Live data from Hacker News

Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

openai.com

171–180 of 678 posts

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#171
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

Nobody seems to remember how the Segway was going to change our world, backed by many of the VC power figures at the time + Steve Jobs.

The hype cycle for Segway was insane. Ginger (code name) wasn’t just going to change the world, it was going to cause us to rethink how cities were laid out and designed. No one would get around the world in the same way.

The engineering behind it was really quite nice, but the hype set it up to fail. If it hasn’t been talked up so much in the media, the launch wouldn’t have felt so flat. There was no way for them to live up to the hype.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#172

For-profit isn't the problem. Lying about being non-profit to raise funds, and _then_ become for-profit, that's the underlying concern.

Its true. Also it looks like Musks original statement was correct that they should have gone with a C-corp instead of a NFP.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#173
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not talking about your anecdotes, they're talking about the capex and returns. Which are overwhelmingly negative.

I mean, inference costs have decreased like 1000x in a few years. OpenAI is the fastest growing startup by revenue, ever. How foolish do you have be to be worrying about ROI right now? The companies that are building out the datacenters produce billions per year in free cash flow. Maybe OP would prefer a dividend?

> OpenAI is the fastest growing startup by revenue, ever.

No it's not. Facebook hit $2B in Revenue in late 2010 - early 2011, ~5 years after its founding.

https://dazeinfo.com/2018/11/14/facebook-revenue-and-net-inc...

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#174
It's an aside, but these sorts of timelines are very American centric.

I don't know when your autumn ("fall") or summer are in relation to September. Don't mix keys here, either use months or quarters, not a mix of things including some relative to a specific hemisphere.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#175
post #34

Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting: "On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."

This made me laugh but also made me think, "...that's it? That's all it takes?"

Land on Mars is cheap...

But no, I really doubt that's all it takes. Unless you discount all of the R&D costs as SpaceX operational expenses.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#177

It's an aside, but these sorts of timelines are very American centric. I don't know when your autumn ("fall") or summer are in relation to September. Don't mix keys here, either use months or quarters, not a mix of things including some relative to a specific hemisphere.

OpenAI is an American company

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#178
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody seems to remember how the Segway was going to change our world, backed by many of the VC power figures at the time + Steve Jobs.

You mean Steve Wozniak. Close but no LSD

Steve Jobs said that Segways had the potential to be "as big a deal as the PC."

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#179
post #128
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

> Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? Yes, frequently and loudly. When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors . > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much l…

> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public.

Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others .

2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on .

- self driving has not transformed us into minority report and despite how far it has come it cannot in next 30 years be ubiquitous, even if the l5 magic tech exists today in every new car sold it will take 15 years for current cars to lifecycle.

- Crypto has not replaced fiat currency , even in most generous reading you can see it as store of value like gold or whatever useless baubles people assign arbitrary value to, but has no traction for 3 out of other 4 key functions of money .

- VR is not transformative to every day life and is 5 fundamental breakthroughs away.

- Voice assistants are useless setting alarms and selecting music 10 years in.

There has been meaningful and measurable in each of these fields, but none of them have met the high bar of world transforming .

AI is aiming for much higher bar of singularity and consciousness. Just in every hype cycles we are in peak of inflated expectations, we will reach a plateau of productivity where it is will be useful in specific areas (as it already is) and people will move on to the next fad.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#180
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that owning Twitter was worth half a Mars colony to him should give you an idea of how seriously he's taking this whole thing. It's up there next to "Full Self Driving" and "$25,000 EV" in the Big Jar of Promises Used To Raise Capital and Nothing Else.

[flagged]

I've been hearing "nearly feature complete" for over a decade now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Predictions_for_Autono...
Post reply on HN