Live data from Hacker News

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

forbes.com

181–190 of 208 posts

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

#181
OpenAI is growing fast, pivoting is only to be expected. It would normally be something HN folk would typically value and encourage on startups.

They have clearly been lacking focus and now finally they seem to be working towards a narrower direction, which is usually highly valued by investors.

This article doesn't explore the depth of the decisions and only regurgitate what you may find your neighbor complaining about on X but with a better stylesheet.

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

#183

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…

You can also get the reputation as an unreliable vendor. I would put Google in this category.

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

#184
I asked an LLM today to take a word document and a PowerPoint template to “convert” the docx to a ppt. It asked some good questions like “it looks like this template is a title slide and content slide only, would you like all the content on the content slide?”

“Yes” I said, slightly impressed. It then asked me to clarify the subheadings, which were correct.

“Cool, this seems neat” I mused.

It generated the PowerPoint. There was not a single word on it from the docx, the header slide was devoid of words, and the 6 following content sliders were identical, and empty of words.

I suppose it’s cool that it used the correct template.

I did the work manually in 10 minutes after waiting around and responding to an LLM for 15.

What a fucking joke. “AI” is a term that we really need to stop fucking using.

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

#185

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…

>The people who work there aren't stupid!

They very nearly gave Elon Musk a controlling interest in the company. Their justification for not doing so was entirely vibes based. "Stupid" is a broad categorization, someone can be smart in some areas and do dumb things. You shouldn't let your personal appraisal for someones talent color the actual results they produce.

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

#186
post #169

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…

Ah, but when you're little, if each misstep annoys a few early users who hit a dead-end with your project, the longer-term reputational damage is trivial. You've still got 99.999% of the TAM (total addressable market) that is ready to be charmed by something new, with no negative vibes in their mind. As you get bigger, serious numbers of people get annoyed at dealing with a company that keeps inviting us into the Roa…

I bought a cheap Samsung phone. And it sucked. So I bought the new Pixel and it's so much better. I'll probably never buy a Samsung phone again.

I was disappointed Google killed Reader but I pivoted. Otherwise, Google's reputation for me is fine-ish.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they already did this: if they had scaled 4.5 with RL, 5 would probably have been the leap we expected If anything 4.5 being abandoned so they could sell India a $3 a month subscription was the first crack in The Box

Did you really mean to say 4.5? Gpt 4.5 used to cost $75/$150 per million tokens input/output. And it did not even seem to be that good to justify that. I would not expect many people were using it, and I doubt that "expanding to india" was what killed it (if it was that useful/popular they would have kept the api, or keep it for higher end subscriptions). If anything it should have been no1 in the "openAI graveyard"…

India in this context is a synecdoche for scaling consumer vs Anthropic's more enterprise-y route, but yes that's pretty much why we didn't get 4.5 with reasoning. Without reasoning, 4.5 had no future.

From Sam Altman himself:

> We had this big GPU crunch. We could go make another giant model. We could go make that, and a lot of people would want to use it, and we would disappoint them. And so we said, let’s make a really smart, really useful model, but also let’s try to optimize for inference cost. And I think we did a great job with that.

4.5 scaled into a unified reasoning model would have been an incredible model. It beat GPT-5 on accuracy and hallucinations without reasoning (!)

It just wouldn't have worked for powering things like ChatGPT Go's rollout and loginless chatgpt.com, so they dropped it.

(And if you want, you could argue it's the compute crunch that didn't let them do both... but Anthropic had to make the same choices at the time and went in the other direction.)

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

#188

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…

Enron employed a lot of smart people too. So did Bear Stearns. Smart people given bad incentives can create huge messes.

Dumb people given bad incentives can be even worse. No politicians come to mind...

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

#189
post #21
post #2

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…

I'm curious how long it took Google to reach that valuation.

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

#190
post #171

Why sunset sora instead of raising the price 100x?

Because to watch usage go to zero while charging what it actually costs to successfully run the service would immediately liquify the slow moving quicksand investors are currently standing in.

That plus the legal risk is too high, which gets added to the math of making copyright deals + computing, and they decided it didn't make sense at the moment. Even Grok is clamping down on the video side. Can't beat bad economics and lawyers/politicians coming down your throat no matter how good the product is.
Post reply on HN