Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

om.co

271–280 of 281 posts

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#271

The quoted revenue numbers seem insane, but I guess it's the result of corporate deals where every developer seat is hundreds of dollars a month? My job has been publicly promoting who's on top of the "AI use dashboard" while our whole product falls apart. Surely this house of cards has to collapse at some point, better get public money before it does.

I wish there was some sort of community project where engineers could whistleblow about their product falling apart through misguided AI pushes. I see it everywhere in my private circles, I'm not sure the story is truly reaching the big public. I've gone through many many fads and smoke during my career, but this is the first time I'm actually worried about things falling apart.

>I wish there was some sort of community project where engineers could whistleblow about their product falling apart through misguided AI pushes.

It would be an awesome thing to see. But would need to be hosted in another country like PirateBay

Also, what is their incentive?

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#272
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you can identify where and how prediction markets are wrong, why aren't you applying that and making millions? > - Prediction markets generally become more accurate as the diversity of the bettor pool grows. The users of polymarket and Kalshi heavily skew towards young men from certain socioeconomic groups, who may be biased towards one or the other outcome. Citation? If your small population is high IQ, accurate…

> why aren't you applying that and making millions? Knowing that something is a lousy predictor doesn't mean that you have a better one.

A lot of predictions are binary. If you know the market is wrong, then you take the other side of the prediction.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#273
post #15

There’s a strong chance the IPO window has passed. I just don’t see investors willing to jump in here given all the questions about the financial viability of AI. The bulk of those investing now are broadly just pumping cash into the fire to keep their prior investments from going to zero. We have hit a mass deceleration of what the current tech can do with transformers. The tech is also on a path to hyper-commoditiz…

> There’s a strong chance the IPO window has passed Ha, i'll take the other side of that bet. I'm not sure why you think they couldn't possibly IPO and you don't really specify why in your post. Having been in the capital markets for 20 years, now is one of the better times to IPO and I'd bet that both OpenAI and Anthropic will IPO within 12 months. There are lots of games you can play like releasing a small 10% floa…

yeah, just fud bc fud. I've seen this movie before

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#274
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, these tools are really great in a lot of cases. But they still don't have general intelligence or true understanding of anything - so if people using them wrong and rely on their output because it looks good and not because they verified it, then this is on the people using them.

I mean, that is fine, but then it seems like people at large are not using them "right". I think you'll find that since these tools are convenient and produce a lot of code in terms of lines, that verifying goes out the window. Due diligence was hard before these tools existed.

Oh I do find it certainly tempting to get lazy with these tools, but I did learn that there are sideprojects, where vibecoding is fine - and important codebase, that can be improved with LLM's - but not if you just let agents loose on them.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's something most people miss just state it. But the LLM suggesting a question doesn't mean it has a good answer to converge to. If you actually ask, the model probabilities will be pressured to come up with something, anything, to follow up on the offer, which will be nonsense if there actually weren't anything else to add. I've seen this pattern fail a lot on roleplay (e.g. AI Dungeon) so I really dislike…

You should be careful with ideas like "sufficiently smart LLM" - quotes and all. There's no intelligence here, just next token prediction. And the idea of an LLM being self-aware is ludicrous. Ask one what the difference between hallucinations and lying is and get a list similar to this why the LLM isn't lying: - No intent, beliefs, or awareness - No concept of “know” truth vs. falsehood - A byproduct of how it predi…

being intelligent and being self aware, or being a moral agent etc are two (three+?) different things

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have started using the most token-intensive model I can find and asking for complicated tasks (rewrite this large codebase, review the resulting code, etc.) The agent will churn in a loop for a good 15-20 minutes and make the leaderboard number go up. The result is verbose and useless but it satisfies the metrics from leadership.

How much do you think that's costing?

It's very opaque to me what we actually pay for tokens. We are aggressively focused on cutting costs everywhere except AI though.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#278

The quoted revenue numbers seem insane, but I guess it's the result of corporate deals where every developer seat is hundreds of dollars a month? My job has been publicly promoting who's on top of the "AI use dashboard" while our whole product falls apart. Surely this house of cards has to collapse at some point, better get public money before it does.

I wish there was some sort of community project where engineers could whistleblow about their product falling apart through misguided AI pushes. I see it everywhere in my private circles, I'm not sure the story is truly reaching the big public. I've gone through many many fads and smoke during my career, but this is the first time I'm actually worried about things falling apart.

The thing is even if it isn't adopted to write code, ChatGPT is part of shadow IT everywhere now. The number of screenshares I get on where a customer has ChatGPT giving them wrong information about AWS networking is staggering. Even AWS support is barfing out LLM responses. Even if it doesn't torpedo the code of your product it will negatively impact how people use your product and the platforms you rely on.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#279
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is this supposed to imply? Wisdom of the crowd, same as guessing jellybeans in a jar. The exact average is wrong, but it's still pretty damn close because the guesses are likely to follow a normal distribution. If the hump of the normal distribution of these guesses is around 4% (or whatever) odds on, the actual answer is unlikely to be far from that. > You can't reasonably draw any conclusion from betting wit…

> Wisdom of the crowd I checked Polymarket towards the end of February for the odds of US bombing Iran and they were vanishingly low. IIRC most bets were aiming for summer 2026. YMMV.

There's a prisoners execution paradox here. If PM said there's a 95% chance, then Iran knows that too, and can prepare. Making them a worse target.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#280
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisdom of the crowd has some fatal flaws that are especially important when it comes to things like IPOs. - Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value…

> An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value to converge to. Of course there is - they are betting on the "when". > It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead. I dunno how to reply to this - that is exactly my point, but it appears (to me, anyway) that you are…

> I dunno how to reply to this - that is exactly my point, but it appears (to me, anyway) that you are saying this in disagreement?

Yes. The research shows that they do (almost) always converge, but that they DON'T always converge to an accurate value. In particular, there can be behavioral biases at work that warp the perception of bettors in one direction or the other. A well documented case of this is when fans of a sports team pile in and bet for their favorite team, causing the price to shift too much towards the more popular team. Exposure to the predictions by other bettors then causes the total market to converge to the biased price. Interestingly enough, people still do this even though this phenomenon is well documented and they have to put their money on the line. People just don't care enough about their $10 bet to do thorough research.

In a similar way, I would not at all be surprised if some people are such fanboys of OpenAI that they start to display cultlike behavior. You can easily find such people online even on this very site. It's not such a weird thing to consider that people at the peak of a hype cycle don't always behave in rational ways, especially when they're just betting $10 when drunk on a Saturday evening.

Post reply on HN