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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

#571

Post by jimbokun »

twothreeone wrote: post #174

The way I've experienced "Code Red" is mostly as a euphemism for "on-going company-wide lack of focus" and a band-aid for mid-level management having absolutely no clue how to meaningfully make progress, upper management panicking, and ultimately putting engineers and ICs on the spot to bear the brunt of that organizational mess. Interestingly enough, apart from Google, I've never seen an organization take the actual…

The one successful example I can think of is Bill Gates writing a memo to re-orient Microsoft to put the Internet at the center of everything they were doing.

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

#572

Post by usef- »

bloppe wrote: post #318
bgirard wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fun trope to repeat but that's not what OpenAI is doing. I get a ton of value from ChatGPT and Codex from my subscription. As long as the inference is not done at a lost this analogy doesn't hold. They're not paying me to use it. They are generating output that is very valuable to me. Much more than my subscription cost. I've been able to help setup cross app automation for my partner's business, remodel my ho…

To be fair, I would get a ton of value out of someone selling dollars for 20 cents apiece. But ya, OAI is clearly making a ton of revenue. That doesn't mean it's a good business, though. Giving them a 20 year horizon, shareholders will be very upset unless the firm can deliver about a trillion in profit , not revenue, to justify the 100B (so far) in investment, and that would barely beat the long term s&p 500 average…

People did say the same thing about Youtube, which was unprofitable and extremely expensive to run in the early years. I remember thinking everyone would leave once ads were added.

At youtube's ad income rate (~$13/year), the current (but growing) ~800 million chatgpt users would add ~$10 billion. At facebook's rate (~$40-50/year) $32-40 billion. Potentially, an assistant would be more integrated into your life than either of those two.

The "audience retention" is the key question, not the profitability if they maintain their current audience. I've been surprised how many non-technical people I know don't want to try other models. "ChatGPT knows me".

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

#573

Post by qnleigh »

cmiles8 wrote: post #443
qnleigh wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's no tangible moat still, but did Gemini 3's exceptional performance actually funnel users away from ChatGPT? The typical Hacker News reader might be aware of its good performance on benchmarks, but did this convert a significant number of ChatGPT users to Gemini? It's not obvious to me either way.

Anecdotally yes. Since launch I’ve observed probably 50% of the folks that were “ChatGPT those that” all the time suddenly talking about Gemini non-stop. The more that gets rolled into Google’s platform the more there’s point to using separate tooling from OpenAI. There’s a reason Sam is calling this “code red.”

Interesting. And these people weren't mostly techies? My impression has been that the further someone is from tech, the more likely they are to think that ChatGPT is synonymous with LLMs.

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

#574

Post by sidibe »

29athrowaway wrote: post #512

OpenAI fragmented into multiple companies that are now competing against them. OpenAI is buying compute and data. Meanwhile, Google consolidated their AI operations under Google Deepmind and doubled down on TPUs. The strategy "solve AGI and then solve everything else" is an all-in gamble that somehow AGI is within reach. This is not true.

Google fragmented into multiple competing companies as well, that's where OpenAI itself came from. The problem is even after shedding employees into all these startups or established competitors trying to catch up, Google has way more people, money, and compute to throw at things and see what works than the rest of the industry. It's demoralizing and tempting for people to go back, which is also demoralizing

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

#575

Post by wrsh07 »

thefourthchime wrote: post #534
nodja wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Genuine question: How is it possible for OpenAI to NOT successfully pre-train a model? The same way everyone else fails at it. Change some hyper parameters to match the new hardware (more params), maybe implement the latest improvements in papers after it was validated in a smaller model run. Start training the big boy, loss looks good, 2 months and millions of dollars later loss plateaus, do the whole SFT/RL sheba…

Isn't that what GPT 4.5 was?

That was a large model that iiuc was too expensive to serve profitably

Many people thought it was an improvement though

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

#576

Post by AlexCoventry »

thrance wrote: post #28
another_twist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's no monetization, the industry will just collapse. Not a good thing to aspire to. I hope they make money whilst doing these improvements.

If there's no monetization, the industry will just collapse, except for Google , which is probably what they want.

The Chinese AI industry won't collapse, because it's a strategic priority for the PRC, and heavily subsidized.

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

#577

Post by zhyder »

It's all about the chip economics. I don't know how the _manufacturing cost_ of Google's TPUs compares to Nvidia's GPUs, for inference of equivalent token throughput.

But at the moment Nvidia's 75-80% gross margin is slowly killing its customers like OpenAI. Eventually Nvidia will drop its margins, because non-0 profit from OpenAI is better than the 0 it'll be if OpenAI doesn't survive. Will be interesting to see if, say, 1/3 the chip cost would make OpenAI gross margin profitable... numbers bandied in this thread of $20B revenue with $115B cost imply they need 1/6 the chip cost, but I doubt those numbers are right (hard to get accurate $ numbers for a private company for the benefit of us arm-chair commenters).

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

#578

Post by Davidzheng »

mvkel wrote: post #550
jdoliner wrote: post #274

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/

I don't think that counts as confirmation. 4.5 we know was a new base-model. I find it very very unlikely the base model of 4 (or 4o) is in gpt5. Also 4o is a different base model from 4 right? it's multimodal etc. Pretty sure people have leaked sizes etc and I don't think it matches up.

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

#579

Post by Incipient »

pshirshov wrote: post #555
findjashua wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NME at all - 5.1 codex has been the best by far.

By my tests ( https://github.com/7mind/jopa ) Gemini 3 is somewhat better than Claude with Opus 4.5. Both obliterate Codex with 5.1

What's - roughly - your monthly spend when using ppt models? I only use fixed priced copilot, and my napkin maths says I'd be spending something crazy like $200/mo if I went ppt on the more expensive models.

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

#580

Post by AlexCoventry »

lanthissa wrote: post #203
achow wrote: post #146

WSJ: Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse. These plus working with Jony Ive on hardware, makes it sound like they took their eyes off the ball.

if you want to compete with google it seems like ad space is the single most important thing to push out quickly. no matter what openai does if its not accepting customers the ad budgets will flow to meta amaz and goog and be used as weapons against it.

OpenAI is trying to revolutionize human industry. The money it can make from ads will be a rounding error, if they can pull that off.
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