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

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

#191

Post by airstrike »

moomoo11 wrote: post #160
airstrike wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Too bad Anthropic fucks over their 20x max subscribers. Their whole opus usage limit bullshit in favor of sonnet 4.5 which is objectively worse regardless of whatever they say. They clearly want to save money and take our $200. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8449 I hope they get destroyed in the AI race.

FWIW I don't disagree

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

#192

Post by sidewndr46 »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #112
AgentME wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't he been saying that OpenAI is going to shut down every year for the last few years now? And that models are never going to get better than they were in 2022? I think he's pretty clearly a grifter chasing an audience that wants to be reassured that big tech is going away soon.

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.

Does Ed produce anything other than a newsletter?

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

#193

Post by smcin »

bigyabai wrote: post #103
codyb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully pay health care costs for _who_ for four years with 1 trillion dollars? Doesn't America alone already spend 2 or 3 trillion a year on healthcare?

> Doesn't America alone already spend 2 or 3 trillion a year on healthcare? There's a huge difference between "paying for healthcare" and "paying a healthcare provider" here in the United States. Oftentimes the latter has 2 or 3 additional zeroes attached.

Sure, but Congress invariably pretend to say the former but mean the latter. You're asking for single-payer instead of privatized health insurance, they will sooner bankrupt the country than switch to sanity. Congress and its funding sources are now captured by privatized health insurance:

In 2023-4, Health came #7 in total political donations, #8 is Lawyers & Lobbyists; the combined "Finance/Insur/RealEst" is #1; would be useful to see "Insurance" broken out by health insurers vs non-health (can anyone cite a more granular breakdown?). [https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/sectors]

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

#194

Post by ryandrake »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #168
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI WANTS 1 trillion dollars. They do not need it. Arguably no one needs it. I am at best luke-warm on LLMs, but how are any sane people rationalizing these requests? What is the opportunity cost of spending a billion or even a hundred billion dollars on compute instead of on climate tech or food security or healthcare or literally anything else?!

Well, it's the rich's money, dedicated to replacing as many people as possible in the Great war on labor. I easily see the rich betting a trillion dollars especially if it's not their money and they start employing government funds in the name of a fictitious AI arms race. They smell blood in the water. Reducing everyone to as minimum wage as possible. Capital is already concentrated, aligned along monopolies and car…

There will be at least one trillionaire within the next 12-24 months, and likely there will be multiple trillionaires within 5 years, the way wealth is consolidating at an accelerated rate. These amounts of investment don't seem to be fictional anymore.

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

#195

Post by wilsonnb3 »

scottyah wrote: post #96
threetonesun wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The play OpenAI is making has nothing to do with the underlying models any more. They release good ones but it doesn't really matter, they're going for being the place people land when they open a web browser. That is incredibly sticky and not easily replaced. Being the company that replaces the phrase "oh just Google it" is worth half the money in the world, and I think they're well on their way to getting there.

I do say ChatGPT when referring to LLMs/genAI in general, but I do hate saying it as it is nowhere near as nice to say as "google". I will switch immediately once something better comes up.

“Chat” is already in the youth lexicon, originally referring to an amorphous blob of live stream viewers. It now kind of refers to a non-existent but omnipresent viewer of your life.

I think ChatGPT might turn into just “chat” as the next evolution of the term.

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

#197

Post by thereitgoes456 »

nemothekid wrote: post #119
thereitgoes456 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was wryly communicating, "your argument was so stupid I don't even need to engage with it". In my experience he has a horrible response to criticism. He's right on the AI stuff, but he responds to both legitimate and illegitimate feedback without much thoughtfulness, usually non-sequitur redirect or ad hominem . In his defense though, I expect 97% of feedback he gets is Sam Altman glazers, and he must be tired.

