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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

#111

Post by guzfip »

bcooke wrote: post #89

They’ve lost a whole lot of people in prominent roles over the past few years. I wonder how much of the misfires and general thrash in product direction is a result of brain drain and/or so many hands changing. Or maybe I’m confusing cause and effect… hard to tell

That’s pretty crazy, I swear it wasn’t that long ago these companies were about the only people hiring and the comp packages looked absolutely deranged.

For a brief moment I regretted wasting any time of my life on anything but ML research. But I guess the bigger they come…

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

#112

Post by mrhottakes »

cmiles8 wrote: post #44
adventured wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Gemin…

Google is already dumping LLMs into search and it works well and is free.

It works very poorly

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

#113

Post by guzfip »

et-al wrote: post #32
bigbuppo wrote: post #5

And if Forbes is reporting this, that means the actual movers and shakers were talking about this months ago.

Keep in mind this is a Forbes "Site", so basically a personal blog with some minor vetting.

Interesting. I never had much of an opinionon Forbes till a few years ago I noticed them posting nearly exclusively NYPost style clickbait. I didn’t think it was that bad of a publication.

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

#114

Post by guzfip »

neaden wrote: post #58
Mistletoe wrote: post #8

Has there ever been a period o time where people saw a bubble coming and that we were in one, but it just inexorably refused to pop/drug out this long? This isn’t a rhetorical question, I’m wondering how this period compares to other irrational periods of the economy like railroad fever etc.

Not at all, there is a famous saying (often attributed to Keynes but as far as I can tell he never said) “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

“But can the markets remain solvent longer than I can remain rational” is the real question.

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

#115

Post by jmye »

ai-x wrote: post #99
cj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 norm…

Which is a good thing. Elon has showed the world, the only thing that limits the upper bound is bureaucracy, extreme risk-averse and no culture for experimenting. More and more companies will start operating on the correct reward/risk curve or else getting crushed by firms who do. OpenAI has forced Google, Apple, Meta out of their comfort zone because they know OpenAI will eat their lunch

Literally every part of this comment is confusing. Elon hasn't shown anyone anything interesting in at least a decade. OpenAI hasn't forced Apple to do anything - LLMs aren't impinging on hardware or bundled services, and this literally seems right up Google's alley (and they're arguably better at it than OpenAI has demonstrated, now that first-mover-ish is long past).

I suppose Meta's recent comfort zone was simply a stupid bet on VR, so sure, maybe one part of the comment isn't confusing.

I don't understand what you think you're seeing.

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

#116

Post by mandevil »

beachy wrote: post #82
mandevil wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not normal for a company that has been at it this long. The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two. ChatGPT was opened to the public on November 30th, 2022, which was 1219 days ago- almost 50% more time has elapsed than between the Apple II and Visicalc.

The Apple II was so simple (by today's standards) that it came with a complete printed circuit diagram. Visicalc was so simple it was written by two guys in a year. AI is so many orders of magnitude more complex that the comparison is not really useful.

This complexity requires a lot of money- from investors- to sustain. If those investors don't see a return on their investment before they get too anxious, then no more money will be invested and the business is dead. So that would suggest that there will be even less patience from the money than the investors in Apple had. If you are correct that this greater complexity actually makes it harder to productize, then it is hard to see how frontier model generative AI will be viable under a VC funded domain.

It is entirely plausible to me that there are great technologies that are impossible to reach via the normal means of VC/investor financed capitalism. I certainly have encountered market failures requiring extremely patient money (usually in the form of government subsidies) to produce a useful product that eventually does have market value. That has worked many times in the past. But so far generative AI has not had that, and looking at my non-technology friends, I very much doubt that there would be much support among them for government subsidies of AI companies. AI companies have made too many people unhappy, served as too much of a punching bag, to be in a good position politically for that.

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

#117

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

mandevil wrote: post #95
ianbutler wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without me trying to be snarky why do you feel spreadsheet software launching is comparable to this scenario?

Visicalc is often described as the killer app of the first generation Personal Computer(1). It was the product that drove them into every small business in the country, that blew up sales of personal computers and brought them out of the realm of hobbyists into enterprise. And, honestly, I think Visicalc and spreadsheets are still a greater benefit than what I've seen out of generative AI today. And that happened a l…

>If the end result of this is "certain classes of white collar workers are 10-25% more productive" (which is the best results I can extrapolate from what I've seen so far) then it's really hard to imagine how OpenAI can return a profit to their investors.

If we take this as face value, and say that the absolute best case scenario is there are literally no other uses for AI but helping programmers program faster, given 4.4 million software devs, with an average cost to the company of $200,000 (working off the US here, including benefits/levels/whatever should be close), those 4.4 million devs with 20% productivity would save roughly 176 billion dollars a year.

Some companies will cut jobs, some will expand features, but that's the gist. And it's hard not to see the magnitude of improvement that's come in just 3 years, though if that leads to a 'moat' is yet to be seen.

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

#118

Post by staticman2 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #77
vesrah wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search for anything mechanically car related and the results are terrible or wrong.

Do you have a concrete example I can reproduce? I searched for things like how to change the filter of X make and model and it seems correct, not sure if that's what you meant.

I'm not the person you replied to but I'm wondering which Google AI product you are referring to that you use for search which is so excellent that you need someone to find for you an example of it failing?

I think Google has several ai products with search features?

Which one in your experience "seems correct"?

I'm fascinated because I've never found any LLM to be particularly error free at search.

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

#119

Post by mandevil »

ianbutler wrote: post #110
mandevil wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visicalc is often described as the killer app of the first generation Personal Computer(1). It was the product that drove them into every small business in the country, that blew up sales of personal computers and brought them out of the realm of hobbyists into enterprise. And, honestly, I think Visicalc and spreadsheets are still a greater benefit than what I've seen out of generative AI today. And that happened a l…

Thanks for the in depth explanation. I was definitely not up on my tech history here. :)

Sorry, I forgot that for many engineers this is, in fact, their first time going through a technology cycle like this, and so would need more explanation. I am too young for Visicalc myself, but the cycle that I saw while I was in high school- the dot-com bubble- doesn't have convenient, easy to mark out dates like the PC does.

Thinking... Thinking... Tim Berners-Lee proposing HTTP in 1989 is kinda like the original Attention is All You Need paper, I guess? Netscape 1.0 release in December 1994 is ChatGPT 1.0? And then Amazon.com opened up to the public in July 1995 and then IPO'd in May 1997 (after raising less than 10 million dollars in two funding rounds). But once again we have the business side of these previous cycles moving much faster than this one.

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