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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

#951
post #949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta makes websites and apps. Historically, they haven't succeeded at lower-level development. A somewhat recent example was when they tried to make a custom OS for their VR headsets, completely failed, and had to continue using Android.

You're generalizing a failure at delivering one consumer solution and ignoring the successful infrastructure research and development that occurs behind the scenes. Meta builds hardware from chip to cluster to datacenter scale, and drives research into simulation at every scale, all the way to CFD simulation of datacenter thermal management.

More than one failure. They had a project to make a custom chip for model training a few years ago, and they scrapped it. Now they have another one, which entered testing in March. I don't think it's going well, because testing should have wrapped up recently, right before the news that they're in serious talks to buy a lot of TPUs from Google. On the other side of the stack, Llama 4 was a disaster and they haven't shipped anything since.

They have the money and talent to do it. As you point out, they do have major successes in areas that take real engineering. But they also have a lot of failures. It will depend how the internal politics play out, I imagine.

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

#952

How does Anthropic fit into this? It's much smaller but feels like they have a much clearer product definition with their Claude Code.

Yes I’m wondering the same. I guess the news here is that google is finally getting the edge over OpenAI when they should have had the lead all along.

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

#953
post #943

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> US consumer spending has grown from $14 to $19 trillion since 2020. $5 trillion in new pie!! All that's telling you is the economy is not doing nearly as well as some of our metrics would have you believe. Real wages are about the same as before, probably lower. Consumers are buying the same amount of stuff - no value has been created. Rather, the dollar has been devalued, much more than we're willing to let on. Th…

Look it's fine to have contrarian opinions that left is right, everything is backwards, whatever. But when it comes to business and money, these things are quantitative and falsifiable. If you have a better understanding than the idiots in charge, then go be rich! If you have a better model for real value, you'll outcompete them. Until you do that, you are playing word games, ones which have somehow deluded you into…

It's not even contrarian, it's just true. Money has always been a proxy for real value, which we created because real value can be hard to measure.

> If you have a better understanding than the idiots in charge, then go be rich!

Doesn't work this way because most markets are dumb as rocks.

> If you have a better model for real value, you'll outcompete them.

Doesn't work this way because most markets are dumb as rocks.

Look, after a certain point you have to detach from what you're being told and look at the world around you.

Prime example: tobacco. For humanity, Tabacoo has a negative value. You should be getting paid to smoke. Why? Because it kills you, and that's very expensive.

But that's hard to measure, right? So we just sell the cigarettes and say their value is what they're sold for. But that's not their actual value.

Their actual value, in the real world, in your hands and in your lungs, is negative. That's not an opinion. That's objective. That's just what it is.

When you look around our markets, almost all products are like this to some degree. The value we're creating is not necessarily real value.

Ads are another prime example. Do they enrich the world? Do they help consumers? No. They have zero real value. They just move money around via manipulation. That's not my opinion. That's just the objective reality.

Eventually, the real world catches up to la la land. You can't just say "well do ads and you make money". When there's no more money to move around, then even our fake value estimates of ads approach zero.

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

#954
post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People who believe this should be studied

Where am I going wrong?

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

#955
post #844
post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The capital is not needed immediately, but they have agreed to provide it if/when called upon in future.

This is highly unlikely. Imagine OpenAI struggling, and in year 4 of this "commitment" call upon the lenders to provide over $100B in capital. The lenders will definitely have recourse if the risk is too high. Otherwise this would simply be a commercial line of credit, or they would be investing the funds directly in OpenAI now.

The contract would obviously not be no strings attached.

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

#956

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm seeing it outside of techies. My dad told me "AI Google said that..."

I've had sales clerks at stores say that when I asked basic questions about their products, including questions about subscription pricing.

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

#958

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the fact they had to resort to forking Chrome because they couldn’t engineer a browser folks wanted to use is pretty telling.

I don't think that tells us anything. Maintaining a web browser requires about 1000 full-time developers (about the size of the Chrome team at Google) i.e., about $400 million a year. Why would Microsoft incur that cost when Chromium is available under a license that allows Microsoft to do whatever it wants with it?

You don't need a Google-sized team to work on a browser. No other browser engine has a team that large.

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

#959
post #944
post #911

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, I just realize these for what they are - reasonable projects at the exploitation (rather than exploration) stage of any industry. I get that bashing on Google is fun, but TensorFlow was the FIRST modern end-user ML library. JAX, an optimizing backend for it, is in its own league even today. The damn thing is almost ten years old already! Waymo is literally the only truly publicly available robotaxi company. I d…

I think Theano takes the crown as first modern end-user library for autodiff and tensor operations.

Original Torch too. https://torch.ch/

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

#960
post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who believe this should be studied

Where am I going wrong?

I don't know where to start. Does marketing typically work this well on you? Do you also think elon musk is going to die on mars?
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