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It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

stratechery.com

121–130 of 284 posts

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#121

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

> Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driver model. I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say Ora to Ingress) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not…

> Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not?

That applies even when you switch models within a vendor, though.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ed Zitron may be many things but he is no grifter. He writes what he believes and believes what he says, and I basically agree with all of it. The chattering class in SV has been wildly wrong for years, and they'll really look foolish when the market crashes horribly and these companies collapse.

He's saying more than that the companies are going to collapse; he's making pronouncements about the underlying technology, which are claims that are much harder to defend. I'm not entirely sure he understands the distinction between the companies and the technology, though.

Respectably...what?? Ed at this point is one of the most well read people on Earth for this topic. Of course he knows the difference between the companies and the technology. He goes in depth both on why he think the companies are financially unviable AND why he's unimpressed by LLM's technologically alllll the time.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#123
post #91
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The openai bet goes "within 4 years, we need to be able to tell the AI to make money for us." Are they on track?

There's another important bit there: 'we need to be able to tell the AI to make money for us and no-one else can compete with us on that'. I think both halves of that are questionable.

I mean FWIW they could probably make those folks happy by just spitting out a list of everything to short because of ai disruption on each new release lol

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same thing about Facebook...

You mean the social network that is currently dying the same death as countless other platforms before it, just on a larger scale? Maybe some are too young to remember the great migrations from/to MySpace, MSN, ICQ, AIM, Skype, local alternatives like StudiVZ, ..., where people used to keep in contact with friends. Facebook was just the latest and largest platform where people kept in touch and expressed themselves i…

>No, people easily migrate between these platforms.

No? It's rare for these platforms to survive, the one that was closest to challenging Facebook was kneecapped by the US government.

The time between the founding of MySpace to Facebook was a little over a year. Instagram has been the largest social network for close to decade now, and it's not like others haven't been trying. META is up 600% over last 3 years. I'm really question your definition of the word "dying"

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#125

I'm on the verge of unsubscribing from Stratechery. The last month has been a bunch of fawning over Meta, YouTube, and constant talk about and fawning over OpenAI and whatever latest models are coming out. It's kind of tiring and boring. I swear I heard them talk about some YouTube influencers event like five times across their different shows and across time. Like, I do not care at all.

Did you listen to the recent interview with Ben Bajarin? I thought that interview alone justified the subscription. Curious as to whether anyone else felt the same.

Fantastic interview. Hard to get much info from inside the world Bajarin was speaking of. Notable how everyone is saying they can't get capacity for the tokens they're trying to serve.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could literally eliminate homelessness, world hunger, and fully pay health care costs in that same timeframe with much less cash.

Cash is just paper. You can't eat paper.

You can't eat AI, either.

Yet another hidden benefit of a human workforce, that AI can't match.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they will get any moat. I might be wrong on this of course, but I don’t see a killer feature for these stochastic parrots that can’t be easily replicated

> … stochastic parrots… What a wonderful phrase, mind if I borrow it?

It's commonly used at this point, for what it's worth

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#128

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

Yeah, I'm extremely loyal to ChatGPT Plus and Codex, but is't because OpenAI has a native Mac app that I like, and Codex included with Plus and has served me well enough to not look at Claude. I like GPT-5 quite a bit as a user. I'll concede none of these are small things - they've had my money for 2+ years - but they're not gigantic advantages either. At an enterprise level however, in the current workload I am deal…

OpenAI is dynamic for consumer apps. Anthropic seems much better at productizing AI that you can actually build with, while also catering to enterprise in their own productized offerings

Also Claude Opus 4.1 runs multidimensional circles around GPT-5 in my view. The only better use case for GPT-5 is when you need it to scrape the web for data

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#129
post #86

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

The openai bet goes "within 4 years, we need to be able to tell the AI to make money for us." Are they on track?

Not sure.

https://youtu.be/OYlQyPo-L4g

From 7th minute, truth about ChatGPT - 2% paid users.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#130

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

> OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. More like $115 billion based on your own link. The $1T is a guess based on promises made, far from "needs to spend that much just to exist". Spending $30 billion a year doesn't sound that apocalyptic.

> Spending $30 billion a year doesn't sound that apocalyptic.

they have $1000billion in future liabilities. https://www.ft.com/content/5f6f78af-aed9-43a5-8e31-2df7851ce...

they have income of about 4billion a half, with a loss of $13bn.

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