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I think there are two things that happened 1. OpenAI bet largely on consumer. Consumers have mostly rejected AI. And in a lot of cases even hate it (can't go o
by ryanSrich 8mo ago
I think there are two things that happened
1. OpenAI bet largely on consumer. Consumers have mostly rejected AI. And in a lot of cases even hate it (can't go on TikTok or Reddit without people calling something slop, or hating on AI generated content). Anthropic on the other hand went all in on B2B and coding. That seems to be the much better market to be in.
2. Sam Altman is profoundly unlikable.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- cschep 8mo ago#2 cannot be understated
- edoceo 8mo agoWas the golden boy for a while? What shifted? I don't even remember what he did "first" to get the status. Is it maybe just a case of familiarity breeding contempt?
- icepush 8mo agoIt is starting to become clear to more and more people that Sam is a dyed in the wool True Believer in AGI. While it's obvious in hindsight that OpenAI would never have gotten anywhere if he wasn't, seeing it so starkly is really rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.
- steveBK123 8mo agoAdvertising Generated Income?
- Bayko 8mo agoDamm this is smart. I like it
- steveBK123 8mo agoSomeone else said it first here
- upboundspiral 8mo agoOne of my favorites is Amphora of Great Intelligence by the artist David Revoy. https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1090/the-amphora-of-great-intelligence-agi https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1090/the-amphora-of-great-... https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1092/the-amphora-of-great-intelligence-agi-part-2 https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1092/the-amphora-of-great-...
- justcool393 8mo agoit's even worse than that and i hope people recognize that it's not that he's a True Believer (though the TBs are often hilarious) it's that he has no ethics to speak of at all. it's not that he's out of touch, it's that he simply does not care.
- munksbeer 8mo agoWhy would him believing in AGI make people dislike him? He is clearly disliked by a lot of tech community, I don't see his AGI belief as a big part of that.
- icepush 8mo agoWell, in the world where AGI is created and it goes suboptimally, everybody gets turned into computronium and goes extinct, which is a prospect some are miffed about. And, in the world where it goes well, no decision of any consequence is made by a human being ever again, since the computer has planned every significant life event since before their birth. Free will in a very literal sense will have been erased. Sam being a true believer means he is not going to stop working until one of these worlds comes true. People who understand the stakes are understandably irked by him.
- pinnochio 8mo agoAll the manipulation and lying that got him fired.
- chihuahua 8mo agoHe is a pretty interesting case. According to the book "Empire of AI" about OpenAI, he lies constantly, even about things that are too trivial to matter. So it may be part of some compulsive behavior. And when two people want different things from him, he "resolves" the conflict by agreeing with each of them separately, and then each assumes they got what they wanted, until they talk to the other person and find out that nothing was resolved. Really not a person who is qualified to run a company, except the constant lying is good for fundraising and PR.
- kreelman 8mo agoHe was once a big pin in Y Combinator (I think kind of ran it?)... Paul Graham thought he was great for YC. Interesting that he's got as far as he has with this issue. I don't think you can run a company effectively if you don't deal in truth. Some of his videos have seemed quite bizarre as well, quite sarcastic about concerns people have about AI in general.
- owebmaster 8mo ago> He was once a big pin in Y Combinator (I think kind of ran it?)... Paul Graham thought he was great for YC. And today it seems everyone will at YC hate him but pretend not
- junofan 8mo agoSounds like when people are politicking he just takes a “whatever” approach haha. That seems reasonable.
- pinnochio 8mo agoNo, that's not what he's doing.
- onetokeoverthe 8mo ago[dead]
- PunchyHamster 8mo agoWell, he made mistake many billionaires do, he opened his mouth with his own thoughts, instead of just reading what PR department told him to read
- notyourwork 8mo agoCringey to watch their interviews.
- 3kkdd 8mo agoIndeed. Sama seems to be incredibly delusional. OAI going bust is going to really damage his well-being, irrespective of his financial wealth. Brother really thought he was going to take over the world at one point.
- ambicapter 8mo agoScariest part is it probably won't, and he'll be back in five year with something else.
- oska 8mo agoDo you see Sam Bankman-Fried getting reinstated? I don't and I see Sam Altman as a greater fraud than that (loathsome) individual. And I don't think Sam gets through the coming bubble pop without being widely exposed (and likely prosecuted) as a fraudster.
- PunchyHamster 8mo agoPeople lying to everyone lie to themselves the most
- glalonde 8mo ago*Overstated
- cschep 8mo agooops, yup.
- jackblemming 8mo agoYou have to give credit to Sam, he’s charismatic enough to the right people to climb man made corporate structures. He was also smart enough to be at the right place at the right time to enrich himself (Silicon Valley). He seems to be pretty good at cutting deals. Unfortunately all of the above seems to be at odds with having any sort of moral core.
- 3kkdd 8mo agoErmmm what? He and his personality caused people like Ilya to leave. At that point the failure risk of OAI jumped tremendously. The reality he will have to face is, he has caused OAIs demise. Perhaps hes ok with that as long as OAI goes down with him. Would expect nothing less from him.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- moomoo11 8mo ago[flagged]
- CamperBob2 8mo agoIlya took a swing at the king and missed. It would have been awkward to hang around after that debacle.
