Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 323 posts

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

#21

Post by cs702 »

This rings true to my ears:

> There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble. Thus, effectively, OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution. The revolution is real, but it’s ultimately going to be a commodity technology layer, not the foundation of a defensible proprietary moat. In 1995 investors mistakenly thought investing in Netscape was a way to bet on the future of the open internet and the World Wide Web in particular.

OpenAI has a short-ish window of opportunity to figure out how to build a moat.

"Trying to spend more" is not a moat, because the largest US and Chinese tech companies can always outspend OpenAI.

The clock is ticking.

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

#23

Post by bloomingkales »

Unimaginable sums of money can only come from oil rich countries. They are probably just mentally trying to accept that they are going to take the money from these nations.

The word "open" is still under threat in this scenario too.

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

#24

Post by MndlshnDscpl »

asadotzler wrote: post #16
ghshephard wrote: post #9

In all fairness regarding his comment about Netscape - anyone who invested in Netscape at the IPO (and certainly before the IPO) at $2.9B - made a ton of money on the Internet. On the last day of trading, after the AOL exit 4 years it was worth (cash, stock, etc...) around $10B. Thank Mike Homer for pushing that one through, and Jim Barksdale for being savvy enough to recognize it as the right play.

Also, they started from scratch, they didn't take NCSA's Mosaic public, they left the university, brought in some established players, created a new company, and re-wrote the entire browser from scratch. SamA wants to take everything the non-profit created and just make it for profit. If he want's to do that he can create a new company, lure away the talent, start from scratch, and run from there. This "it's just lik…

Agreed. I think originally, it would have been more accurate to say IE was based on Mosaic. If I recall correctly, I think Microsoft bought out Spyglass Mosaic to base IE on, and that browser had been licensed from the NCSA. Netscape on the other hand had originally been Mosaic Communications(anyone remember home.mcom.com?) and changed the name when they did the clean rewrite. I think the name Mozilla came about because they were looking for a 'Mosaic Killer' or something along those lines. Memories are kind of fuzzy so I'm sure someone on here has a better recollection.

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

#25

Post by kragen »

asadotzler wrote: post #12

Gruber's shilling some here. Andreesen et al. started over from scratch when they created Netscape. They didn't use any of the NCSA code. It was a ground up re-write. SamA wants to take everything the non-profit built and use it directly in HIS for profit enterprise. Fuck him.

Who and what do you think Gruber is shilling for? I don't see Gruber saying anything that might tempt anyone to part from some of their money. He seems to be doing the diametrical opposite of shilling.

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

#26

Post by wmf »

robertlagrant wrote: post #15

This doesn't seem to say much to back its comparisons. Wouldn't spending a giant amount of money create some sort of moat?

Not if your competitors are spending the same amount (or spending vastly less to get similar results in the case of DeepSeek).

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

#27

Post by VHRanger »

patrickhogan1 wrote: post #20

I agree that at its current rate of $20 per month and continuous cash burn, OpenAI’s model doesn’t seem sustainable. But the same could have been said about Google in its early days. Back then, Google spent heavily to index websites without a clear path to profitability—until it figured out how to monetize. Similarly, OpenAI will likely release more products to generate revenue. OpenAI has the potential to create the…

> Google spent heavily to index websites without a clear path to profitability

Uh, they were advertising in 1999 already?

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

#28

Post by Handprint4469 »

stri8ed wrote: post #11
ren_engineer wrote: post #5

and yet deepseek just created an amazing model with the fraction of their compute resources

Trained at least in part on Chat-GPT data.

Doesn't matter. In fact, it makes it even funnier: all these investors spending billions of dollars on OpenAI just end up subsidizing the competing models.

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

#29

Post by mvdtnz »

asadotzler wrote: post #12

Gruber's shilling some here. Andreesen et al. started over from scratch when they created Netscape. They didn't use any of the NCSA code. It was a ground up re-write. SamA wants to take everything the non-profit built and use it directly in HIS for profit enterprise. Fuck him.

What do you suppose he is shilling, and for whom?

I don't know who this Gruber guy is, but it's relieving to hear at least someone talk some sense about the ludicrous levels of investment being poured into something that most users go "heh that's neat" and would never consider paying for.

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

#30

Post by wmf »

I see some people talking about OpenAI "stealing" IP from the nonprofit side, but remember that they went "capped profit" back in 2019. It's possible that GPT-3 and later were developed entirely by the capped-profit side anyway. I doubt there's much if any pre-2019 IP left.
Post reply on HN