So basically people who will wrap the openai SDK but sit at your company's offices lol what a joke
The OpenAI Deployment Company
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: The OpenAI Deployment Company
#22Nothing says easy to use revolutionary new way to work like requiring implementation middlemen. Salesforce would be proud.
I mean, to be fair to OpenAI and this approach, new general purpose technologies (like LLMs) are normally pretty hard to work with at first.
Look at electricity in factories and how long it took to have an impact, as well as the massive, massive lag between Visicalc and economy wide productivity increases.
I personally do believe that the foundation model companies are a terrible business, but that the technology itself is definitely useful (even if it's vastly unlikely to go full Singularity).
Re: The OpenAI Deployment Company
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are much worse. You can generally fire consultants. These people are from OpenAI. Good luck ever cancelling or reducing your OpenAI contracts when they have people inside your organization. Have fun trying to even discuss it as these people will no doubt insert themselves into every meeting and watercooler discussion involving the contracts they are are paid to protect.
Doesn't ASML have Engineers who work with TSMC to make sure their complex machines works optimally within their manufacturing facility? How is this any different?
Yeah, this is a totally normal thing that businesses do (particularly for complicated technology). However, the dysfunctions of many companies make these kinds of people far more powerful than they should be.
Re: The OpenAI Deployment Company
#24Is the sentiment around OpenAI already so bad that it's even fallen off the front page of Hacker News in two hours?
Re: The OpenAI Deployment Company
#25Is the sentiment around OpenAI already so bad that it's even fallen off the front page of Hacker News in two hours?
Well, it is a repulsive corporation, with a very repulsive CEO.
But so is Anthropic and all of Big Tech, so there's that.
Re: The OpenAI Deployment Company
#26People laugh at this, myself included in the past, but it works. I remember scoffing at AWS partnering with Deloitte and Accenture over a decade ago. My exact thoughts were "Our technology is great, why do we need these people to sell it?", and it turns out that selling to enterprises at scale is a lot more like an American high school experience than anything else.
Re: The OpenAI Deployment Company
#27I run a dev agency, and I can spot one when I see one. The trouble with dev agencies, "services companies", integration specialists and "forward deployed engineers" is that they scale lineraly with the number of people. You can't 100x your revenue without at least 80x-ing your headcount.Oh, you might go for that once due to AI - but so can everyone else. After that, it's boring linear growth. When I say "boring", I d…
The problem with these kinds of businesses is you have no capital. You have labourers.
If you’re SAP, you build SAP once and you sell it. If you’re an author, you write the book once.
With consulting, you have to keep doing the same work every year just to stand still. You don’t own an actual product.
Re: The OpenAI Deployment Company
#28I run a dev agency, and I can spot one when I see one. The trouble with dev agencies, "services companies", integration specialists and "forward deployed engineers" is that they scale lineraly with the number of people. You can't 100x your revenue without at least 80x-ing your headcount.Oh, you might go for that once due to AI - but so can everyone else. After that, it's boring linear growth. When I say "boring", I d…
The problem with these kinds of businesses is you have no capital. You have labourers. If you’re SAP, you build SAP once and you sell it. If you’re an author, you write the book once. With consulting, you have to keep doing the same work every year just to stand still. You don’t own an actual product.
Mostly.
Many of these companies do build up internal know-how.
In case of big consulting companies, they have huge internal knowledge bases, decks, cases etc from previous engagements. In case of product companies with FDEs, the feedback from customers ideally trickles down to product improvements. In case of OpenAI, they can improve their models.
Whether that's actually valuable enough to turn a blind eye to the downsides of consulting, I don't know.
Re: The OpenAI Deployment Company
#29> Forward Deployed Engineers We have a word for this, it's "consultant".
Different, this would be a "field engineer", which is pretty common for supporting customers which might have a lot of technical needs around your product. For example, some microcontroller vendors are pretty famous for having poor or non-existent documentation and instead rely on the dude on-site to tell your engineers how everything works.
Re: The OpenAI Deployment Company
#30People laugh at this, myself included in the past, but it works. I remember scoffing at AWS partnering with Deloitte and Accenture over a decade ago. My exact thoughts were "Our technology is great, why do we need these people to sell it?", and it turns out that selling to enterprises at scale is a lot more like an American high school experience than anything else.
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