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The OpenAI Deployment Company
- siva7 5mo agoSo this is body leasing for ai experts under the umbrella of the openai brand? are they moving all their existing fde under this new company?
- righthand 5mo ago> The OpenAI Deployment Company is a committed partnership between OpenAI and 19 leading global investment firms, consultancies, and system integrators. The partnership is led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners, and B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank Corp., Warburg Pincus, and WCAS as founding partners. > Investors also include leading consulting and systems integration firms, including Bain & Company, Capgemini, and McKinsey & Company. All of these companies are invested in Palantir too right? Why does this “deployment company” sound like more Palantir?
- drdrek 5mo agoNothing says easy to use revolutionary new way to work like requiring implementation middlemen. Salesforce would be proud.
- csoups14 5mo agoAn indictment of the technology and the modern corporation. We're supposed to believe this technology is all-powerful and these corporations are efficient and innovative, by the way.
- bena 5mo agoWhich is why I found the Claude Super Bowl ads really weird. They seemed like an indictment of the technology as a whole. The LLM character proxies all spoke with the LLM-cadence and phrasing. Because we all know it. LLM writing is very uncanny valley. And they didn't even try to deny this. It made LLMs itself look like a joke.
- disgruntledphd2 5mo agoI mean, to be fair to OpenAI and this approach, new general purpose technologies (like LLMs) are normally pretty hard to work with at first. Look at electricity in factories and how long it took to have an impact, as well as the massive, massive lag between Visicalc and economy wide productivity increases. I personally do believe that the foundation model companies are a terrible business, but that the technology itself is definitely useful (even if it's vastly unlikely to go full Singularity).
- onlyrealcuzzo 5mo agoI love the tagline: "build businesses around intelligence" As if they are all built around un-intelligence now...
- sethops1 5mo ago> Forward Deployed Engineers We have a word for this, it's "consultant".
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoNo thats different. Consultant you pay to come to your company. Forward Deployed Engineers are payed by the other company to push you spending money at their company.
- siva7 5mo agoWell, in this case the FWE will be payed by you to push you spending more money so the ceo is being able to brag that they are working with openai (instead of mckenzie)
- pphysch 5mo agoSurely the various contracts are pricing in the salary for the FDE, as a feature. "Not only are we giving you terrible software that is impossible for outsiders to learn and operate, but we are also installing a double-agent in your organization who will ensure you don't migrate elsewhere. Pay up unless you want to lose out on the AIs."
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoThere might be other motivations but at least thats how the term differenciates. For OpenAI having more companies using OpenAI and buying tokens etc. helps them and they do have a typical issue: they can move as fast as they want, if no one else is moving with them...
- sandworm101 5mo agoThese are much worse. You can generally fire consultants. These people are from OpenAI. Good luck ever cancelling or reducing your OpenAI contracts when they have people inside your organization. Have fun trying to even discuss it as these people will no doubt insert themselves into every meeting and watercooler discussion involving the contracts they are are paid to protect.
- senko 5mo agoI run a dev agency, and I can spot one when I see one. The trouble with dev agencies, "services companies", integration specialists and "forward deployed engineers" is that they scale lineraly with the number of people. You can't 100x your revenue without at least 80x-ing your headcount.Oh, you might go for that once due to AI - but so can everyone else. After that, it's boring linear growth. When I say "boring", I don't mean as "capitalism requires exponential growth" critique. I mean OpenAI valuation is not priced for that. They're priced for singularity. If the bulk of their revenue turns out to be bodyshop, that's...quite a different math. The way to charge big with this kind of work is to do what big consultancies (MBB, IBM, etc) do: brand equity and (supposed) expertise in solving domain problems. OpenAI has ... interesting tech. It's going to be interesting seeing if they can pull this off. If I were a betting man, my money would be on "no".
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoThe problem with these kinds of businesses is you have no capital. You have labourers. If you’re SAP, you build SAP once and you sell it. If you’re an author, you write the book once. With consulting, you have to keep doing the same work every year just to stand still. You don’t own an actual product.
- senko 5mo agoMostly. Many of these companies do build up internal know-how. In case of big consulting companies, they have huge internal knowledge bases, decks, cases etc from previous engagements. In case of product companies with FDEs, the feedback from customers ideally trickles down to product improvements. In case of OpenAI, they can improve their models. Whether that's actually valuable enough to turn a blind eye to the downsides of consulting, I don't know.
- zelias 5mo agotoo little too late
- clvx 5mo agoThis sounds like forward engineering as a service
- joostdevries 5mo agoI guess this is a sign that Mistral AI is on to something.
- throwaway613746 5mo ago[dead]
- ramesh31 5mo agoSurely bodyshop work will scale to trillions of dollars
- 3638384849 5mo agoAgi 2027 btw or smth
- villgax 5mo agoSo basically people who will wrap the openai SDK but sit at your company's offices lol what a joke
- kyars 5mo agoYes, that is more or less correct.
- yifanl 5mo agoIs the sentiment around OpenAI already so bad that it's even fallen off the front page of Hacker News in two hours?
- surgical_fire 5mo agoWell, it is a repulsive corporation, with a very repulsive CEO. But so is Anthropic and all of Big Tech, so there's that.
- kyars 5mo agoeven ant?
- rubiquity 5mo agoPeople laugh at this, myself included in the past, but it works. I remember scoffing at AWS partnering with Deloitte and Accenture over a decade ago. My exact thoughts were "Our technology is great, why do we need these people to sell it?", and it turns out that selling to enterprises at scale is a lot more like an American high school experience than anything else.
- huflungdung 5mo ago[dead]
- redwood 5mo agoFor those who have not read it this is a terrific overview on the value of the FDE trend https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir
- wunderlotus 5mo agothis was a great read, thank you for sharing it.