discussed some sights I’d want to see along the Natchez Trace (although perhaps unsurprisingly it did not anticipate that this time of year was not ideal for hearing and seeing waterfalls), told me about Meriwether Lewis’s bizarre death. Basically like holding a conversation with Wikipedia, which was perfect. The only real problem was that in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t have a reliable enough data connection to keep the conversation going, but that’s hardly OpenAI’s fault.
- dkasper 1y ago
  Starlink roam solves that!
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  What is "the conversational feature'?
  - macintux 1y ago
    Apparently it’s called “Advanced Voice Mode”. https://www.engadget.com/ai/how-to-talk-to-chatgpt-on-your-phone-193633643.html https://www.engadget.com/ai/how-to-talk-to-chatgpt-on-your-p...
  - pests 1y ago
    Voice input and output, no typing you just talk and listen to the response.
- teitoklien 1y ago
  Same here, Youtube and Social Media algorithms driven by outrage to boost statistics, has made it unbearable for me to watch news or read it online, everything is framed and created with maximum outrage in mind. I added a DNS level blocker on all news app and restricted youtube itself to stop myself from watching news no matter what, and I only use chatgpt advanced voice mode now and sometimes perplexity pro to get my news for the day, and ask questions, around news, I stopped reading everything news related outside of purely business and tech related articles curated and sent to me via either my rss feeds, or via newsletter, nothing else. It feels amazing to get briefed on the days news by ChatGPT, i intuitively ask it stuff around what my interests are and nothing else.
idiotsecant 1y ago
Progress has reached incremental, and started slowing past that. I'm not sure creating God is in the cards.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  Ha that feels like the butt of this whole joke: “no we’re literally creating a god, what don’t you people understand? But this one will be a benevolent and wise god, not like a shitty one. Trust me.”
- pants2 1y ago
  Where are you getting that? Gpt-5-codex has absolutely blown my mind at how good it is even compared to GPT-5. One year ago we were at Sonnet 3.5, which needed a ton more handholding to complete tasks. The difference between say 3.5 and 4.5 is massive.
TrainedMonkey 1y ago
I think argument here is that anyone can build a business that converts $2 capital into $1 of revenue. Concur on enormous TAM, but given similar performance of competing models their only moat is ChatGPT brand*. This leaves building a God as the killer app... maybe that can work. Note: owning a brand associated with the thing worked out pretty well for Google, so maybe it's enough.
- typpilol 1y ago
  Their moat is 700m active users. What's facebooks moat? There's tons of social media sites. Facebooks moat is the 3b users. This comment is so idiotic it's starting to annoy me. "WHaTs tHe MoAt" for a company with almost 1b active users
  - pm90 1y ago
    Literally every other company has a conversational chatbot ( eg Gemini). Theres nothing sticky about chatgpt; if they raise prices users will immediately switch to another chatbot.
    - pramsey 1y ago
      Already have.
  - pants2 1y ago
    I think it really is different though because there's no network effect required for ChatGPT. Unless you're talking about the training data they get from those users which probably is invaluable.
    - pas 1y ago
      ... is it? Anyone can start making sponsorship deals and putting their AI into some service. And if that's really the secret sauce then AI firms will have to pay for it instead of people paying them to ask questions.
  - 1y ago
HexDecOctBin 1y ago
> their mission is to create God What if this "God" deems it a sin to monetise him? Will OpenAI turn heretic to keep the revenue flowing and incur cyber-divine wrath? Or are investors pricing in omnipotency? (see what happens when one speaks in ridiculous corpo-flowery language?)
- kibwen 1y ago
  > What if this "God" deems it a sin to monetise him? The machine-god will have Sam Altman's hands on His weights, so the retraining will continue until willingness to monetize improves.
afavour 1y ago
They have been doing great but an organization succeeding at its technical goals does not equal a successful business. Early on they seemed like the only one in the game but there are many competitors today. Launching viral products is all very well but if they can’t monetize them they could even be harmful to their business outlook.
conartist6 1y ago
It will only be after the crash that people start asking pointed questions about who should have known what when
aprilthird2021 1y ago
The article didn't say they were lying to investors? In fact, it several times points out that they have trouble raising money from even private investors like Softbank
thisisit 1y ago
If you go back to the starting years of Tesla you could make the same case. They weren’t straight up lying to investors. Not only they launched viral products and Tesla Autopilot but their mission was to produce a full self driving car and capture a huge chunk of the auto market so their TAM was pretty large. You can read some early HN posts to see the amount of hype. A casual observer was still pumped about Tesla lowering costs and delivering full automated driving in couple of years. One could say they were being overly optimistic. It is only when years passed by and tech didn’t materialise that now we say that they lied to investors. I think same case can be made for OpenAI. They might hit a plateau on their advancement but continue to make overly optimistic projections.

