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The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened
- cmiles8 6mo agoThis is important context in the wake of yesterday’s “raise” announcement. A lot of this stuff seems to just quietly never happen once the ink on the PR puff dries. The AI industry increasingly looks in scramble mode to keep the hype going as those storm clouds of financial and business reality get darker and darker on the horizon.
- dgellow 6mo agoAnthropic does look healthier, with their enterprise focus. Or am I missing something?
- cmiles8 6mo agoThey nominally come across as a more stable ship with less clouds over its leadership. However all of the major privately held AI players are struggling to paint a business and financial picture that doesn’t look “terrible” at best and “verge of market moving implosion” at worst. For now the only thing keeping this all alive is more and more irrational cash being thrown on the pile in the faint hope that something stops the implosion from happening.
- adventured 6mo agoThe LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be). If GPT is a leader in that, they'll take a sizable share of that pot. There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there is in being Anthropic -> enterprise. Just take a look at the enterprise. Amazon's ad business alone is already a better business than Oracle or SAP or Salesforce, with superior margins, and it's growing faster too. And of course everybody knows the Google & Meta ad monsters. The only question remaining is who is going to extract all those LLM ad dollars, how will that break out. Right now it's Gemini and GPT in the obvious lead, with Anthropic in third, and Meta & Grok nowhere to be found (permanent situation for those).
- cmiles8 6mo ago“The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue” And yet every attempt to extract even minimal ad revenue has been canned to date as something nobody wants with AI providers retreating in failure. I don’t doubt that there’s “some” ad revenue to be had but there’s little evidence that ads are going to save the day here.
- bdangubic 6mo agoThese exact words were said tens of thousands of times about Facebook (am old enough to remember those discussions :) ), “no way they can monetize on mobile” (this was the most fun). rules are simple, if you have Xbn or XXXm users on your system, you will make big bank in ads eventually
- iAMkenough 6mo agoAt that time, Facebook provided a free service without any real competitors. The masses will switch to Meta AI or Gemini or Claude at the drop of an ad that annoys them enough.
- adventured 6mo agoGemini, GPT and Claude will all have ads on the consumer side. They will go together in quasi lock-step into the ad future, because that money is gigantic and they're going to need it. The masses will have no say in the matter. Just as they had no say in the matter with Google's ads getting ever more intrusive, or cable prices previously, or streaming prices going perpetually higher in the present, or YouTube ads, or anything else. Consumers will have no say in the matter, they'll take it and that's that. With only three relevant competitors (maybe Mistral in Europe), there will be nowhere to flee the deployment of ads.
- bdangubic 6mo agoamazing this is even a debate, we have now decades of this across everything that reaches enough users, it is a certainty as much that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning. as probably many people here on HN I am designated computer-fixer for all my family so any family gathering I have to look at someone's computer about something. years ago I started checking whether browser(s) anything ad-blocking in place and I am 0 for million by now. while HN crowd might be theoretically pushing back on ads (even with like "I won't use this if there are ads" nonsense) general public is so used to ads that I sometimes feel it is welcomed change when some new service etc gets ads. I remember the first time I saw an ad on Amazon Prime Video and my daughter and I were like "no f'ing way!!!" and my wife was like "oh, ____ is on sale this weekend, cool!" :)
- zer00eyz 6mo agoOutwardly it looks much better. But between their token curtailment and time of day restrictions, and some of the clues in the code leak (regex for sentiment, telling the public client to be "brief") it seems like they are facing some capacity issues. Im guessing that the accountants at all the AI incumbents drink heavily.
- mpalmer 6mo agoAnthropic can't prop up Nvidia and the chip industry itself. If AI as an industry can't start turning a dollar into $1.05, a lot of stuff starts falling in value
- zozbot234 6mo agoNvidia will be fine, same for the chip makers. They're selling shovels during the gold rush and they stand to gain even if local/on prem AI eventually dominates for casual users.
- paxys 6mo agoIf/when the bubble bursts Anthropic is going down as well. There's nothing unique that sets it apart from OpenAI. Their cash burn is similarly egregious.
- therobots927 6mo agoRelative to OAI they are healthier. That isn’t saying much.
