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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

#221

Post by int_19h »

mschuster91 wrote: post #180
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Well, it's the rich's money, dedicated to replacing as many people as possible in the Great war on labor. A lot of "the rich's" money is actually backed by the pension funds, 401k and similar investment vehicles. That's the dirty secret in most of today's world. A lot of ultra-large companies would absolutely deserve getting broken up just for being way too powerful, the problem is any such attempts would send the…

Which is precisely why this arrangement exists. Think of it as chaining the galley slaves to the galley - if it sinks, then so do they, so their "interest" is to keep rowing.

But that is a short-term perspective. Long term, if we do nothing, we remain galley slaves.

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

#222

Post by int_19h »

noir_lord wrote: post #208
bigbuppo wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s rapidly ending my deal with Microsoft. I want windows to play games, for computing I use Linux but they keep foisting shite I don’t want on me just to play games, AI and sodding OneDrive can piss off. I’ve kept windows around because it was less painful to game on than Linux but Linux is better than ever and windows is getting worse, at some point those lines are gonna cross and for the first time in 30 odd year…

It's not just pushing it on the users. There's also a heavy-handed push to get teams to use more AI coding inside the company. I'll let you guess what that does to software quality, on average...

Regarding Linux gaming, the biggest problem there right now is all the multiplayer games with kernel anti-cheat. But I suspect that it'll be resolved eventually by Valve pushing for SteamOS support (although I doubt it'll ever work on any random Linux distro).

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

#223

Post by dariobeezly »

llbbdd wrote: post #150
exolymph wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homelessness and world hunger are not bottlenecked by money. There's a stronger case for healthcare, but that's also substantially a political issue.

There's a stronger case for world hunger being bottlenecked than healthcare. World hunger is a logistics problem now, but no amount of money lets you print doctors.

[dead]

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

#224

Post by wubrr »

mschuster91 wrote: post #186
wubrr wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of "the rich's" money is actually backed by the pension funds, 401k and similar investment vehicles. Not really clear what you mean by this. But arguably all of the rich's money (and all money in general) is backed by labour/the ability to exchange that money for someone else's labour.

> Not really clear what you mean by this. The amount of shares in many a large company that are held by passive or semi-passive investment vehicles. It's not just high net worth individuals and nation-state entities (wealth funds) that pump money into YC, Meta, Apple, NVidia, Microsoft and god knows what else, the bulk of the ownerships is held indirectly by the wide masses via one sort or another of pension schemes.…

I think you're greatly overestimating how much ownership the general public has. The bottom 90% of the population own like 12% of all equities, while bottom 50% only own 1% [0]

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9...

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

#225

Post by beeflet »

dantyti wrote: post #69
nemomarx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it that quickly? GPT 3 is where I would kind of put the start of this and that was in 2020, they had to work on the technology for quite a while before it got like this. Everyone else has been able to follow their progress and see what works.

GPT 2 didn't have a chat interface but had made a splash in some circles (think spam-adjacent). Edit: mixed up my dates claiming DALL E came out before GPT 3

I remember subredditsimulator was big (based on GPT and GPT2), but there was some confusion because no one could get ahold of these models

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

#226

Post by int_19h »

smcin wrote: post #193
bigyabai wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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; wo…

It's not single payer vs privatized insurance. Why is this myth so persistent in US?? There are many different options for public healthcare, of which single payer is but one, and it's not even the most popular worldwide. Many European countries are not single payer, including e.g. Germany.

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

#228

Post by int_19h »

aerhardt wrote: post #70
kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

Yeah, I'm extremely loyal to ChatGPT Plus and Codex, but is't because OpenAI has a native Mac app that I like, and Codex included with Plus and has served me well enough to not look at Claude. I like GPT-5 quite a bit as a user. I'll concede none of these are small things - they've had my money for 2+ years - but they're not gigantic advantages either. At an enterprise level however, in the current workload I am deal…

Interesting, so it's not just me who's finding Gemini 2.5 Pro to be the quiet leader? Deep Research also seems to be better in it, and the limits for that are far more generous to boot (20 per day on Gemini!).

Makes one wonder if Google will eventually sweep this field.

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

#229

Post by Andrex »

lkrubner wrote: post #87
karel-3d wrote: post #83

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

In late 2021, Ed Zitron wrote (on Twitter) that the future of all work was "work from home" and that no one would ever work in an office again. I responded: "In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear their processes to handle external workers. Now that the companies have invested in these changed processes, they are finding it easier to o…

> "Pee pee poo poo aaaaaaaaaaa peeeeee peeeeee poop poop poop."

Attach your name to this publicly, and you're a clown. I don't know why the world started listening to clowns and taking them seriously, when their personas are crafted to be non-serious on purpose.

Like I said, clowns.

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

#230

Post by JohnMakin »

nemothekid wrote: post #171
JohnMakin wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that OpenAI is still operating and the argument that it is completely unsustainable are not two incompatible things.

Wether or not OpenAI is sustainable or not is only a question that can be answered in hindsight. If OpenAI is still around in 10 years, in the same sort of capacity, does OP become retroactively wrong? My point is, you can agree that OpenAI is unsustainable, but it's not clear to me that is a decided fact, rather than an open conjecture. And if someone is making that decision from a place of ego, I have greater reaso…

The fact they are not currently even close to profitable with ever increasing costs and the sobering scaling realities there is something you could consider, and if you do believe they are sustainable, then you would have to believe (in my opinion, unlikely scenarios) they will somehow become sustainable, which is also a conjecture.

Seems a little unreasonable to point out “they are still around” as a refutation of the claim they aren’t sustainable when, in fact, the moment the investment money faucet keeping them alive is turned off they collapse and very quickly.

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