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

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

#241

Post by netdevphoenix » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:17 PM UTC

This is why I don't think LLMs will lead anywhere other than the present: they are very expensive. If top LLM company in the world can't bring those costs down in a sensible amount of time, it tells you everything you need to know about the future of LLMs. Rest assured, once OpenAI goes down and it really sounds like they are way past the peak, valuations for other LLMs companies will follow. And once they can't raise funding, all of them aside from those backed by big conglomerates (see Google's Gemini and Facebook's Llama) will survive.

The long term future of LLMs sure looks like the LLMs themselves will be commodities and the real value will lie in the use of those LLMs to deliver value

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

#242

Post by ahel » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:21 PM UTC

Why Meta decided to open source their Llama architecture and complete models? From a strategic business perspective, I'm trying to puzzle why they would give that up, a competitive advantage (even though it might not be as good as OpenAI product), rather than directly competing with OpenAI. What's the reasoning behind this decision?

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

#243

Post by mrbungie » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:27 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #236

ben_w wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers — the latter are metaphorically the equivalent of warning about CO2-induced warming causing loss of ice caps and consequent sea level rises and loss of tens of trillions of dollars of real estate as costal cities are destroyed… in 1896*, when it was already possible to predict, but we were a long way from both the danger and the zeitgeist to care. But only metap…

> But only metaphorically the equivalent, as the maximum downside is much worse than that. Maybe I'm a glass-half-full sort of guy, but everyone dying because we failed to reverse man-made climate change doesn't seem strictly better than everyone dying due to rogue AI

Everyone dying from a rogue AI would be stupid and embarrasing: we used resources that would've been better used fighting climate change, but ended up being killed by an hallucinating paperclip maximizer that came from said resources.

Stupid squared: We die because we gave the AI the order of reverting climate change xD.

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

#244

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:28 PM UTC

buster wrote: post #165

lotsofpulp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was. When was this true? Amazon was founded Jul 1994, and a publicly listed company by May 1997. I highly doubt Amazon absorbed billions of dollars of VC money in less than 3 years of the mid 1990s. https://dazeinfo.com/2019…

I don't know about vc money but Amazon was well known for spending all revenue into growth and, to my understanding, noone understood why. Why buy stocks of companies that don't make profit? Nowadays, it's not unusual. Jeff Bezoz was laughed about for it. I think even on TV (some late night show in the 90s). Edit: Jay Leno, 1999: https://www.unilad.com/film-and-tv/news/jeff-bezos-audience-...

The talk shows segments are pre-planned to have “funny” quips and serve as marketing for the guests.

I was only a teenager, but I assume there had been lots of businesses throughout the course of history that took more than 5 years to be profitable.

The evidence is that investors were buying shares in it valuing it in the billions. Obviously, this is 1999 and approach peak bubble, but investing into a business for multiple years and waiting to earn a profit was not an alien idea.

I especially doubt it was alien to a mega successful celebrity and therefore I would bet Jay Leno is 100% lying about “not understanding” in this quote, and it is purely a setup for Bezos to respond so he can promote his business.

> “Here’s the thing I don’t understand, the company is worth billions and every time I pick up the paper each year it loses more money than it lost the year before,” says the seasoned talk show presenter, with the audience erupting into laughter off screen.

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

#245

Post by netdevphoenix » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:34 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #149

bruce511 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no technical moat, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moat. Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was. There's no technical moat around online sales. And lots of companies sell online. But Amazon is still the biggest (by a long long way) (at least in the…

A couple other comments touch on the point I want to make, but I feel they don't nail it hard enough: if today you told me you had a website that was 100% technologically identical to Amazon, but you were willing to make slightly less money, you'd still have no products... as a user I'd have no reason to go there, but then without users there is no reason to sell there, so you have a circular bootstrapping issue. Tha…

Missing the point though. Amazon isn't Amazon because of its tech (speed, reliability, etc) doesn't matter as much as: inventory (tons of things you can only find there), delivery speed (you can reliably get 99% of the things in a week or less and some of the items get delivered in HOURS) and customer service (you are right by default, you will refunded and get free delivery if you encounter issues). That's the ultimate killer. If a competitor managed to do this, a little marketing to get installed in the customer base's phones will definitely eat Amazon's lunch. Temu has shown big strides but its ethical problems will prevent them from becoming a true threat. A local Temu-like competitor would be a formidable adversary

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

#246

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:39 PM UTC

sausagefeet wrote: post #178

lotsofpulp wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart and Target have tons of warehouse expertise. Amazon’s moat is their software, where they have a far longer head start and they can afford to pay their employees due to AWS and other services’ high margins, as well as executing well on growth resulting in being able to compensate with equity. Walmart and Target were far better than Amazon at logistics at the beginning, but they couldn’t execute (or didn’t focu…

Walmart has been a tech company since the 80s. The way Walmart got so big is that the created a literal network between stores so they could do logistics at scale. They had the largest database at the time. Walmart is still the largest company in the world by revenue, with Amazon at its heels, with Amazon's profit beating out Walmart's. A lot of this thread, I think, is just fantasy land that Amazon is somehow: 1. De…

Good point that Walmart got its edge against incumbents by incorporating advanced technology into their operations.