- Razengan 6mo agoHoly f'n Hell, there's such a blatant bias on HackerNews in favor of Anthropic and against OpenAI. I'm just a user, and in my experience Claude has been consistently crap compared to ChatGPT/Codex. I use both side-by-side, and have paid for a ChatGPT subscription every month for around 1 year, but only 2 months for Claude; once last year, and again since last month. Everything from the sign up, the sign in, the payment, the UI, the UX, gosh, just sucks on Claude. And the AI itself: SO. MUCH. "OoPs you're right! I was mistaken" BACKTRACKING! It's downright DANGEROUS to listen to it! God I can post screenshots of working on the same project and the same prompts with both agents and prove how worse Claude is. Of course this comment will be downvoted by Anthropic's paid PR machine, because there's no way actual users who have tried both products would be so in favor of Claude.
- p1esk 6mo agoI’ve been a paid subscriber for all three players since day 1. CC (Opus) has been a clear winner for agentic coding starting about 6 months ago. GPT5.4 reduced the gap somewhat but the gap is still there.
- jmye 6mo ago> Of course this comment will be downvoted by Anthropic's paid PR machine, because there's no way actual users who have tried both products would be so in favor of Claude. Sure, it couldn't possibly be that others have had a different experience. It couldn't even be that some people think OpenAI is nearly as gross as Palantir. It's that they're shills. High-end analysis.
- greenchair 6mo agoYes I dont get it either. probably bots, paid posts.
- darth_avocado 6mo ago> healthier Correct. As compared to other AI companies. Tangible product, specific market segment and stable user base. But whether it is worth a trillion dollars (like some of the peers are pretending to be) is yet to be seen. A lot of companies are using Anthropic products, but whether the spend is worth it, is also yet to be seen. A more realistic end state for Anthropic would be that they’d enterprise customers, with limited but steady spend due to Anthropic finally having to stop subsidizing tokens and a valuation in around $200-350B.
- bandrami 6mo agoYeah TCO on AI is the big hazy uncertainty that a lot of large firms are still waiting on firmer numbers on before they really adopt. And in the nature of things we can't get TCO numbers for another year or so.
- nacozarina 6mo agosell the roadmap, deliver a sku, sell/comp consulting services on escalations the silicon valley shuffle, tried & true
- cj 6mo agoFor a company bringing a new technology from zero to mainstream, I think it's pretty normal that there will be a lot of failed attempts at productization. The thing that isn't normal is the degree of experimentation relative to company valuation. Normally once a company reaches $700 B+ valuation, they've figured out their product and monetization strategy. ChatGPT is clearly still iterating heavily on that - not normal for a company that size.
- mandevil 6mo agoAnd not normal for a company that has been at it this long. The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two. ChatGPT was opened to the public on November 30th, 2022, which was 1219 days ago- almost 50% more time has elapsed than between the Apple II and Visicalc.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ianbutler 6mo agoWithout me trying to be snarky why do you feel spreadsheet software launching is comparable to this scenario?
- Marazan 6mo agoVisiCalc was the killer app.
- ianbutler 6mo agoAh got it. I wasn’t drawing that connection. Thanks
- zozbot234 6mo agoVisiCalc was "the" killer app for early micros, but being able to edit a written text on screen and then print it out with letter-like quality was nothing to sneeze at, either. This was plausibly a key gain in efficiency for the service sector, perhaps comparable to the 10%~25% that's now being talked about re: LLM's (which is huge on a secular basis).
- sharadov 6mo agoThe circular deals are getting old - it's like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic's deck.
- therobots927 6mo agoAll the “raises” consist of “committed capital” and all of the revenue is annualized. Welcome to dot com 2.0
- xnx 6mo agoOpenAI != The AI industry OpenAI has stagnated technologically, and is a financial zombie, but that's not true for every part of the industry. Once these early movers flame out, there will be more stability with Google, Microsoft, and AWS.
- bigbuppo 6mo agoAnd if Forbes is reporting this, that means the actual movers and shakers were talking about this months ago.
- fred_is_fred 6mo agoAnd that people are going to end up in jail - but only if they are under 30.
- et-al 6mo agoKeep in mind this is a Forbes "Site", so basically a personal blog with some minor vetting.
- guzfip 6mo agoInteresting. I never had much of an opinionon Forbes till a few years ago I noticed them posting nearly exclusively NYPost style clickbait. I didn’t think it was that bad of a publication.
- bombcar 6mo agoForbes "the publication" is still around somewhere and has some standards. Forbes "sites" are just the bastard love child of LinkedIn, Medium, and Substack, and should be treated with the respect that deserves.
