Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

theverge.com

41–50 of 960 posts

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#42
post #31

> There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development. It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed. Throw in a knee-jerk solution of "daily call" (sound familiar?) for those involved while they are wading knee-deep through work and you have a perfect storm of terrib…

Imho it just shows how relatively simple this technology really is, and nobody will have a moat. The bubble will pop.

amazing how the bubble pops either from the technology either being too simple or being too complex to make a profit

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#43
post #5

> the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.

The bottleneck isn’t the people doing the work but the leadership’s bandwidth for strategic thinking

I think it's a matter of public perception and user sentiment. You don't want to shove ads into a product that people are already complaining about. And you don't want the media asking questions like why you rolled out a "health assistant" at the same time you were scrambling to address major safety, reliability, and legal challenges.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#44
In one of the Indian movies, there is a rather funny line that goes like this "tu jiss school se padh kar aaya hai mein uss school ka headmaster hoon". It would translate like this "The school from which you studied and came? I am the principal of that school". Looks like Google is about to show who the true principal is

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#45
post #5

> the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.

There are two layers here: 1) low level LLM architecture 2) applying low level LLM architecture in novel ways. It is true that there are maybe a couple hundred people who can make significant advances on layer 1, but layer 2 constantly drives progress on whatever level of capability layer 1 is at, and it depends mostly on broad and diverse subject matter expertise, and doesn't require any low level ability to implement or improve on LLM architectures, only understanding how to apply them more effectively in new fields. The real key thing is finding ways to create automated validation systems, similar to what is possible for coding, that can be used to create synthetic datasets for reinforcement learning. Layer 2 capabilities do feed back into improved core models, even if you have the same core architecture, because you are generating more and improved data for retraining.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#46
We are in a pretty amazing situation. If you're willing to go down 10% in benchmark scores, you easily 25% your costs. Now with Deepseek 3.2 another shot across the bow.

But if the ML, if SOTA intelligence becomes basically a price war, won't that mean that Google (and OpenAI and Microsoft and any other big model) lose big? Especially Google, as the margin even Google cloud (famously a lot lower than Google's other businesses) requires to survive has got to be sizeable.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#47
post #5

> the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.

Far be it from me to backseat drive for Sam Altman, but is the problem really that the core product needs improvement, or that it needs a better ecosystem? I can't imagine people are choosing they're chatbots based on providing the perfect answers, it's what you can do with it. I would assume google has the advantage because it's built into a tool people already use every day, not because it's nominally "better" at generating text. Didn't people prefer chatgpt 4 to 5 anyways?

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#48
post #12

I take this code red as a red flag. Open AI should continue to concern itself with where it will be 5 years from now, not lose sight over concern about where it will 5 months from now.

Back in the day before Adobe bought Macromedia, there was a constant back and forth between Illustrator and Freehand where each release would better the competitor at least until the competitor's next release.

Does anyone in AI think about 5 years from now?

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#49

There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development. Truly brilliant software development management going on here. Daily update meetings and temporary staff transfers. Well known strategies for increasing velocity!

I've had ideas for how to improve all the different chatbots for like 3 years, nobodys has implemented any of them (usually my ideas get implemented in software somehow the devs read my mind, but AI seems to be stuck with the same UI for LLMs), none of these AI shops are ran by people with vision it feels like. Everyone's just remaking a slightly better version of SmarterChild.

I really want a UI that visualises branching. I would like to branch out of specific parts of the responses and continue the conversation there but also keep the original conversation. This seems to be a very standard feature but no one has developed it.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#50
post #37

OpenAI was founded to hedge against Google dominating AI and with it the future. It makes me sad how that was lost for pipe dreams (AGI) and terrible leadership. I fear a Google dystopia. I hope DeepSeek or somebody else will counter-balance their power.

That goal has wildly succeeded -- there are now several well financed companies competing against Google.

The goal was supposed to be an ethical competitor as implied by the word "Open" in their name. When Meta and the Chinese are the most ethical of the competitors, you know we're in a bad spot...

Post reply on HN