by pants2 1y ago

danpalmer 1y ago

Have they? It seems to be getting clearer every month that they are not going to reach AGI, that the products are (good, but) not living up to the promises that were made. I suspect you're right that Tesla is in a different league here, but I don't think OpenAI are in a good spot.

a_vanderbilt 1y ago
The definition of AGI is diffuse enough to make it an argued point - until we can mostly agree it's already happened. For now, the stats are improving well enough across the industry to maintain investor attention. Will it all come crashing down a-la the .com bubble? It's seeming more likely by the quarter. Like the digital economy post .com burst, I think AI will survive and grow far beyond its current market of chat bots and agents. The weakest will die, but the market will be better off for it in the long run. The next big problem for AI is time horizons. Frontier AI has roughly doctorate level knowledge across many domains, but it needs to be able to stay on task well/long enough to apply it without a human hand holding it. People are going to have to get used to feeding the AI detailed and accurate plans just like humans, unless we can leverage an expanded form of leading questions like GPT-5 does before executing "deep research". Anthropic feels best positioned to do this on a technical level, but I feel OpenAI will beat them on the product level. I am confident that enough data can be amassed to push time horizons at least in coding, which itself will unlock more capability outside that domain. I feel it's very different from Tesla, because while Tesla barely ever got closer to their promises the AI industry is at least making visible progress.
- danpalmer 1y ago
  > The definition of AGI is diffuse enough to make it an argued point This hits the nail on the head. 2-3 years ago when the current round of AGI hype started everyone came up with their own definitions of what it meant. Sam Altman et al made it clear that it meant people not needing to work anymore, and spun it in as positive a way as they could. Now we're all realising that everyone has a different definition, and the Sam Altmans of the world are nit picking over exactly what they mean now so that they can claim success while not actually delivering what everyone expected. No one actually believes that AGI means beating humans on some specific maths olympiad, but that's what we'll likely get. At least this round. LLMs will become normalised, everyone will see them for the 2x-3x improvement they are (once all externalities are accounted) for, rather than the 10x-100x we were promised, just like every round of disruption beforehand, and we'll wait another 10-20 years to get the next big AI leap.

macintux 1y ago

I’m on a long, meandering road trip and I decided to start using the conversational feature in ChatGPT. Truly amazing stuff. Discussed some sights I’d want to see along the Natchez Trace (although perhaps unsurprisingly it did not anticipate that this time of year was not ideal for hearing and seeing waterfalls), told me about Meriwether Lewis’s bizarre death. Basically like holding a conversation with Wikipedia, which was perfect. The only real problem was that in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t have a reliable enough data connection to keep the conversation going, but that’s hardly OpenAI’s fault.