He's right on the AI stuff? How do you figure that? As far as I can tell, OpenAI is still operating. It sounds like you agree with him on the AI stuff, but he could be wrong, just like how he was wrong about remote work. I'm actually more inclined to believe he's wrong if he gets so defensive about criticism. That tells me he's more focused on protecting his ego than actually uncovering the truth.

I don't think he's right about everything. He is particularly weak at understanding underlying technology, as others have pointed out. But, perhaps by luck, he is right most of the time.

For example, he was the lone voice saying that despite all the posturing and media manipulation by Altman, that OpenAI's for-profit transformation would not work out, and certainly not by EOY2025. He was also the lone voice saying that "productivity gains from AI" were not clearly attributable to such, and are likely make-believe. He was right on both.

Perhaps you have forgotten these claims, or the claims about OpenAI's revenue from "agents" this year, or that they were going to raise ChatGPT's price to $44 per month. Altman and the world have seemingly memory-holed these claims and moved on to even more fantastical ones.

He has never said that OpenAI would be bankrupt, his position (https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/, Jul 2024) is:

I am hypothesizing that for OpenAI to survive for longer than two years, it will have to (in no particular order):

- Successfully navigate a convoluted and onerous relationship with Microsoft, one that exists both as a lifeline and a direct source of competition.

- Raise more money than any startup has ever raised in history, and continue to do so at a pace totally unseen in the history of financing.

- Have a significant technological breakthrough such that it reduces the costs of building and operating GPT — or whatever model that succeeds it — by a factor of thousands of percent.

- Have such a significant technological breakthrough that GPT is able to take on entirely unseen new use cases, ones that are not currently possible or hypothesized as possible by any artificial intelligence researchers.

- Have these use cases be ones that are capable of both creating new jobs and entirely automating existing ones in such a way that it will validate the massive capital expenditures and infrastructural investment necessary to continue.

I ultimately believe that OpenAI in its current form is untenable. There is no path to profitability, the burn rate is too high, and generative AI as a technology requires too much energy for the power grid to sustain it, and training these models is equally untenable, both as a result of ongoing legal issues (as a result of theft) and the amount of training data necessary to develop them.

He is right about this too. They are doing #2 on this list.

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

#198

Post by Fraterkes »

Multiplayer wrote: post #63

The current AI wave has been compared (by sama) to electricity and sometimes transistors. AI is just going to be in all the products. The trillion dollar question is: Do you care what kind of electricity you are using? So, will you care what kind of AI you are using. In the last few interviews with him I have listened to he has said that what he wants is "your ai" that knows you, everywhere that you are. So his game…

If you take that at face value, shouldn't every investor just back Google or Apple instead? Like, OpenAI is, at best, months ahead when it comes to model quality. But for them to get integrated into the lives of people in the way all their competitors are would take years. If the way in which ai becomes this ubiquitous trillion dollar thing involves making it hyper-personalized, is there any way in which OpenAi is particularly well positioned to achieve that?

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

#199

Post by CamperBob2 »

ebb_earl_co wrote: post #111
Insanity wrote: post #105

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?

Never mind the phrase. If your parrot can compete in international math and programming competitions at the gold-medal level and make entire subreddits fail the Turing test, I would like to borrow your parrot.

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

#200

Post by rhetocj23 »

bigbuppo wrote: post #188
yibg wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty smart actually. Altman has sort of linked the fate of OpenAI to that of Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Microsft etc with these huge deals / partnerships. We've seen the impact of these deals on stock prices before even a penny has changed hands. Tracks with his reputation for power play and politics.

That certainly explains why Microsoft is so desperate to force everyone into using their AI whether they want to or not. I'm wondering if the deal will end Microsoft when OpenAI goes belly up.

Difficult to say for certain.

It depends on the extent to which the promise was peddled and whether MSFT can be trusted with the cash balance - investors will reflect that in the stock price in future if there is a bubble bursting event. If that scenario pans out, Apple will be sitting there very pretty given it has not spent any real money on pursuing LLMs.

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