Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Evolving OpenAI's Structure

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 746 posts

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#221

Post by [deleted] »

fooker wrote: post #209
jjani wrote: post #107

SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now . If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up - and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy ph…

Google is pretty far behind. They have random one off demos and they beat benchmarks yes, but try to use Google’s AI stuff for real work and it falls apart really fast.

[deleted]

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#222

Post by caseyy »

jjani wrote: post #107

SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now . If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up - and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy ph…

It's doubtful if there even is a race anymore. The last significant AI advancement in the consumer LLM space was fluent human language synthesis around 2020, with its following assistant/chat interface. Since then, everything has been incremental — larger models, new ways to prompt them, cheaper ways to run them, more human feedback, and gaming evaluations.

The wisest move in the chatbot business might be to wait and see if anyone discovers anything profitable before spending more effort and wasting more money on chat R&D, which includes most agentic stuff. Reliable assistants or something along those lines might be the next big breakthrough (if you ask certain futurologists), but the technology we have seems unsuitable for any provable reliability.

ML can be applied in a thousand ways other than LLMs, and many will positively impact our lives and create their own markets. But OpenAI is not in that business. I think the writing is on the wall, and Sama's vocal fry, "AGI is close," and humanity verification crypto coins are smoke and mirrors.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#223

Post by schlch »

fs111 wrote: post #161
jwarden wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brand counts for a lot

Google is one of the most valuable brands ever. Everyone knows it. It is even used for "searching the web" openai is not that strong of a brand

I think for the general public ChatGPT is a much stronger brand than OpenAI itself.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#224

Post by tshaddox »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #187
Jefro118 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made $4 billion last year, not really "little to no money". I agree it's not clear they can justify their valuation but it's certainly not a bubble.

I guarantee you that I could surpass that revenue if I started a business that would give people back $9 if they gave me $4. OpenAI models are already of the most expensive, they don’t have a lot of levers to pull.

> I started a business that would give people back $9 if they gave me $4

I feel like people overuse this criticism. That's not the only way that companies with a lot of revenue lose money. And this isn't at all what OpenAI is doing, at least from their customers' perspective. It's not like customers are subscribing to ChatGPT simply because it gives them something they were going to buy anyway for cheaper.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#225

Post by sekai »

wmf wrote: post #160
elAhmo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have seen how much power does the board have after the firing of Altman - none. Let's see how this plays out. PBC effectively means nothing - just take a look at Xai and its purchase of Twitter. I would love to listen reasoning explaining why this ~33 billion USD move is benefiting public.

ChatGPT is free. That's the public benefit.

They don't collect data?

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#226

Post by BosunoB »

mandevil wrote: post #172
Jefro118 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made $4 billion last year, not really "little to no money". I agree it's not clear they can justify their valuation but it's certainly not a bubble.

But didn't they spend $9 billion? If I have a machine that magically turns $9 billion of investor money into $4 billion in revenue, I need to have a pretty awesome story for how in the future I am going to be making enormous piles of money to pay back that investment. If it looks like frontier models are going to be a commodity and it is not going to be winner-take-all... that's a lot harder story to tell.

Most of that 9 billion was spent on training new models and on staff. If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#227

Post by jameslk »

pi-err wrote: post #133
jjani wrote: post #107

SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now . If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up - and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy ph…

Sounds a lot like "Google+ will catch Facebook in no time". OpenAI has been on a winning streak that makes ChatGPT the default chatbot for most of the planet. Everybody else like you describe is trying to add some AI crap behind a button on a congested UI. B2B market will stay open but OpenAI has certainly not peaked yet.

OpenAI is a relatively unknown company outside of the tech bubble. I told my own mom to install Gemini on her phone because she's heard of Google and is more likely going to trust Google with whatever info she dumps into a chat. I can’t think of a reason she would be compelled to use ChatGPT instead.

Consumer brand companies such as Coca Cola and Pepsi spend millions on brand awareness advertising just to be the “default” in everyone’s heads. When there’s not much consequence choosing one option over another, the one you’ve heard of is all that matters

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#228

Post by BeetleB »

esafak wrote: post #163
BeetleB wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I meant is: Europe can choose to regulate as they do, and end up living in a Chinese dystopia because the Chinese will drastically benefit from non-regulated AI, or they can create their own AI dystopia. A non-AI dystopia is the least likely scenario.

If you are suggesting that China may use AI to attack Europe, they can invest in defense without unleashing AI domestically. And I don't think China will become a utopia with unregulated AI. My impression after having visited it was not one of a utopia, and knowing how they use technology, I don't think AI will usher it in, because our visions of utopia are at odds. They may well enjoy what they have. But if things g…

> If you are suggesting that China may use AI to attack Europe

No - I'm suggesting that China will reap the benefits of AI much more than Europe will, and they will eclipse Europe economically. Their dominance will follow, and they'll be able to dictate terms to other countries (just as the US is doing, and has been doing).

> And I don't think China will become a utopia with unregulated AI.

Did you miss all the places I used the word "dystopia"?

> My impression after having visited it was not one of a utopia, and knowing how they use technology, I don't think AI will usher it in, because our visions of utopia are at odds. They may well enjoy what they have.

Comparing China when I was a kid, not that long ago, to what it is now: It is a dystopia, and that dystopia is responsible for much of the improvements they've made. Enjoying what they have doesn't mean it's not a dystopia. Most people don't understand how willing humans are to live in a dystopia if it improves their condition significantly (not worrying too much about food, shelter, etc).

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#229

Post by pphysch »

miki123211 wrote: post #207
no_wizard wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook had immense network effects working for it back then. What network effect does OpenAI have? Far as I can tell, moving from OpenAI to Gemini or something else is easy. It’s not sticky at all. There’s no “my friends are primarily using OpenAI so I am too” or anything like that. So again, I ask, what makes it sticky?

OpenAI (or, more specifically, Chat GPT) is CocaCola, not Facebook. They have the brand recognition and consumer goodwill no other brand in AI has, incredibly so with school students, who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them. I think better models are enough to dethrone OpenAI in API, B2C and internal enterprise use cases, but OpenAI has consumer mindshare, and they're going to b…

> who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them.

...Until their employer forces them to use Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, or whatever, because that's what they pay for and what integrates into their enterprise stack. And the new employee shrugs and accepts it.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#230

Post by edmundsauto »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #187
Jefro118 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made $4 billion last year, not really "little to no money". I agree it's not clear they can justify their valuation but it's certainly not a bubble.

I guarantee you that I could surpass that revenue if I started a business that would give people back $9 if they gave me $4. OpenAI models are already of the most expensive, they don’t have a lot of levers to pull.

There is a pretty significant different between “buy $9 for $4” and selling a service that costs $9 to build and run per year for $4 per year. Especially when some people think that service could be an absolute game changer for the species.

It’s ok to not buy into the vision or think it’s impossible. But it’s a shallow dismissal to make the unnuanced comparison, especially when we’re talking about a brand new technology - who knows what the cost optimization levers are. Who knows what the market will bear after a few more revs.

When the iPhone first came out, it was too expensive, didn’t do enough, and many people thought it was a waste of apples time when they should be making music players.

Post reply on HN