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

forbes.com

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

#191

Post by aworks »

bombcar wrote: post #100
ianbutler wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without me trying to be snarky why do you feel spreadsheet software launching is comparable to this scenario?

I took it the other way, spreadsheets shook up the world way more than AI has (to date) - it's possible that history will look back and count AI as the bigger "thing" but if I had to pick a killer app, VisiCalc and computer spreadsheets in general would beat ChatGPT.

Good link from the other day about spreadsheet impact on business https://davidoks.blog/p/how-the-spreadsheet-reshaped-america

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

#192

Post by aworks »

skydhash wrote: post #104
mandevil wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not normal for a company that has been at it this long. The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two. ChatGPT was opened to the public on November 30th, 2022, which was 1219 days ago- almost 50% more time has elapsed than between the Apple II and Visicalc.

IMO, the AI companies are trying to be both T-Mobile and Google Doc at the same time. Even Apple is struggling with being both the platform and the product. The issue with OpenAI is that the platform has no moat (other than money) and the product can be easily copied. In the game console world, the platforms have patents and trademarks, and games are not easily produced.

I'm a retired engineering manager so judge me appropriately :-) I've had 1000 good chats with ChatGPT on a wide range of topics. I build personal Excel and Access applications but not any real programming. I don't need workflow automation although I will dabble with Codex. I'm curious why I should abandon what works for Claude.

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

#193

Post by aworks »

bandrami wrote: post #178
adventured wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM usage will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, which will be wildly lucrative in terms of margins (not as good as Google search used to be). If GPT is a leader in that, they'll take a sizable share of that pot. There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there is in being Anthropic -> enterprise. Just take a look at the…

It will not be lucrative if the hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue cost the providers trillions in compute. That's still the big question.

I think this is the right question. My search/chat is now 50% ChatGPT, 30% Google, and 20% Gemini. I have no idea the business implications of this.

For that matter, I don't know the bandwidth and compute cycle tradeoffs between traditional search and AI.

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

#195

Post by skydhash »

aworks wrote: post #192
skydhash wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the AI companies are trying to be both T-Mobile and Google Doc at the same time. Even Apple is struggling with being both the platform and the product. The issue with OpenAI is that the platform has no moat (other than money) and the product can be easily copied. In the game console world, the platforms have patents and trademarks, and games are not easily produced.

I'm a retired engineering manager so judge me appropriately :-) I've had 1000 good chats with ChatGPT on a wide range of topics. I build personal Excel and Access applications but not any real programming. I don't need workflow automation although I will dabble with Codex. I'm curious why I should abandon what works for Claude.

You shouldn't. No need to rush to buy a TI-84 to do simple arithmetic. I don't use either because I can learn just find from docs and textbooks. And I don't have that many problems to solve with computing.

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

#196

Post by keeda »

staticman2 wrote: post #175
satvikpendem wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I played around with it and its better than it used to be but if you ask it something like "Whats the name of the third book in the peripheral trilogy going to be" it just regurgitates some dumb reddit comment by someone who seems to be making things up. There's no actual title that has been announced and the reddit post was not a reasonable bit of speculation. The problem with these LLMs is they rarely say "the sear…

These days, Google AI overviews regularly add a qualifier to the effect of "... according to this comment on Reddit "

That's basically a UX trick to entirely sidestep being held accountable for the results, but seems sufficient to notify the user about the provenance of the answer to adjust their grains of salt.

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

#197

Post by mtrifonov »

The pattern with most of these is they optimized for the demo, not the sustained interaction. Making an AI impressive for 5 minutes is easy. Making it feel like a presence that belongs in your daily life, knowing when to talk, what to remember, what to forget. That's a completely different engineering problem.

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

#198

Post by pseudohadamard »

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…

  Something missing in this discussion is people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who work there aren't stupid!
They have infinite amounts of investor money to burn and no obvious way forward. TFA's line about "spaghetti at the wall" pretty much summed up what happens in that situation.

And in terms of "the people who work there aren't stupid", you can have technically talented people who are very good at their specific thing and hopeless at anything else, a friend of mine once summed it up as "the dumbest smart people I ever met". This is why you need skilled management to let them do their thing but also steer them in the right direction as they're doing it. From the descriptions of OpenAI it's kinda rudderless apart from the one-man hype machine at the top.

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

#199

Post by pyronite »

lefty2 wrote: post #143
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…

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.

Do you have a source for any of this?

I’d previously heard 1M a day.

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