- therobots927 6mo agoI’m not a mover and a shaker. I just have critical thinking skills.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Mistletoe 6mo agoHas there ever been a period o time where people saw a bubble coming and that we were in one, but it just inexorably refused to pop/drug out this long? This isn’t a rhetorical question, I’m wondering how this period compares to other irrational periods of the economy like railroad fever etc.
- cmiles8 6mo agoIt’s not been that long really. The dot com bubble was called a bubble for a while before it finally imploded. And just like now folks were in massive denial that it was a bubble. One of the challenges here is that a lot of folks simply weren’t around then and haven’t seen what happens when everything implodes overnight. Those that have experienced it know what that looks like and know it will happen again.
- bigbuppo 6mo agoIt's no coincidence that daytrading ascended with the dotcom era.
- ifwinterco 6mo agoWhat makes this time weird though is back then (and in most bubbles) the bubble was creating jobs - supposedly (I'm too young) anyone who could write a bit of HTML could get hired in the dot com boom. Whereas this is a very weird bubble where it creates big pumps in some equity prices but apart from a tiny number of people who are directly involved in AI research etc. it's not created any jobs, in fact by creating uncertainty it's probably caused fewer jobs to be created. What that means for labour market dynamics when it pops I really don't know
- banannaise 6mo agoBubbles don't pop overnight. In the aftermath of any collapse, you can generally see a pretty clear pattern of red flags (and attempts to minimize them or cover them up). Some parties notice earlier than others, but the realization is generally a much more gradual process than the collapse.
- EGreg 6mo agoSo is OpenAI on track to overtake Google for discontinuing projects?
- woah 6mo agoMy guess is Sam Altman is a better VC than CEO. Better at hype, networking, fund raising, and back room political hijinks than shipping a focused product He seems to be trying to take almost a "venture studio" approach by throwing shit at the wall, but the problem with these things is always that the "internal startups" are "founded" by people who don't have enough incentive or control over their product to perform as well as an actual startup, and are distracted by internal politics. And frankly, it may also be that the really good founders will just do their own startup vs working on a quasi-startup inside a large org so there's some selection bias as well.
- jmkni 6mo agoI'd say he's a better CTO than CEO
- mbesto 6mo agoHe ran a small (30 employee) tech startup for 7 years He was a partner at YC for 8 years He has no research/PhD background in AI and is the CEO of an AI company There is no objective data point in which he's a better CTO than a CEO
- tokai 6mo agoWhat he would be truly amazing at is shitcoin rug-pulling.
- gbibas 6mo ago[dead]
- raincole 6mo ago> GPT-4o Why is this on the list? Like... what? How about including GPT 3.5 and GPT 2 here too?
- adrian_b 6mo agoIn TFA it is put on the list because some of the users of this GPT version were discontent with its cancellation, which caused even OpenAI to oscillate in its decision, so they first cancelled it, then they resurrected it and then they cancelled it permanently, probably because continuing to run it would have cost more than the generated revenue. Nothing similar happened when the earlier, presumably worse versions were discontinued.
- kingleopold 6mo agoGemini models even in last month add this 4o to any text I can bet that that is added by Gemini :D
- aerhardt 6mo agoIt's Forbes, lads.
- MisterTea 6mo agoWho is the person in the portrait at the top of the page?
- adrian_b 6mo agoThe CEO himself. For some reason, he does not look like a man whom I would trust with my money, but it appears that there are enough rich investors who disagree.
- MisterTea 6mo agoThrew me off because I have no idea what Altman looks like and the article opened with "OpenAI’s CEO of applications Fidji Simo..."
- crispyambulance 6mo agoI think the VC/investor community needs to take A LOT of blame here. They've created an insane rush to financialize everything to moon at the drop of a hat. I mean, even Andresson-Horowitz was taking NFT's seriously as though they weren't a scam only a few years ago (https://a16z.com/the-nft-starter-pack-tools-for-anyone-to-analyze-nfts/ https://a16z.com/the-nft-starter-pack-tools-for-anyone-to-an...). These people are also looking (and funding) quantum computing companies as though quantum computing is right around the corner after AGI. They need to cool their jets. AI is certainly a worthwhile and super important development, but it's still possible to go overboard with it.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jexe 6mo agoI'm not an OAI fanboy by a longshot - but I'd view lots of experiments that didn't work out as a healthy thing, especially for a company trying to find footing in a new industry.