- 9dev 8mo agoAll this drama is mostly irrelevant outside a very narrow and very online community. The demise of OpenAI is rooted in the bad product market fit, since many people like using ChatGPT for free, but fewer are ready to pay for it. And that’s pretty much all there is to it. OpenAI bet on consumers, made a slopstagram that unsurprisingly didn’t revolutionise content, and doesn’t sell as many licenses as they would like.
- randomNumber7 8mo agoImo they'll soon make a lot of money with advertisement. Whenever chatgpt brings you to some website to buy a product they will get some share.
- moomoo11 8mo agoI actually think Sam is “better” than say Elon or Dario because he seems like a typical SF/SV tech bro. You probably know the type (not talking about some 600k TC fang worker, I mean entrepreneurs). He says a lot of fluff, doesn’t try to be very extreme, and focuses on selling. I don’t know him personally but he comes across like an average person if that makes sense (in this environment that is). I think I personally prefer that over Elon’s self induced mental illnesses and Dario being a doomer promoting the “end” of (insert a profession here) in 12 months every 6 months. It’s hard for me to trust a megalomaniac or a total nerd. So Sam is kinda in the middle there. I hope OpenAI continues to dominate even if the margins of winning tighten.
- ryanSrich 8mo agoElon is one of the most unlikable people on the planet, so I wouldn't consider him much of a bar.
- jacquesm 8mo agoHah, you beat me to it, serves me right for writing longer comments. Have an upvote ;)
- moomoo11 8mo agoIt’s kind of sad. I can’t believe I used to like him back in the iron man days. Back then I thought he was cool for the various ideas and projects he was working on. I still think many of those are great but he as a person let me down. Now I have him muted on X.
- jordanb 8mo agoBack then he had a PR firm working for him, getting him cameos and good press. But in 2020 he fired them deciding that his own "radically awesome" personality doesn't need any filtering. Personally I don't think Elon is the worst billionaire, he's just the one dumb enough to not have any PR (since 2020). They're all pretty reprehensible creatures.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoInstead of anecdotes about “what you saw on TikTok and Reddit”, it’s really not that hard to lookup how many paid users ChatGPT has. Besides OpenAI was never going to recoup the billions of dollars based on advertising or $20/month subscriptions
- okhobb 8mo agoIs CEO likeability a reliable predictor?
- pizlonator 8mo agogood point. I don't think it is at all The CEO just has to have followership: the people who work there have to think that this is a good person to follow. Even they don't have to "like" him
- LunaSea 8mo agoAsk Tesla about the impact of their CEOs likeability on their sales.
- catdog 8mo agoI think it depends how visible the CEO is to (potential) customers, in this case very visible, he is in the media all the time.
- redanddead 8mo agoThey pay to be in the media
- nl 8mo ago> Consumers have mostly rejected AI. People like to complain about things, but consumers are heavily using AI. ChatGPT.com is now up to the 4th most visited website in the world: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users
- isk517 8mo agoUsually when I hear about people using ChatGPT they are usually just using it as a search engine that delivers summarized results. The average person wouldn't use email if they had to pay for it, good luck making money off of all of those visitors without just becoming another ad tech company competing with the other ad tech companies.
- drawfloat 8mo agoWe’ve seen many times that platforms can be popular and widely disliked at the same time. Facebook is a clear example. The difference there is it became hated after it was established and financially successful. If you need to turn free visitors in to paying customers, that general mood of “AI is bad and going to make me lose my job/fuck up society” is yet another hurdle OpenAI will have to overcome.
- philistine 8mo agoYeah, every single big website is totally free. People have complex emotions toward Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, but they don't have to pull out their wallet. That's a bridge too far for many people.
- ryanSrich 8mo agoAre they paying through? Reddit was also popular for a long time and didn't make much money. My point was more that it seems this wave of AI is more profitable if you're in B2B vs. B2C.
- simianwords 8mo agoIt’s incorrect to point out that consumers have rejected AI. The strategy here is more valid in my opinion. The value in AI is much more legible when the consumer uses it directly from their chat UI than whatever enterprises can come up with. I can suggest many ways that consumers can use it directly from chat window. Value from enterprise use is actually not that clear. I can see coding but that’s about it. Can you tell me ways in which enterprises can use AI in ways that is not just providing their employees with chaggpt access?
- simianwords 8mo agoNaive to call Sam Altman unlikeable.
- g947o 8mo ago> OpenAI bet largely on consumer Source on that? Lots of organizations offer ChatGPT subscriptions, and Microsoft pushes Copilot as hard as it can which uses GPT models.
- BoredomIsFun 8mo agoThose who is publicly hating LLMs still use them though, even for the stuff the claim to hate, like writing fanfic.
- senordevnyc 8mo agoHN is such a bubble. ChatGPT is wildly successful, and about to be an order of magnitude more so, once they add ads. And I have never heard a non-technical person mention Altman. I highly doubt they have any idea who he is, or care. They’re all still using ChatGPT.
- filoeleven 8mo ago> and about to be an order of magnitude more so, once they add ads. How do you figure?