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My understanding is that the company is burning $0.5+ to $1+ billion each month. I'd say that's very high risk.
That is also much lower than Uber at its peak.
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The funny thing about that statement is that if it actually does become true, all of those VCs (and Altman himself), whose job is ostensibly to find the optimal uses for capital, would immediately become obsolete. Heck, the whole idea that capitalism could just continue along in its current form if true AGI existed is pretty laughable.
The problems with central planning that capitalism ostensibly solves don't exist because of a lack of intelligence, but due to the impedance mismatch between the planner and the people. Making the central planner an AGI would just make it worse, because there's no guarantee that just because it's (super)intelligent it can empathize with its wards and optimize for their needs and desires.
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For every Theranos and WeWork, there’s Uber, Coinbase, AirBnb. I know they didn’t raise as much as OpenAI, but it wasn’t insignificant amount of money burning before they became profitable with large market caps. It’s very strange times we’re living in.
Have any of those become profitable?
Does OpenAI have a moat?
In fact they do, it’s called servers, GPUs, scale. You need them to train new models and to serve them. They also have speed and in AI speed is a non traditional moat. They got crazy connections too because of Sam. All of that together becomes a moat that someone just can’t do a “Facebook clone” on OpenAI
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny thing about that statement is that if it actually does become true, all of those VCs (and Altman himself), whose job is ostensibly to find the optimal uses for capital, would immediately become obsolete. Heck, the whole idea that capitalism could just continue along in its current form if true AGI existed is pretty laughable.
The problems with central planning that capitalism ostensibly solves don't exist because of a lack of intelligence, but due to the impedance mismatch between the planner and the people. Making the central planner an AGI would just make it worse, because there's no guarantee that just because it's (super)intelligent it can empathize with its wards and optimize for their needs and desires.
I for one can never get over the fact that Mira Murati was not laughed out of the room when she said -- with a straight face -- that GPT4 had high school level intelligence and the non-existent GPT5 will have PHD-level intelligence [1]. IMO -- this is not a serious company with serious people building an important long-lived product. This is a group of snake oil salesmen that are in the middle of the greatest grift o…
But that’s obviously not a fair description either, because they have the world-leading product in an intensely competitive field that does stuff nobody would have thought possible five years ago.
The marketing is obviously massive hyperbole bordering the ridiculous, but the idea that they haven’t produced something deeply serious and important is also ridiculous, to me.
The only (gigantic, huge, fatal—perhaps) problem they have at the moment is that their moat seems to only consist of a short head start over the competition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny thing about that statement is that if it actually does become true, all of those VCs (and Altman himself), whose job is ostensibly to find the optimal uses for capital, would immediately become obsolete. Heck, the whole idea that capitalism could just continue along in its current form if true AGI existed is pretty laughable.
There are so many things wrong in this statement (starting with "immediately"). Let's assume they built a system they claim is AGI. Let's assume its energy consumption is smaller than that of a small country. Let's assume that we can verify it's AGI. Let's assume its intelligence is higher than average human. That's many "ifs" and I omitted quite a few. Now, the question is: would you trust it? As a human, a manager,…
You have no option but to trust an ASI as it is all-powerful by definition. If you don't trust ASI, your only option is to prevent it from existing to begin with.
Edit: please note that AGI ≠ "human intelligence," just a general intelligence (that may exceed humans in some areas and fall behind in others.)
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It's fine, Sam's bulletproof plan is to build AGI (how hard could it be) and then ask the AGI how they can make a return on their investments. https://www.threads.net/@nixcraft/post/C5vj0naNlEq If they haven't built AGI yet that just means you should give them more billions so they can build the AGI. You wouldn't want your earlier investments to go to waste, right?
How old is that though? They seem to be making revenue pretty well now, so I suspect this might be quite old?
I wouldn't even be surprised if they were losing money on paying ChatGPT users on inference compute alone, and that isn't even factoring in the development of new models.
There was an interesting article here (can't find the link unfortunately) that was arguing that model training costs should be accounted for as operating costs, not investments, since last year's model is essentially a total write-off, and to stay competitive, an AI company needs to continue training newer frontier models essentially continuously.
I wonder why Apple pulled out
Another interesting part:
> Under the terms of the new investment round, OpenAI has two years to transform into a for-profit business or its funding will convert into debt, according to documents reviewed by The Times.
Considering there are already lawsuits ongoing about their non-profit structure, that clause with that timeline seems a bit risky.