But for whatever reason, they took their foot off the pedal, and allowed Amazon to use the next step (networking technology and internet) to gain an edge over the now incumbent Walmart.

> 2. Is more tech savvy than Walmart and Target.

The market (via market cap) clearly thinks Amazon has lots more potential than its competitors, and I assume it is because investors think Amazon will be more successful using technology to advance.

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

#247

Post by fragmede » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:42 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #233

How do they define success after we gave them all the capital they're requesting?

According to 'The Information', AGI will be achieved only when OpenAI's AI systems generate profits exceeding $100 billion, so I'm guessing, for them, AGI = success.

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

#248

Post by eden-u4 » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:42 PM UTC

ahel wrote: post #242

Why Meta decided to open source their Llama architecture and complete models? From a strategic business perspective, I'm trying to puzzle why they would give that up, a competitive advantage (even though it might not be as good as OpenAI product), rather than directly competing with OpenAI. What's the reasoning behind this decision?

meta is large enough (and diversified enough), when OpenAI valuation goes to pennies (because LLM won't solve any real problem, nor they'll remain relevant in the long term and open source alternative are more than enough for most chatbot usecases), they can acquire all the relevant technologies from OpenAI, Anthropic and such. The real question is why google didn't release their models.

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

#249

Post by noch » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:47 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #238

noch wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers Fwiw, I don't believe that there are any AI doomers. I've hung out in their forums for several years and watched all their lectures and debates and bookmarked all their arguments with strangers on X and read all their articles and … They talk of bombing datacentres, and how their children are in extreme danger within a decade or how in 2 decades, the entire ea…

> or, best case, in 2000 years, the entire observable universe will have been consumed for energy You're definitely mixing things up, and the set of things may include fiction. 2000 years doesn't get you out of the thick disk region of our own galaxy at the speed of light. > The doomers have also been funded to the tune of half a billion dollars and counting. I've never heard such a claim. LessWrong.com has funding m…

I somehow accidentally made you think that I was trying to have a debate about doomers, but I wasn't which is why I prefixed it with "fwiw" (meaning for-what-it's-worth; I'm a random on the internet, so my words aren't worth anything, certainly not worth debating at length) Sorry if I misrepresented my position. To be clear, I have no intense intellectual or emotional investment in doomer ideas nor in criticism of doomer ideas.

Anyway,

> You're definitely mixing things up, and the set of things may include fiction. 2000 years doesn't get you out of the thick disk region of our own galaxy at the speed of light.

Here's what Arthur Breitman wrote[^0] so you can take it up with him, not me:

"

1) [Energy] on planet is more valuable because more immediately accessible.

2) Humans can build AI that can use energy off-planet so, by extension, we are potential consumers of those resources.

3) The total power of all the stars of the observable universe is about 2 × 10^49 W. We consume about 2 × 10^13 W (excluding all biomass solar consumption!). If consumption increases by just 4% a year, there's room for only about 2000 years of growth.

"

About funding:

>> The doomers have also been funded to the tune of half a billion dollars and counting.

> I've never heard such a claim. LessWrong.com has funding more like a few million

" A young nonprofit [The Future of Life Institute] pushing for strict safety rules on artificial intelligence recently landed more than a half-billion dollars from a single cryptocurrency tycoon — a gift that starkly illuminates the rising financial power of AI-focused organizations. "

---

[^0]: https://x.com/ArthurB/status/1872314309251825849

[^1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/25/a-665m-crypto-war-c...

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

#250

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 12:48 PM UTC

scarface_74 wrote: post #193

lotsofpulp wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart and Target have tons of warehouse expertise. Amazon’s moat is their software, where they have a far longer head start and they can afford to pay their employees due to AWS and other services’ high margins, as well as executing well on growth resulting in being able to compensate with equity. Walmart and Target were far better than Amazon at logistics at the beginning, but they couldn’t execute (or didn’t focu…

Walmart and Target can get truckloads of items to a relatively few stores. Amazon can get items to people’s houses

Right, which Amazon originally accomplished with huge assistance from expensive contracts with UPS, but they used software (and new hardware) and mobile internet technology to figure out how to reduce their delivery costs by being able to figure out how to incentivize cheaper independent contractors to deliver their packages, rather than expensive UPS union employees.