They were good at that, but then the tech didn't meet the lofty expectations that had been created.
ChatGPT is entirely different - people understand instantly how useful it is and don't need marketing and sales people to peddle it.
They convinced executives to do a pilot. It was a shit-show. Quick and dirty API endpoints running on bluemix and spewing 500 internal errors at every gust of wind. Nothing remotely intelligent.
That said, it would be insane to use it at work to generate content in a domain you're not an expert in. It is an amazing productivity tool, but it does not change the reality that faking expertise at work is always going to bite you.
I simply don’t recall anything else where most people’s opinions spiked then fell so rapidly before.
"The dirty secret of artificial intelligence" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35832168
It raised over $11B so far.
If we follow the money, the valuation, on either low or high end is absurd. It's starting to seem like weWork at a larger scale.
Revenue for 2022? $3M
No trace of financials for 2023, other than some expected 100M or 1B depending on the wind for this year. we can be sure of one thing, when numbers can be used to boost interest and claim a success, we get numbers release faster than accounting even settled.
My guess is that they are burning at least hundreds of millions by poaching the best AI talent from Google. Infrastructure wise, about the same. And no, it doesn't help the bottom line to be owned by a massive cloud provider, it only distracts since there is a senior VP somewhere in there now who's non negotiable OKR is complete migration to MS Azure. But openAI will still be charged like any other client.
Welcome to vampirizing VC at its best. Put billion in to inflat the bubble, if it wins great, if it doesn't then you would have sold plenty as a prefered must have no choice parter for services, and by then insider info would have given you a head start to sell of a good chunk of your bags anyway.
OpenAI may win the prize for the most hyped business and fastest skyrocketing company in the entire history, it risks to not even explode but worse: to disappear in the deep sky with backers pulling their hair off or each others when they finally get to receive the in and out reports. Everyone else will have moved on, subscribing to a plethora of dedicated services built by tiny companies improving on moderate size models and building catered solutions.
It will be a great happy ending after all the spams we've seen everywhere over the internet about this gpt genius tech.