Just wanted to point out for the record that the person you're replying to said "inane," not "insane." Might not have changed your reply all that much though. IMO SpaceX is not an inane idea, though it's arguably insane from the perspective of the era when it was founded (2002-ish), but it definitely seems to have succeeded. Tesla might be in the same bucket. But everything else he's been involved with has either bee…
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…
>and no obvious large-scale product-market fit I'm afraid you are in as much an echo chamber as anyone. 200 million+ weekly active users is large scale pmf
but they're not making money and there are plenty substitutes. I bet they have practically zero paid customer retention rate. People say they love it, so what.
>and no obvious large-scale product-market fit I'm afraid you are in as much an echo chamber as anyone. 200 million+ weekly active users is large scale pmf
It’s the fastest product to 100m users ever. Even if they never update their models from here on out, they have an insanely popular and useful product. It’s better at search than Google. Students use it universally. And programmers are dependent on it. Inference is cheap — only training is expensive. To say they don’t have PMF is nuts.
> 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 a…
> 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything Are you so deep in the SV tech echo chamber that you can’t distinguish between tech bro / snake oil salesman hype and something that actual normal people are engaged by? The only people talking about NFTs in a non-disparaging way were delusional in large part because they themselves bought into it wanted to egg others on. NFTs were just…
I think that underestimates public engagements in these hypes. Billions were wasted by "normal" people worldwide on VR headsets, in-game nfts, and shitcoins. Real world money, not some inflated VC capital projections. And while the current LLMs still are an "advanced Eliza", regular people are quite happy to pay for its services.
Sure, but the nuance is Elon only wants what benefits him most at the time. There was no philosophical change, other than now he’s competing. He's allowed these opinions, we’re allowed to ignore them and lawyers are allowed to use this against him.
> but the nuance is Elon only wants what benefits him most at the time. Isn't that almost everyone? The people who left OpenAi could have joined forces but everyone went ahead and created their own company "for AGI" It's like the wild west where everyone dreams of digging up gold.
> Isn't that almost everyone?
Sure. That's why we have contracts and laws to restricts how much one can change without paying or jail. Not every changes are equals.
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…
I guess it depends on what media you follow. As a Brit my recollection was hearing it was a novelty gadget that about a dozen American eccentrics were using, and then there was the story that a guy called Jimi Heselden bought the company and killed himself by driving one off a cliff and then that was about it. Not the same category as AI at all.
I was in the tech space in the UK at the time and the hype behind this was off the charts. I seem to remember a meeting with Bezos where he was super hyped about it, and we had no idea what "it" was still. The speculation was crazy.
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 $80B for a city on Mars."
One of the best things I've ever read. I'm going to use this in my next salary negotiation. Oh you know I don't really care about the number, it's just that I'm working on this plan to desalinate all the water in the oceans.
> I thought everyone wanted him back, and that's why he was able to return. Everyone working at OpenAI wanted him back. Which only includes people who have a significant motivation to see OpenAI succeed financially. Also, there are rumours he can be vindictive. For all I know, that might be a smear campaign. But if that were the case, and half the people at OpenAI wanted him back, the other half would have a motivati…
It sounds to me people working in AI these days have a lot more options than being fraid of a particularly vindictive man.
Between just working on ML tech and working on ML tech with US$XXX billion of Microsoft’s money—salaries aside—imaginably, having access to nuclear plants worth of energy, compute power and cutting edge GPUs, legal department for defending intellectual property violation, etc., makes for a very different value proposition compared to some other startup in the space. (The self-image of working at a company allegedly “advancing humanity” likely helps, too.)
A few weeks ago my OpenAI credits expired and I was billed to replace them. I had no idea this was the business model, fine you got me with your auto-renew scam because you decided my tokens were spoiled. At some point, OpenAI became who they said they werent. You can't even get chatgpt to do anything fun anymore as the lawyers have hobbled its creative expression. And now they want to fight with Elon over what they…
ChatGPT is way less hobbled than Gemini or Claude.
> never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself, and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being re-dubbed as…
I mean nobody needs to bother with anecdotes here. chatgpt.com hit 3.7B visits in October and was #8 in worldwide internet traffic. Open AI say they have 300M weekly active users and 1B messages per day . The idea that it's some fad with no utility or that the general public knows little about it is at this point laughable. It's the software product with by far the fastest adoption any software product has ever seen.…
That actual isn't evidence at all that the general public knows a lot about it, or even uses it much. It can be a small group of very active users.
