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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#601
post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Lower prices don't make things more convenient or fast. > You are replying to a straw man, I never said anything like that. It makes for dull discussions. If you didn't mean that, why did you say "When price goes down, robotaxis become a more viable option due to convenience and speed"? > You should compare the public transport with a robotaxi alternative. The alternative being "do I put these four bags in a trunk…

Not the op. If you reread what he wrote I think he’s trying to say the price going down changes the viability of the option—not the convenience and speed which he treats as inherent to the car. Said another way: When price goes down, robotaxis (which are convenient and speedy) become a more viable option.

Thanks, that reading looks plausible :)

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#602
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is it. Another primary example is that I can put a 80 IQ person to work on a farm or let them build something under supervision. There is no way for an AI to do either at this time, even if the AI is much smarter.

Ah, AI have been doing both farm work and "building things under supervision" work for a while now. Robots are a thing, AI controlling robots is a thing.

Robots at this point are specialized for a highly specific task. None of them are as dynamically deployable as a 80 IQ person. You can let a walk around a construction site doing whatever, no such robot is available right now.

If I'm wrong please post where I can buy such a general robot.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m replaced by a DOTA bot I'm going to be pissed. At least it could be a bot for a good game, like StarCraft or something.

I'm curious why they ended up focusing on DOTA. Prize money? Valve make the game particular amenable to machine interface?

Not sure. Off the cuff, as someone who only played MOBAs when they were Warcraft 3 maps,

* limited choices for actual commands to make, but still lots decision to make.

* a very active competitive community

* easy to evaluate win conditions and (I think?) somewhat easy to evaluate “am I doing well” conditions (like if you fall behind on experience you are doing poorly I think)

So maybe it is a convenient genre.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#604
post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True to some extend. But if you have OpenAI on your resume I have to imagine there’s no necessity for your next job to be much different (e.g. go to any FAANG)

I think (based on very shallow research) among FAANG behemoths Meta is the closest in terms of resources thrown at ML, but it’s an ad company that hasn’t got such a “we advance humanity” image. Equity vesting and that sort of stuff can additionally make moving companies a problematic prospect, even if the new place offered a competitive salary…

Yeah, Meta pays well, but they probably wouldn't match the $10M equity pile that some generic engineer or researcher who joined 1 year before ChatGPT dropped could be sitting on. Ofc, the equity->cash conversion rate for OpenAI pseudo stocks isn't clear, but those paper gains would be tough to abandon.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#605
post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a city I don’t take public transport over uber due to the cost but due to the convenience and speed. The only exception is the US, and even then that doesn’t apply in Manhattan.

That's because people are behind the wheel. Once car ownership drops, the computerized traffic control can get much more efficient.

Computerised public transport is even more efficient

Your public transport with robo taxis takes up far more space in the surface than there is available in a normal city, as shown in this photo.

https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#606
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a big difference between companies like Google and Amazon that were operated unprofitably for years but did have the option to pivot in to profitability for a lot of that time. I would also consider Uber more of an outlier than the rule in terms of blitzscaling. Maybe OpenAI will be kept alive on life support for a while because there is so much in the industry riding on AI being the next big thing, b…

>I think there's a big difference between companies like Google and Amazon that were operated unprofitably for years How many years before they reached this point ? chatgpt.com had 3.8B visits last month and was #8 in Internet worldwide traffic. It is the software product with by far the fastest adoption of any software product in history. "Some of the largest fundraising in Silicon Valley" you say ? Well, that sound…

What part of poor unit economics do you not understand?

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#607
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? Yes, frequently and loudly. When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors . > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much l…

> When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors. He always does that to give himself cover, but he has clearly shown that his words mean very little in this regard. He always dodges criticism. He used to talk about the importance of him being accountable to the OpenAI board and them bei…

Indeed. Words are very very inexpensive and fool a lot of people. Never pay attention to any words. Judge people by their actions.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#608
post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying that for a few years now. I've been using it as a very advanced autocomplete while coding for that time and not much else.

I use it for cooking, proofreading, learning German, skimming long documents, shopping advice (by uploading photos), and asking dumb questions about physics that get me [closed] if I were to post on physics stack exchange, in addition to being a coding assistant.

Most of those existed before llms. Also still like a microwave, not very essential.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#609
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea same with Google. I mean search is nice. But broadly there’s no killer app that makes _everyone_ gladly pay for it. Jury is still out on whether they’ll be able to subsidize those massive server costs of indexing the entire web.

The cost to Google per search is way lower, though.

Plus they actually make money from it!

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#610
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

I remember seeing OpenAI like 10 years ago in GiveWell's list of charities along with water.org, deworm the world 80.000 hours and that kind of things. It's a wild take to say that they have gotten nowhere and that they haven't found product-market fit.

Anyone familiar with the past 10 years of "unicorn" startups or Sam Altman's business history is perfectly content saying that OpenAI has gone nowhere and cannot find a market fit for their paid products.
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