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The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened

forbes.com

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Re: The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened

#21

Post by cj »

cmiles8 wrote: post #2

This is important context in the wake of yesterday’s “raise” announcement. A lot of this stuff seems to just quietly never happen once the ink on the PR puff dries. The AI industry increasingly looks in scramble mode to keep the hype going as those storm clouds of financial and business reality get darker and darker on the horizon.

For a company bringing a new technology from zero to mainstream, I think it's pretty normal that there will be a lot of failed attempts at productization.

The thing that isn't normal is the degree of experimentation relative to company valuation. Normally once a company reaches $700 B+ valuation, they've figured out their product and monetization strategy. ChatGPT is clearly still iterating heavily on that - not normal for a company that size.

Re: The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened

#22

Post by steveBK123 »

adventured wrote: post #10
dgellow wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic does look healthier, with their enterprise focus. Or am I missing something?

The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be). If GPT is a leader in that, they'll take a sizable share of that pot. There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there is in being Anthropic -> enterprise. Just take a look at the…

> Just take a look at the enterprise. Amazon's ad business alone is already a better business than Oracle or SAP or Salesforce, with superior margins, and it's growing faster too.

You can say the same about AWS and then prove the b2b case instead of ad case as well

Re: The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened

#23

Post by mpalmer »

dgellow wrote: post #3
cmiles8 wrote: post #2

This is important context in the wake of yesterday’s “raise” announcement. A lot of this stuff seems to just quietly never happen once the ink on the PR puff dries. The AI industry increasingly looks in scramble mode to keep the hype going as those storm clouds of financial and business reality get darker and darker on the horizon.

Anthropic does look healthier, with their enterprise focus. Or am I missing something?

Anthropic can't prop up Nvidia and the chip industry itself. If AI as an industry can't start turning a dollar into $1.05, a lot of stuff starts falling in value

Re: The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened

#25

Post by bdangubic »

cmiles8 wrote: post #13
adventured wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be). If GPT is a leader in that, they'll take a sizable share of that pot. There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there is in being Anthropic -> enterprise. Just take a look at the…

“The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue” And yet every attempt to extract even minimal ad revenue has been canned to date as something nobody wants with AI providers retreating in failure. I don’t doubt that there’s “some” ad revenue to be had but there’s little evidence that ads are going to save the day here.

These exact words were said tens of thousands of times about Facebook (am old enough to remember those discussions :) ), “no way they can monetize on mobile” (this was the most fun).

rules are simple, if you have Xbn or XXXm users on your system, you will make big bank in ads eventually

Re: The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened

#26

Post by adventured »

operatingthetan wrote: post #14
adventured wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be). If GPT is a leader in that, they'll take a sizable share of that pot. There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there is in being Anthropic -> enterprise. Just take a look at the…

>The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be). This seems like ... not the situation we are in. LLMs are great for coding now but their text generation capabilities aren't exactly capturing the masses or replacing their jobs yet. People are already tired of the deluge of fake content on the inter…

LLM usage will largely replace traditional search, and that's stage one. To be specific, search will be consumed by the LLMs, it'll be merely an aspect of what they do for the user, and that'll include handling the more intricate details of the search, refining the search, understanding the results of search, etc. The age of the typical user handling any of that is about to end. Search will more be a feature of Gemini in the not very distant future, rather than Gemini being bolted onto/into search.

Fuller integration into the user's life will bring ever more ad opportunities (and it doesn't matter if the HN base hates that notion, it's going to happen regardless). That'll happen over the next decade gradually.

Shopping, home management, tasks (taxes, accounting, lifestyle, reminders, homework, work work, 800 other things), travel (obvious), advice & general conversation (already there), search (being consumed now), gaming (next 3-5 years to start), full at-work integration (gradual spread across all industries, with more narrow expertise), digital world building (10-15+ years out for mass user adoption). And on the list goes. It's pretty much anything the user can or does touch in life.

Re: The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened

#28

Post by steveBK123 »

operatingthetan wrote: post #14
adventured wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be). If GPT is a leader in that, they'll take a sizable share of that pot. There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there is in being Anthropic -> enterprise. Just take a look at the…

>The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be). This seems like ... not the situation we are in. LLMs are great for coding now but their text generation capabilities aren't exactly capturing the masses or replacing their jobs yet. People are already tired of the deluge of fake content on the inter…

> The $20-200 LLM plans are all subsidized and aren't paying for themselves. Something has to give here.

Whats interesting to me as well as much as companies are pushing AI adoption, i have started to hear AI token spend limits enforced across a few companies, so its not entirely clear that b2b can make them profitable yet either.

If all the models reach good enough, then low cost provider would win. Gemini seems like a safer bet since Google controls more of the stack / has more efficiencies / cross selling / etc.

It’s not like “best” has won any other b2b arms race in the past.

Re: The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened

#29

Post by mbesto »

jmkni wrote: post #18
woah wrote: post #11

My guess is Sam Altman is a better VC than CEO. Better at hype, networking, fund raising, and back room political hijinks than shipping a focused product He seems to be trying to take almost a "venture studio" approach by throwing shit at the wall, but the problem with these things is always that the "internal startups" are "founded" by people who don't have enough incentive or control over their product to perform a…

I'd say he's a better CTO than CEO

He ran a small (30 employee) tech startup for 7 years

He was a partner at YC for 8 years

He has no research/PhD background in AI and is the CEO of an AI company

There is no objective data point in which he's a better CTO than a CEO

Re: The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened

#30

Post by adrian_b »

raincole wrote: post #15

> GPT-4o Why is this on the list? Like... what? How about including GPT 3.5 and GPT 2 here too?

In TFA it is put on the list because some of the users of this GPT version were discontent with its cancellation, which caused even OpenAI to oscillate in its decision, so they first cancelled it, then they resurrected it and then they cancelled it permanently, probably because continuing to run it would have cost more than the generated revenue.

Nothing similar happened when the earlier, presumably worse versions were discontinued.

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