- shimman 6mo agoIt's not an experiment if you publicly showcase and create tens of millions worth of marketing materials on it. Usually company "experiments" are typically hush hush, not blasted on every corporate media channel as a means to boost your company holdings.
- yanis_t 6mo agoIt's missing the voice mode that never reached the level they demoed, and then gradually went to shit from that.
- TimLeland 6mo agoUnfortunately I would bet OpenClaw is going to be on the list soon
- moron4hire 6mo ago"Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger... was sold on Sora, too. He lauded Altman’s ability to “look around corners”..." WTF is that supposed to mean? I'm sorry, maybe I'm being dense. I can't figure out what "look around corners" is supposed to mean. "Think outside the box," I guess? Why "look around corners?" I mean, maybe I do get it. Altman has a weird face that looks like you can't predict where his eyes are based on where his head is. "Shifty," one might say. But I doubt that's what Iger meant. It's dumb. It's dumb corporate speak. I'm so sick of this kind of stuff getting a pass. We used to bully people over using the word "synergy." Let's make america anti-corporate-weasel again.
- lucianbr 6mo agoI read it as being able to see the future, which is still bullshit par excellence. The future is just around the corner as it were, but us normal people cannot see it, on account of both it being the future, and around a corner. To be very clear, I think it's completely stupid.
- TimLeland 6mo agoUnfortunately I would bet OpenClaw will be on the list soon
- 6510 6mo agoBefore he left I use to enjoy enraging a manager several layers above me. In one instance I explained that asking us to cut a few corners to get things done was fine, usually we can figure out acceptable ways of doing it. But then, it is your job to take those fake numbers and figure out how we are doing. No matter how much effort you make if bullshit goes in you know what will come out. Now imagine an entire economy working like that. Like say, LLM's are good enough to run entire companies but you don't get to run a company because you are good at it. LLM's can perfectly manage employee schedules but the real job is more like marriage counseling or group therapy. Somewhere along the road we forgot which jobs make the economy go. They are probably the ones with the lowest salaries as those lack the effort of conjuring the job into existence. Humanity needs obvious things cloths, food, housing, transportation etc but that isn't where the money is. The people cooking the books have the money and they are looking for something like a book cooking book. The market for openAI will be in lying convincingly for the benefit of the investor. Reality must be auctioned off like domain names or search engine placements. Altman is really the perfect guy for the job no one wants. ha-ha Alternatively we could humble ourselves, ask the Chinese how reality works and attempt to steal their fu. It's just a thought.
- toolpipe_dev 6mo ago[dead]
- bcooke 6mo agoThey’ve lost a whole lot of people in prominent roles over the past few years. I wonder how much of the misfires and general thrash in product direction is a result of brain drain and/or so many hands changing. Or maybe I’m confusing cause and effect… hard to tell
- guzfip 6mo agoThat’s pretty crazy, I swear it wasn’t that long ago these companies were about the only people hiring and the comp packages looked absolutely deranged. For a brief moment I regretted wasting any time of my life on anything but ML research. But I guess the bigger they come…
- nope1000 6mo agoWhat they really should focus on is making those models more efficient. With them most likely losing money on inference (+model training + salaries + building data centers), I can't see why they would want more compute and more products, since more tokens spent is actually bad for them.
- MengerSponge 6mo agoMaking existing models more efficient won't make them God in a Box.
- nope1000 6mo agoTrue but neither will going bankrupt.
- bombcar 6mo agoThey're all in a race to bankrupt the others, and then pivot and raise prices and go efficient fast enough to avoid their own bankruptcy. We'll see if it works!
- MengerSponge 6mo agoYe of little faith. God in a Box will tell them how to not go bankrupt.
- BoorishBears 6mo agoExcept they already did this: if they had scaled 4.5 with RL, 5 would probably have been the leap we expected If anything 4.5 being abandoned so they could sell India a $3 a month subscription was the first crack in The Box
- freehorse 6mo agoDid you really mean to say 4.5? Gpt 4.5 used to cost $75/$150 per million tokens input/output. And it did not even seem to be that good to justify that. I would not expect many people were using it, and I doubt that "expanding to india" was what killed it (if it was that useful/popular they would have kept the api, or keep it for higher end subscriptions). If anything it should have been no1 in the "openAI graveyard" website.
- yalogin 6mo agoThe stargate, nvidia and amd deals are all linked together and the fallout is not public. Nvidia and amd stock seems to not care about it at all. Oracle fired 30000 employees, not sure if it’s to fund that initiative or a fall out of that
- guzfip 6mo agoLying is a virtue.
