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

OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 620 posts

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#411

Post by giobox »

leptons wrote: post #377
numbers wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, ~1B active users + when non-tech people think of AI, they think of "ChatGPT" not many of the competitors.

"Anthropic" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and I think a lot of people would avoid it simply because it doesn't have a catchy name like OpenAI or ChatGPT. It's also far more fun to say "I did a Google search" than "I did a Duck Duck Go search", and one still dominates over the other no matter the privacy concerns or how easy it is to switch. People can be simple like that.

I’m not sure it matters in Anthropic’s case that much - even people who use Anthropic models rarely think of the company as “Anthropic”. Their Claude brand is very strong, so much so the website is https://claude.ai etc, and you commonly see discourse about the company’s models where the name Anthropic never even appears. It’s Claude, Claude, Claude all the way down.

Claude has impressive mindshare in many engineering disciplines too, and given how many open source projects are a play on its name I’m not sure I’d argue it isn’t catchy either. Certainly rolls off the tongue easier for me than “chatGPT” does, which even Sam Altman their CEO agrees is an awful product name they are stuck with.

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#412

Post by MengerSponge »

danielparsons wrote: post #407
sigmoid10 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4 came out 3 years ago and you can run comparable models for 1% of the cost nowadays. That is not 2x efficiency. That's two orders of magnitude in end-to-end compute efficiency.

you're looking at nearly the entire curve of the tech's development. that's like saying lightbulbs became 99% more energy efficient and therefore will become another 99% more energy efficient. but most techs follow an S curve.

But S curves are boring and dont moon

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#413

Post by duped »

danielparsons wrote: post #410
mlinsey wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adoption of web browsers was also much lower when Netscape was dominant. 90% marketshare is less meaningful if you're only 1% of the way to the potential market size. Peeling away users who talk to ChatGPT every day is very possible, but harder than getting someone whose never used an LLM before (but does use your OS, browser, phone...) to try yours first. I think the even better analogy than browsers is search engin…

google search definitely has a moat. people build their websites to optimize for google's algorithm, therefore google users see better results -> google gets more users -> websites optimize for google -> repeat. Personally I never bother with 'bing SEO' or 'bing ppc ads'.

Google backfilled their moat with sponsored results and crappy AI summaries

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#414

Post by trvz »

dfp33 wrote: post #288
max51 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "circular investment" is mostly start up companies using their stocks instead of cash to pay for server hardware and cloud computing. There is a few extra steps in between that make things look weird and convoluted, but the end results is really just big companies giving hardware and getting shares of ai companies in exchange for it.

Nope wrong framing. Nvidia is investing assets into OAI - it has to. Because OAI needs to become successful for Nvidia's story in the long-term to play out, to justify its current stock price.

Nvidia just needs the winner to be an Nvidia customer. OpenAI is replacable.

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#416

Post by echelon »

xienze wrote: post #322
echelon wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m convinced these “guys you gotta believe me I’m a seasoned veteran and this shit is the real deal” posts that show up in every AI thread are either coming from Sam Altman or a bot.

Just try it.

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#417

Post by teaearlgraycold »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #397
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to be plenty of jobs in SF. Although you’ll most likely end up working on some AI bullshit.

Contact me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867010 Note: I need work, not interviews. ;-)

I’m not an employer. But I’ve been intentionally unemployed for the last 18 months and have been lucky enough to pass on multiple jobs because they weren’t the right fit. I haven’t applied to anything. The networking is just really good here.

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#418

Post by underlipton »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #319
dangus wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re just describing how it’s circular. It’s like Toys R Us not having enough money to pay Mattel for Barbie dolls and telling Mattel they can have partial ownership of the company if they just supply them with some more toys. But the problem is that Toys R Us is spending $15, 20, or maybe even $50 (who knows?) to sell a $10 toy. Toys R Us continues selling toys faster and faster despite a lack of profit, m…

OK, so absolutely good faith here what is the end game? Obviously, there’s a scenario of super power AI and then it’s a matter of continuing course. Electricity and silicon. What if you are right, and the scaling doesn’t work. It is too much power, time, hardware to improve… does openAI fold? Do they just actual use the models they have? Does everyone just decide that AI didn’t work and go back 5 years like it didn’t…

The people running these companies have a perverse incentive to keep the ball rolling as long as possible so that they can extricate as much personal wealth and influence as possible. Maybe AGI makes all the problems go away. But, failing that, they get out relatively scot-free when it all collapses. And they don't owe anything to the public. And no one is going to bring them up on fraud charges or any other kind of criminal charges. So, while the world is burning around them (including their former companies), they have the money and connections to acquire property and businesses that are actually productive. It's the Russian oligarch playbook. They're the kings of a struggling society on the brink of failure, but they heard "kings" and said, "Let's go."

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#419

Post by davemp »

copx wrote: post #307
paxys wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very convenient to put "AGI" in all these agreements because the term is fundamentally undefinable. So throw out whatever numbers you want and fight about it and backtrack later.

The definition used to be "passes the Turing test" .. until LLMs passed it.

Extremely debatable. Especially because there is no "The Turing Test" [0] only a game and a few instances were described by Turing. I recommend reading the original paper before making bold claims about it. The bar for the interrogator has certainly be raised, but considering:

- the prevalence "How many |r|'s are in the word 'strawberry'?" esque questions that cause(d) LLMs to stumble

- context window issues

It would be naive to claim that there does not exist, or even that it would be difficult to construct/train, an interrogator that could reliably distinguish between an LLM and human chat instance.

[0]: https://archive.computerhistory.org/projects/chess/related_m...

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#420

Post by hunterpayne »

copx wrote: post #307
paxys wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very convenient to put "AGI" in all these agreements because the term is fundamentally undefinable. So throw out whatever numbers you want and fight about it and backtrack later.

The definition used to be "passes the Turing test" .. until LLMs passed it.

Sure, when the expected monetary value was 0. Then they started claiming that investing $1,000,000,000,000.00 (that's $1T) into a 4 year old startup was a good idea. Change the valuation, change the goal. Then the goal was be better than a human employees (or at least more efficient or even just improves efficiency) because without that the value of the LLM is far lower than what it is being sold as. All the research so far says that LLMs fall far short of that goal. And if this was someone else's money, fine. But this is basically everyone's retirement savings. Again, higher valuation, higher goal. Finally, when you start losing people's retirement savings, criminal penalties start getting attached to things.
Post reply on HN