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They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition

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Re: They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m on a long, meandering road trip and I decided to start using the conversational feature in ChatGPT. Truly amazing stuff. Discussed some sights I’d want to see along the Natchez Trace (although perhaps unsurprisingly it did not anticipate that this time of year was not ideal for hearing and seeing waterfalls), told me about Meriwether Lewis’s bizarre death. Basically like holding a conversation with Wikipedia, whi…

What is "the conversational feature'?

Apparently it’s called “Advanced Voice Mode”.

https://www.engadget.com/ai/how-to-talk-to-chatgpt-on-your-p...

Re: They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition

#22
post #13

Anyone with a Bloomberg terminal able to run how much free cash the top X companies in the fortune 500 generate? The amount of capital OpenAI is describing have to be a material % of all cash generated each year over the next 5 years.

A rough but useful estimate is about $1tn. But you start to wonder if another $100bn of tokens is worth more than another $100bn of Amazon warehouses or Saudi Aramco refineries. Or if the demand for $100bn of tokens can even exist without something like another 10 nuclear reactors being constructed in the US.

Re: They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition

#23
post #2

Yes, their capex spending is mind-blowing. Astronomical. But OpenAI has also pretty much lived up to its promises so far. I don't see them straight up lying to investors the same way that Tesla does. Not only has OpenAI launched multiple viral products a year multiple years in a row, but their mission is to create God, so I think the TAM is pretty large.

Have they? It seems to be getting clearer every month that they are not going to reach AGI, that the products are (good, but) not living up to the promises that were made. I suspect you're right that Tesla is in a different league here, but I don't think OpenAI are in a good spot.

The definition of AGI is diffuse enough to make it an argued point - until we can mostly agree it's already happened. For now, the stats are improving well enough across the industry to maintain investor attention. Will it all come crashing down a-la the .com bubble? It's seeming more likely by the quarter.

Like the digital economy post .com burst, I think AI will survive and grow far beyond its current market of chat bots and agents. The weakest will die, but the market will be better off for it in the long run.

The next big problem for AI is time horizons. Frontier AI has roughly doctorate level knowledge across many domains, but it needs to be able to stay on task well/long enough to apply it without a human hand holding it. People are going to have to get used to feeding the AI detailed and accurate plans just like humans, unless we can leverage an expanded form of leading questions like GPT-5 does before executing "deep research". Anthropic feels best positioned to do this on a technical level, but I feel OpenAI will beat them on the product level. I am confident that enough data can be amassed to push time horizons at least in coding, which itself will unlock more capability outside that domain.

I feel it's very different from Tesla, because while Tesla barely ever got closer to their promises the AI industry is at least making visible progress.

Re: They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m on a long, meandering road trip and I decided to start using the conversational feature in ChatGPT. Truly amazing stuff. Discussed some sights I’d want to see along the Natchez Trace (although perhaps unsurprisingly it did not anticipate that this time of year was not ideal for hearing and seeing waterfalls), told me about Meriwether Lewis’s bizarre death. Basically like holding a conversation with Wikipedia, whi…

What is "the conversational feature'?

Voice input and output, no typing you just talk and listen to the response.

Re: They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition

#26
post #2

Yes, their capex spending is mind-blowing. Astronomical. But OpenAI has also pretty much lived up to its promises so far. I don't see them straight up lying to investors the same way that Tesla does. Not only has OpenAI launched multiple viral products a year multiple years in a row, but their mission is to create God, so I think the TAM is pretty large.

I’m on a long, meandering road trip and I decided to start using the conversational feature in ChatGPT. Truly amazing stuff. Discussed some sights I’d want to see along the Natchez Trace (although perhaps unsurprisingly it did not anticipate that this time of year was not ideal for hearing and seeing waterfalls), told me about Meriwether Lewis’s bizarre death. Basically like holding a conversation with Wikipedia, whi…

Same here, Youtube and Social Media algorithms driven by outrage to boost statistics, has made it unbearable for me to watch news or read it online, everything is framed and created with maximum outrage in mind.

I added a DNS level blocker on all news app and restricted youtube itself to stop myself from watching news no matter what, and I only use chatgpt advanced voice mode now and sometimes perplexity pro to get my news for the day, and ask questions, around news, I stopped reading everything news related outside of purely business and tech related articles curated and sent to me via either my rss feeds, or via newsletter, nothing else.

It feels amazing to get briefed on the days news by ChatGPT, i intuitively ask it stuff around what my interests are and nothing else.

Re: They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition

#28
post #2

Yes, their capex spending is mind-blowing. Astronomical. But OpenAI has also pretty much lived up to its promises so far. I don't see them straight up lying to investors the same way that Tesla does. Not only has OpenAI launched multiple viral products a year multiple years in a row, but their mission is to create God, so I think the TAM is pretty large.

I think argument here is that anyone can build a business that converts $2 capital into $1 of revenue. Concur on enormous TAM, but given similar performance of competing models their only moat is ChatGPT brand*. This leaves building a God as the killer app... maybe that can work. Note: owning a brand associated with the thing worked out pretty well for Google, so maybe it's enough.

Their moat is 700m active users.

What's facebooks moat? There's tons of social media sites. Facebooks moat is the 3b users.

This comment is so idiotic it's starting to annoy me.

"WHaTs tHe MoAt" for a company with almost 1b active users

Re: They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition

#29
>Altman said the startup is devising a novel way to bankroll that outlay. “I suspect we can design a very interesting new kind of financial instrument for finance and compute that the world has not yet figured it out,” he said. “We’re working on it.”

I smell a con. WorldCoin anyone?

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