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

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

#121

Post by satvikpendem »

staticman2 wrote: post #118
satvikpendem wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google.com with the AI overview or whatever they call it now. It seems to source web page information for grounding so it's reasonably correct and doesn't hallucinate recently at least.

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

#122

Post by Hansenq »

Lots of critiques here! Something missing in this discussion is people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who work there aren't stupid!

I think this is a disconnect between people who think that large companies are static entities with established products vs. large companies that still operate like a startup and are trying to grow. When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you don't know what will work! You try different things, you [launch over and over again](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-a...)...all in hopes of something that works, sticks, and starts to grow.

In every example here, I see OpenAI trying something new, hoping it will grow, and shutting it down after it doesn't. Sora is the pre-eminent example of this. They make news, but you don't talk about the things they launch that successfully grow!

OpenAI isn't shutting down Codex or ChatGPT, because those were launches that they did that actually worked! When you go look at the tweets and communication from OpenAI employees when ChatGPT launched, nobody was sure that it would work. But it did. And if they hadn't launched, we would have never known how valuable it was.

All that is to say...you don't know what will work until you launch. Most things fail, and it's correct to shut them down. But focusing on the products that haven't worked instead of the products that have gets you more clicks, but actually depresses innovation by making future launches less likely.

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

#123

Post by chasd00 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #59
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.

NFTs lasted a lot longer than they should have.

yes they did, Salesforce even came out with an "NFT Cloud" product.

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

#124

Post by jmye »

Razengan wrote: post #85
dgellow wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Holy f'n Hell, there's such a blatant bias on HackerNews in favor of Anthropic and against OpenAI. I'm just a user, and in my experience Claude has been consistently crap compared to ChatGPT/Codex. I use both side-by-side, and have paid for a ChatGPT subscription every month for around 1 year, but only 2 months for Claude; once last year, and again since last month. Everything from the sign up, the sign in, the payme…

> Of course this comment will be downvoted by Anthropic's paid PR machine, because there's no way actual users who have tried both products would be so in favor of Claude.

Sure, it couldn't possibly be that others have had a different experience. It couldn't even be that some people think OpenAI is nearly as gross as Palantir. It's that they're shills.

High-end analysis.

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

#125

Post by piker »

Hansenq wrote: post #122

Lots of critiques here! Something missing in this discussion is people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who work there aren't stupid! I think this is a disconnect between people who think that large companies are static entities with established products vs. large companies that still operate like a startup and are trying to grow. When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you don't…

People are much more willing to give the benefit of the doubt on things like that when the flagbearers of your industry aren't running around sucking all of the oxygen out of the system and telling people things are "solved": that your product will obsolete them in the next 6-12 months.

We get it. They say that stuff to raise money, make sales and keep the party going. But don't expect too much sympathy when the strategy falters a bit.

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

#126

Post by MadxX79 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #86
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I rarely visit the webpages before anymore. And what do you think this'll do for future LLM models that need to train on new content if web page traffic collapses?

I understand the concern but it's frankly not my problem as a user, that is for the authors and corporations to figure out. No one would (or should) blame car buyers for putting horse and buggies out of business, they're merely participating in the market as a consumer not the producer.

They won't figure it out. It's the tragedy of the commons.

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

#127

Post by lucianbr »

moron4hire wrote: post #63

"Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger... was sold on Sora, too. He lauded Altman’s ability to “look around corners”..." WTF is that supposed to mean? I'm sorry, maybe I'm being dense. I can't figure out what "look around corners" is supposed to mean. "Think outside the box," I guess? Why "look around corners?" I mean, maybe I do get it. Altman has a weird face that looks like you can't predict where his eyes are based on where…

I read it as being able to see the future, which is still bullshit par excellence. The future is just around the corner as it were, but us normal people cannot see it, on account of both it being the future, and around a corner.

To be very clear, I think it's completely stupid.

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

#128

Post by piker »

mandevil wrote: post #119
ianbutler wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WOW. That does really drive home the perspective. I was an adolescent during those years and it did seem quick then, but that's an insane pace in retrospect.

Amazon is perhaps a counter-example to your point, though, to be fair. It seems to me they did a lot of spaghetti throwing while making accounting losses for a good number of years. Granted, they did it on OpenAI's dining budget.

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

#129

Post by satvikpendem »

MadxX79 wrote: post #126
satvikpendem wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the concern but it's frankly not my problem as a user, that is for the authors and corporations to figure out. No one would (or should) blame car buyers for putting horse and buggies out of business, they're merely participating in the market as a consumer not the producer.

They won't figure it out. It's the tragedy of the commons.

Then that is how it will be, it's a self correcting problem in that if they don't figure it out, their models won't continue improving.

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

#130

Post by steveBK123 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #103
operatingthetan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Gemini is the best deal too. For $20: you get multiple quotas per day across the products (web, CLI, antigravity, AI Studio) 2tb of cloud storage, and you can family share the plan.

I don't know Gemini's pricing model in detail, but in general pricing doesn't generalize well between personal/hobbyist and enterprise use. Consumer pricing of variable costs is a balancing act, and most Gemini users aren't going to be anywhere near the quota; a company of 1000 can't always buy for $20,000 what 1000 random users with $20 personal plans are theoretically capped at.

Ultimately though in the long run.. They invented the tech, have a large cashflow generating business subsidizing R&D as well as sales, with network effect of existing B2B relationships.

Further they have their own TPUs, datacenters, etc on which to run their models.

Plus existing data they've squirreled away over the preceding 30 years from books, web, etc.

Just seems like a lot of efficiencies if its going to come down to cost.

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