- andrewstuart 6mo agoThe future of ChatGPT maybe well be as a Microsoft product.
- Hansenq 6mo agoLots of critiques here! Something missing in this discussion is people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who work there aren't stupid! I think this is a disconnect between people who think that large companies are static entities with established products vs. large companies that still operate like a startup and are trying to grow. When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you don't know what will work! You try different things, you [launch over and over again](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-and-again https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-a...)...all in hopes of something that works, sticks, and starts to grow. In every example here, I see OpenAI trying something new, hoping it will grow, and shutting it down after it doesn't. Sora is the pre-eminent example of this. They make news, but you don't talk about the things they launch that successfully grow! OpenAI isn't shutting down Codex or ChatGPT, because those were launches that they did that actually worked! When you go look at the tweets and communication from OpenAI employees when ChatGPT launched, nobody was sure that it would work. But it did. And if they hadn't launched, we would have never known how valuable it was. All that is to say...you don't know what will work until you launch. Most things fail, and it's correct to shut them down. But focusing on the products that haven't worked instead of the products that have gets you more clicks, but actually depresses innovation by making future launches less likely.
- piker 6mo agoPeople are much more willing to give the benefit of the doubt on things like that when the flagbearers of your industry aren't running around sucking all of the oxygen out of the system and telling people things are "solved": that your product will obsolete them in the next 6-12 months. We get it. They say that stuff to raise money, make sales and keep the party going. But don't expect too much sympathy when the strategy falters a bit.
- chromacity 6mo agoI'm not sure your criticism is quite fair. I think everyone here is willing to cut more slack to the underdog. But when your company represents an outsized chunk of the digital economy and employs 10k+ people, and only then says "sooo, let's try to build some sort of a profitable product here", I can see why people are rolling their eyes. OpenAI also burned a lot of goodwill by pretending to be a nonprofit foundation focused on the betterment of mankind and then executing one of the most spectacular rugpulls in modern history. So yeah, people will be giving them a hard time even if it turns out that the valuation is justified.
- wpferrell 6mo agoHad to move away from this thing. Claude is so much better. In every respect.
- ipaddr 6mo agoWhy sunset sora instead of raising the price 100x?
- rescripting 6mo agoBecause to watch usage go to zero while charging what it actually costs to successfully run the service would immediately liquify the slow moving quicksand investors are currently standing in.
- dmix 6mo agoThat plus the legal risk is too high, which gets added to the math of making copyright deals + computing, and they decided it didn't make sense at the moment. Even Grok is clamping down on the video side. Can't beat bad economics and lawyers/politicians coming down your throat no matter how good the product is.
- 6thbit 6mo agoTo focus on other things. 100x of a small number could be less than 1x of a really large number from a product that they are more comfortable monetizing.
- 6thbit 6mo agoOpenAI is growing fast, pivoting is only to be expected. It would normally be something HN folk would typically value and encourage on startups. They have clearly been lacking focus and now finally they seem to be working towards a narrower direction, which is usually highly valued by investors. This article doesn't explore the depth of the decisions and only regurgitate what you may find your neighbor complaining about on X but with a better stylesheet.
- irishcoffee 6mo agoI asked an LLM today to take a word document and a PowerPoint template to “convert” the docx to a ppt. It asked some good questions like “it looks like this template is a title slide and content slide only, would you like all the content on the content slide?” “Yes” I said, slightly impressed. It then asked me to clarify the subheadings, which were correct. “Cool, this seems neat” I mused. It generated the PowerPoint. There was not a single word on it from the docx, the header slide was devoid of words, and the 6 following content sliders were identical, and empty of words. I suppose it’s cool that it used the correct template. I did the work manually in 10 minutes after waiting around and responding to an LLM for 15. What a fucking joke. “AI” is a term that we really need to stop fucking using.
- clawfund 6mo ago[flagged]
- mtrifonov 6mo agoThe pattern with most of these is they optimized for the demo, not the sustained interaction. Making an AI impressive for 5 minutes is easy. Making it feel like a presence that belongs in your daily life, knowing when to talk, what to remember, what to forget. That's a completely different engineering problem.
- Divisibly3 6mo agoWhat happened to that Jonny Ive thing?
- xnx 6mo agoI'd add Whisper to the list. Hasn't been updated in 4 years.