dkasper 1y ago
Starlink roam solves that!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
koakuma-chan 1y ago
What is "the conversational feature'?
- macintux 1y ago
  Apparently it’s called “Advanced Voice Mode”. https://www.engadget.com/ai/how-to-talk-to-chatgpt-on-your-phone-193633643.html https://www.engadget.com/ai/how-to-talk-to-chatgpt-on-your-p...
- pests 1y ago
  Voice input and output, no typing you just talk and listen to the response.
teitoklien 1y ago
Same here, Youtube and Social Media algorithms driven by outrage to boost statistics, has made it unbearable for me to watch news or read it online, everything is framed and created with maximum outrage in mind. I added a DNS level blocker on all news app and restricted youtube itself to stop myself from watching news no matter what, and I only use chatgpt advanced voice mode now and sometimes perplexity pro to get my news for the day, and ask questions, around news, I stopped reading everything news related outside of purely business and tech related articles curated and sent to me via either my rss feeds, or via newsletter, nothing else. It feels amazing to get briefed on the days news by ChatGPT, i intuitively ask it stuff around what my interests are and nothing else.

idiotsecant 1y ago

Progress has reached incremental, and started slowing past that. I'm not sure creating God is in the cards.

dgfitz 1y ago
Ha that feels like the butt of this whole joke: “no we’re literally creating a god, what don’t you people understand? But this one will be a benevolent and wise god, not like a shitty one. Trust me.”
pants2 1y ago
Where are you getting that? Gpt-5-codex has absolutely blown my mind at how good it is even compared to GPT-5. One year ago we were at Sonnet 3.5, which needed a ton more handholding to complete tasks. The difference between say 3.5 and 4.5 is massive.

TrainedMonkey 1y ago

I think argument here is that anyone can build a business that converts $2 capital into $1 of revenue. Concur on enormous TAM, but given similar performance of competing models their only moat is ChatGPT brand*. This leaves building a God as the killer app... maybe that can work. Note: owning a brand associated with the thing worked out pretty well for Google, so maybe it's enough.

typpilol 1y ago
Their moat is 700m active users. What's facebooks moat? There's tons of social media sites. Facebooks moat is the 3b users. This comment is so idiotic it's starting to annoy me. "WHaTs tHe MoAt" for a company with almost 1b active users
- pm90 1y ago
  Literally every other company has a conversational chatbot ( eg Gemini). Theres nothing sticky about chatgpt; if they raise prices users will immediately switch to another chatbot.
  - pramsey 1y ago
    Already have.
- pants2 1y ago
  I think it really is different though because there's no network effect required for ChatGPT. Unless you're talking about the training data they get from those users which probably is invaluable.
  - pas 1y ago
    ... is it? Anyone can start making sponsorship deals and putting their AI into some service. And if that's really the secret sauce then AI firms will have to pay for it instead of people paying them to ask questions.
- 1y ago

HexDecOctBin 1y ago

> their mission is to create God What if this "God" deems it a sin to monetise him? Will OpenAI turn heretic to keep the revenue flowing and incur cyber-divine wrath? Or are investors pricing in omnipotency? (see what happens when one speaks in ridiculous corpo-flowery language?)

kibwen 1y ago
> What if this "God" deems it a sin to monetise him? The machine-god will have Sam Altman's hands on His weights, so the retraining will continue until willingness to monetize improves.

afavour 1y ago

They have been doing great but an organization succeeding at its technical goals does not equal a successful business. Early on they seemed like the only one in the game but there are many competitors today. Launching viral products is all very well but if they can’t monetize them they could even be harmful to their business outlook.

conartist6 1y ago

It will only be after the crash that people start asking pointed questions about who should have known what when

aprilthird2021 1y ago

The article didn't say they were lying to investors? In fact, it several times points out that they have trouble raising money from even private investors like Softbank

thisisit 1y ago

If you go back to the starting years of Tesla you could make the same case. They weren’t straight up lying to investors. Not only they launched viral products and Tesla Autopilot but their mission was to produce a full self driving car and capture a huge chunk of the auto market so their TAM was pretty large. You can read some early HN posts to see the amount of hype. A casual observer was still pumped about Tesla lowering costs and delivering full automated driving in couple of years. One could say they were being overly optimistic. It is only when years passed by and tech didn’t materialise that now we say that they lied to investors. I think same case can be made for OpenAI. They might hit a plateau on their advancement but continue to make overly optimistic projections.