OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’ • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#141

Post by gloryjulio » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 5:41 AM UTC

> There's no technical moat around online sales. And lots of companies sell online. But Amazon is still the biggest (by a long long way) (at least in the US). Their "moat" is in public minds here.

I don't think that's true. I think it's actually the opposite. Global physical logistic is way harder than software to scale. That's Amazon's moat

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#142

Post by ripped_britches » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 5:42 AM UTC

This is an odd thing to say.

Facebook has an enormous network effect. Google is the lynchpin of brokering digital ads to the point of being a monopoly. Someone else mentioned Amazons massive distribution network.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#143

Post by morgante » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 5:43 AM UTC

Amazon has scale economics, branding power, and process power. It would take years to fully rebuild Amazon from scratch even given unlimited money.

Right now, OpenAI's brand is actually probably its strongest "moat" and that is probably only there because Google fumbled Bard so badly.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#144

Post by raincole » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 5:44 AM UTC

He literally wrote this:

> OpenAI’s board now stating “We once again need to raise more capital than we’d imagined” less than three months after raising another $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion sounds alarmingly like a Ponzi scheme

Ponzi scheme. If he's shilling something I guess it's "shorting".

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#145

Post by brookst » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 5:45 AM UTC

You think the public in general is highly concerned with protecting copyrighted works? Like, they’re all saying “I would love to pay OpenAI but they are infringing on my beloved Reuters copyrights”?

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#146

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 5:59 AM UTC

> Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was.

When was this true? Amazon was founded Jul 1994, and a publicly listed company by May 1997. I highly doubt Amazon absorbed billions of dollars of VC money in less than 3 years of the mid 1990s.

https://dazeinfo.com/2019/11/06/amazon-net-income-by-year-gr...

As far as I can tell, they were very break even until Amazon Web Services started raking it in.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#147

Post by raincole » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 6:03 AM UTC

Facebook and ChatGPT are the opposite kinds of products.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#148

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 6:04 AM UTC

Walmart and Target have tons of warehouse expertise. Amazon’s moat is their software, where they have a far longer head start and they can afford to pay their employees due to AWS and other services’ high margins, as well as executing well on growth resulting in being able to compensate with equity.

Walmart and Target were far better than Amazon at logistics at the beginning, but they couldn’t execute (or didn’t focus on) software development as well as Amazon.

Meanwhile, Amazon figured out how to execute logistics just as good or better than the incumbents, giving them the edge to overtake them.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#149

Post by saurik » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 6:14 AM UTC

A couple other comments touch on the point I want to make, but I feel they don't nail it hard enough: if today you told me you had a website that was 100% technologically identical to Amazon, but you were willing to make slightly less money, you'd still have no products... as a user I'd have no reason to go there, but then without users there is no reason to sell there, so you have a circular bootstrapping issue. That is a moat.

This is very different from OpenAI: if you show me a product that works just as well as ChatGPT but costs less--or which costs the same but works a bit better--I would use it immediately. Hell: people on this website routinely talk about using multiple such services and debate which one is better for various purposes. They kind of want to try to make a moat out of their tools feature, but that is off the path of how most users use the product, and so isn't a useful defense yet.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#150

Post by bryant » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 6:17 AM UTC

I'll bite because I find this compelling: if Apple is trying to build momentum for its Private Cloud Compute (https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/), it makes sense to try and get ahead of anything that could enable a competitor to build something similar. I'd think OpenAI getting billions shoveled their way in future investment just to throw darts at building any kind of moat would qualify, because for all Apple knows, OpenAI might eat their Private Cloud Compute lunch.

Granted I'm not sure there's much of anything to substantiate this, but I imagine Apple would know better from competitive intel.

(I feel a bit bad that my mind also immediately connects "Gruber" to "Apple" in less-than-savory ways, but alas, that's the reputation he built for himself.)