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Comment by mlinsey | Hacker News Reader

Drawing a bright line between research vs products and considering only the former to be "innovation" is a way to become quickly irrelevant.

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+1. Bell labs said hi

Product based on no fundamental innovation is also a path to irrelevance. If there was even something remotely defensible in GPTs then OpenAI would not have sold 50% of company for 10B dollar. Only a matter of time and large about of human in the loop will bring any large transformer model into the same space as shown by recent models like alpaca and vicuña are showing that. Only thing the whole thing has done is no labs will open source any major breakthroughs anymore

> Product based on no fundamental innovation is also a path to irrelevance

Microsoft has been doing, like, negative innovation and is still relevant.

Yeah, they innovate the frontier for annoying users and developers. How many APIs can one deprecate and ads can one cram down throats?

> If there was even something remotely defensible in GPTs then OpenAI would not have sold 50% of company for 10B dollar.

If you need 10B dollar to develop your product you have to find it from somewhere. Training an LLM is not something you can do in a garage, bootstrapped.

What do you mean? Most VC-backed startups sell far more than 50% of their company for far less than 10B.

This is not a typical VC based company. According the HN crowd this is the one company who can execute on AI and challenge Google and all other trillion dollar AI labs. In my opinion they themselves are aware of the fact they are one trick pony. Given how astute a VC SamAltman is, if there was any thing remotely innovative and defensible about the product they would have never done that.

I don't understand why they wouldn't have raised that money if "there was any thing remotely innovative and defensible about the product"?

What would they have done instead? They still need to fund the operation somehow, and raising money is a good way to build partnerships.

Raising money is ok. Selling 50% of your company for 10B the company when apparantly you have trillion dollar defensible business dont any business sense.

You need money to turn it into a trillion dollar business... Selling equity is how you raise that money.

If you were sure it will be a $1T business you have more reason to sell equity and accelerate the growth of your company, because you know the remaining 50% is going to be so valuable.

These are capitalist enterprises here. I'd argue that product is almost all that matters. Sure someone has to innovate but the final product that can be sold is what keeps people and companies relevant.

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