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Clearly foundation models don’t make money or a viable business on their own
You can say the same about any piece of software...
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From the article 5 billion of the payment is equity in OpenAI. So they aren't spending cash
This still means 1.5B were paid in cash for a company from what I understood has neither clients nor even a product. Not exactly pocket money.
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That is interesting given that reddit has gone from a cultural powerhouse to something most people talk about shamefully, if at all.
The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere. Anecdata, but still. In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram, and I think most ordinary people hold that same view.
They said the same thing about Quora and 3d TV.
That being said, TikTok and Instagram matter. Reddit probably matters more because it's so easy for motivated people and corporations to manipulate discussions on it; it's even weaker than Wikipedia.
50x as many people read Reddit than post on Reddit, and 10x as many people as read Reddit have gotten their opinions indirectly from people passing on stuff they (can't remember that they) saw on Reddit (but think they learned somewhere legitimate.)
A while back someone here on Hacker News made a pretty insightful comment that as great of a designer as Jony Ive is, a large part of his success is owed to the fact that he had an "editor" in the form of Steve Jobs. Once Jobs passed, he no longer really had an editor. It remains to be seen whether Sam Altman / OpenAI in general will be a good editor
Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman) I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for…
Ron Johnson's job where he had the most success was where he was selling fundamentally desirable and great products. I think you would have to be pretty shitty at retail to not do a good job selling iPods and iPhones. His subsequent 2 endeavors, JC Penney and Enjoy, were complete flops. It turns out selling middle-market goods is just really f'ing hard.
Ive, on the other hand, I think is pretty universally recognized as a design genius who was directly responsible for the designs of some of the most important consumer products of the past few decades. Yes, it does seem like Jobs was a critical editor that tempered the worst of Ive's "form over function" tendencies like the butterfly keyboard and removing magsafe, but I think it's fair to say there wouldn't have been an iPhone as it was originally released without Ive.
I feel like Apple still would have had a pretty similar in-store experience even if someone else besides Johnson originally launched it.
First Windsurf and now this. OpenAI is spending billions like there's nothing else to use this money for while being seemingly cash strapped for model training since they already signaled more investment rounds would be needed to remain competitive. They're trying to become too big to fail before they have a moat which won't work well.
From the article 5 billion of the payment is equity in OpenAI. So they aren't spending cash
Just need a way to talk to ChatGPT anytime. Microphone, speaker and permanent connection to ChatGPT. That’s all you need: io One need is being able to talk to ChatGPT in a whisper or silent voice… so you can do it in public. I don’t think that comes from them, but it will be big when it does. Much easier than brain implants! In an ear device, you need enough data of listening to the muscles and the sounds together, t…
The form factor that suggests is an AR headset. Google, Meta, and others have those. They're all flops. Too bulky. Carmack has said that for VR/AR to get any traction, the headgear needs to come down to swim goggle size, and to go mainstream, it has to come down to eyeglass size. He's probably right. Ive would be the kind of guy to push in that direction.
I agree with the first 2 sentences, but not the last. Everyone and their grandmother knows size and bulkiness are big blockers to VR/AR adoption. But the reason we don't have an Apple Vision Pro in an eyeglasses form factor isn't an issue of design, it's an issue of physics.
Meta seems to have decent success with their Ray Bans, which can basically do all the "ask AI" use cases, but true VR/AR fundamentally require much bulkier devices, most of all for battery life.
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This still means 1.5B were paid in cash for a company from what I understood has neither clients nor even a product. Not exactly pocket money.
They already have a product, 500m+ active users, and billions in revenue. They aren't remotely profitable, but that is a different conversation.
First Windsurf and now this. OpenAI is spending billions like there's nothing else to use this money for while being seemingly cash strapped for model training since they already signaled more investment rounds would be needed to remain competitive. They're trying to become too big to fail before they have a moat which won't work well.
They've already claimed that there will be no "GPT-5" LLM, and that instead what they want to call "GPT-5" is a fusion of their various models like 4o, dalle, their video model, etc. That in and of itself is a move that makes it quite clear to me they've hit a wall on the intelligence side. Add these purchases, and it seems like they are extremely desperate.