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

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

#561
post #550

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 m…

It's not a rumor, it's confirmed by OpenAI. All "models" since 4o are actually just optimizations in prompting and a new routing engine. The actual -model- you are using with 5.1 is 4. Nothing has been pre-trained from scratch since 4o. Their own press releases confirm this. They call 5 their best new "ai system", not a new model https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5/

Maybe this is just armchair bs on my part, but it seems to me that the proliferation of AI-spam and just general carpet bombing of low effort SEO fodder would make a lot of info online from the last few years totally worthless.

Hardly a hot take. People have theorized about the ouroboros effect for years now. But I do wonder if that’s part of the problem

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

#562

Conspiracy time. >be Google >watch regulators circle like vultures >realize antitrust heat is rising faster than stock buybacks can hide >notice a small lab called OpenAI making exotic tech and attracting political fascination >calculate that nothing freezes regulators like an unpredictable new frontier >decide to treat OpenAI as an accidental firebreak >let them sprint ahead unchecked watch lawmakers panic about hyp…

there is enough proof that they had a chatbot internally which was quite competitive but was not pushed through for all these fears, it seems they were always confident that they could catch up and scaling laws were their internal defense. The question now though is neither might have expected Chinese labs to catch up so fast.

China releasing open models only helps the big companies make more efficient inference.

Maybe they don’t realize that the money will be in the inference compute and there is limited applicability for low flops inference.

Ie. All the breakthroughs they share for free will immediately improve profitability of the ai compute clusters.

Not sure why people think otherwise.

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

#563

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 m…

Usually current events get taught through mid-training, so even with old pre-training current events still could be added

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

#564
post #550

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 m…

It's not a rumor, it's confirmed by OpenAI. All "models" since 4o are actually just optimizations in prompting and a new routing engine. The actual -model- you are using with 5.1 is 4. Nothing has been pre-trained from scratch since 4o. Their own press releases confirm this. They call 5 their best new "ai system", not a new model https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5/

Well then 5.x is pretty impressive

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

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anecdotal, but my wife wasn't interested in switching to claude from chatgpt. as far as she's concerned chatgpt knows her, and she's got her assistant perfectly tuned to her liking.

ChatGPT is to AI as Facebook is to social media. OpenAI captured a significant number of users due to first-mover advantage, but that advantage is long gone now.

1. ChatGPT would be MySpace as the first mover. 2. Facebook has insane lock in: your entire graph of friends and family.

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

#566
post #389
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI doesn't have $500 billion in commitments lined up, it's promising to spend that much over 5 years... That's a helluva big difference than having $500B in revenue incoming.

Commitments here means money that people have agreed to lend them in future.

Does it mean have agreed to lend them in a binding agreement that OpenAI can sue to enforce?

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

#567
post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being an insane brand means literally nothing if people can trivially switch to competitors, which they can. There isn't even a tenth of enough money if you group together all of advertising. Like, the entire industry. Ads is a bad, bad plan that wont work. Advertising is also extremely overvalued. And even at it's overvalued price tag, it's nowhere near enough.

People could trivially switch their search engine to Bing or Yahoo, but they don't. If ads are so overpriced, how big is your short position on google? Also ads are extremely inefficient in terms of conversion. Ads rendered by an intelligent, personalized system will be OOM more efficient, negating most of the "overvalue". I'm not saying they should serve ads. It's a terrible strategy for other reasons.

Funny that you mention Yahoo, as in my mind they're the perfect example of what the poster above you noted: people quickly switched to Google once a better alternative to Yahoo appeared.

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

#568
post #317

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 m…

SemiAnalysis said it last week and AFAIK it wasn't denied. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...

This is a really great breakdown. With TPUs seemingly more efficient and costing less overall, how does this play for Nvidia? What's to stop them from entering the TPU race with their $5 trillion valuation?

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

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be a little bit more nuanced: I think there's something off with their plans right now: it's pretty clear at this point that they can't own the technological frontier, Google is just too close already and from a purely technological PoV they are much better suited to have the best tech in the medium term. (There's no moat and Google has way more data and compute available, and also tons of cash to burn without de…

Being an insane brand means literally nothing if people can trivially switch to competitors, which they can. There isn't even a tenth of enough money if you group together all of advertising. Like, the entire industry. Ads is a bad, bad plan that wont work. Advertising is also extremely overvalued. And even at it's overvalued price tag, it's nowhere near enough.

It's Coca Cola vs Pepsi. Yes some might even say Pepsi has been shown to taste better, but people still buy loads of Coke.

Of course the tech savvy enterprises will use the best models. But the plumber down the road doesn't care whether she asks Gemini or ChatGPT about the sizing of some fittings.

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

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with no means of significant revenue generation. OpenAI will top $20 billion in ARR this year, which certainly seems like significant revenue generation. [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-will-...

I can generate $20 billion in ARR this year too! I just need you to give me $100 billion and allow me to sell each of your dollars for 0.2 dollars.

You sell dollar 1 penny, they sell it for more like 70. Different skill level
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