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.
The bubble bursting has almost become eschatological for deniers. Keep praying that it will happen. It won't.
Why the sudden pivot to agents and subagents? One shotting not good enough? Was a tech plateau reached? Or maybe one related to cost?
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…
Sora was losing 15M a day and it was running at least 3 months, so that's a total 1.3 Billion. That's a pretty expensive experiment. It sounds like a company with lots of VC to burn and no discipline. Even Jensen Huang accused them of lack of discipline in business approach.
Yeah. $1.3B isn't scrappy startup pivots, it's the sort of money Google/Meta/Microsoft/Yahoo/Salesforce burn on strategic acquisitions. And those entities absolutely get and deserve the sneers when they "sunset" the product 6-18 months later having concluded that it wasn't even showing enough signs of being a market they should bother with keeping the lights on.
At least Sora was novel and technically impressive, I guess.
absolutely not the case. there isn’t a single nerve in human brains that goes “oh imma tolerate ads cause this shit’s free but if I pay a few bucks no way” - if the product you use has utility to you, you will tolerate ads provided no other acceptable alternative. not to tell you something you don’t already know but anthropic is getting ads, eventually, it is a given. so while today you may have an alternative (argua…
Yeah sure, but for me the common man OpenAI doesn't add any value that Claude, Gemini or Meta AI doesn't also provide. If they want to out-ad those companies to the tune of billions, I'll go with the least annoying. OpenAI hasn't earned any loyalty.
to me and you sure, but what do you reckon how many of their MAU are just people for whom “AI” is ChaptGPT? 90+%?
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 norm…
For most companies an $850B valuation means you figured out the business model. Here it seems to mean you convinced enough people that figuring it out is inevitable. Those are very different bets.
it is a simple stance - if you have a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people ad monetization strategy will be found cause there are people a lot smarter than you and me that will get it done. here’s intellectual challenge - find a business with comparable number of users to openai which is not swimming in ad revenue - one will do
A counterpoint is that there are many products with significant usage that fail or never attempt advertising monetization. They just increase the cost of the product.
Without me trying to be snarky why do you feel spreadsheet software launching is comparable to this scenario?
VisiCalc was the killer app.
VisiCalc was "the" killer app for early micros, but being able to edit a written text on screen and then print it out with letter-like quality was nothing to sneeze at, either. This was plausibly a key gain in efficiency for the service sector, perhaps comparable to the 10%~25% that's now being talked about re: LLM's (which is huge on a secular basis).
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
Nvidia will be fine, same for the chip makers. They're selling shovels during the gold rush and they stand to gain even if local/on prem AI eventually dominates for casual users.
The first AI company to cram their product full of ads will get roasted over the coals for it. My guess is they're all playing chicken and waiting to be the second to do it. I'd also guess that they're all already thinking about ways to introduce it that will generate the least backlash. Google could do it in 2000 because their search was legitimately so much better, and also because their ads were comparatively more…
People forget it took Google years of frog-boiling to get us to where we are now. The first AI to insert blatant ads will be dumped for some other model overnight. Look at the Copilot "backlash" over their "product announcements".
Yep. Finally someone who knows how to think straight.
Google built up immense surplus and ate into it slowly.
OAI can't suddenly start cramming Ads as it fights to survive. Im sure they are employing questionable tactics to keep users hooked. Won't really work on a large enough user base to make the economics viable given the competition they face.
Not interested in a service with ads throughout my workday, which is why I switched to Anthropic. Billions in projected revenue is nothing but hype/cope. Google and Meta got their edge because their product was offered for "free" to the masses.
absolutely not the case. there isn’t a single nerve in human brains that goes “oh imma tolerate ads cause this shit’s free but if I pay a few bucks no way” - if the product you use has utility to you, you will tolerate ads provided no other acceptable alternative. not to tell you something you don’t already know but anthropic is getting ads, eventually, it is a given. so while today you may have an alternative (argua…
Anthropic is already an ad - for Anthropic. The uniquely "friendly" personality of their user-facing AI chatbot is far from accidental.