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They have gone from being a niche research company to being (probably) the fastest growing start-up in history.

I suspect they do care about communicating with customers, but it's total chaos and carnage internally.

> I suspect they do care about communicating with customers, but it's total chaos and carnage internally.

This is my best guess as well, they are rocketing down the interstate at 200mph and just trying to keep the wheels on the car. When you're absolutely killing it I guess making X% more by being better at messaging just isn't worth it since to do that you'd have to take someone off something potentially more critical. Still makes me a little sad though.

> When you're absolutely killing it

Aren't they unprofitable? and have fierce competition from everyone?

Whether or not you’re profitable has very little to do with how valuable others think you are. And usually having competitors is something that validates your market.

The same can be said about food delivery start ups.

> And usually having competitors is something that validates your market.

Don't users validate your market? ChatGPT has plenty of users, so I would think competitors only hurt their value.

Well, it depends.

Clearly, you can be a company like Microsoft where nobody is challenging your dominance in PC operating systems, and you can make huge sums of money. So competitors certainly aren't vital.

Or if you've cleverly sewn up a market with patents or trade secrets or a giant first-mover advantage or network effects, and nobody's got any chance of challenging your dominance in your specific market niche - again that could be highly profitable.

On the other hand, if you're selling ten-dollar bills for five dollars, you might have millions of satisfied paying customers, but no competitors because nobody else thinks your unit economics make sense. Or if you run a DVD rental store, you might be profitable and have many return customers, but you might not attract competitors because they don't think DVD rental is a growth business.

So some people consider a lack of competition an ominous sign.

> And usually having competitors is something that validates your market

a whole bunch of AI startups were founded around the same time. surely each can't validate the market for the others and be validated by the others in turn

The surviving ones can. The same way that multiple species of trees, growing on the same patch of the ground, desperately competing for sunlight, together validate that the soil underneath is fertile.

Even if they are unprofitable they can get VC money very easily.

Plus they make 20 dollars a month from a lot of people.

When dealing with a tech where people have credible reasons to believe it can be enormously harmful on every possible time scale, maybe it would behoove them to not rocket down the interstate at 200mph?

Thats not what the analogy means. 200mph refers to funding.

No it refers to them moving too fast to send out basic emails for feature updates, per this comment chain.

Then use that funding to hire one PR guy who is 1/4 the expenses of an AI developer?

There is always going to be people who against any new technology and who makes up reasons to be against it.

The best defence is to move so quickly that you are an established part of the business framework by the time these forces can gather, or to go so slowly that nobody takes you as a threat.

No startup can go slowly.

In other words, make your money and ride off into the sunset before anyone can catch on to how much damage you’re doing to society.

Otherwise known as the AirBnB playbook.

No, successfully navigate past this version of Covid vacine deniers, 5g conspiracists etc.

In ten years we will enjoy a higher productivity due to AI and a richer society as a result. We have already seen it with protein folding which AI is amazing at[0].

The only reasonable fear of AI is for some jobs and that China gets their first.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02083-2

Right, it is perfectly valid to only accept the potential good points while neglecting all the potential bad points.

This is no different then saying "Look, nuclear weapons aren't actually dangerous, if they were we'd all be dead because the apocalypse would have already happened", which is probably the dumbest take on the close calls and real risks that exist.

Maybe there is a state somewhere between "total chaos and carnage" and "emails users when new features are enabled for their account".

Such as "decided it wasn't an operational priority to email users when features were enabled for them".

Emailing users when a new feature is enabled for their account isn't even the kind of thing that would distract an existing very busy developer.

You could literally hire an entirely new guy, give him instructions to build such an email system, and let him put the right triggers on the user account permissions database to send out the right emails at the right time.

And then, when it's built, you can start adding more features like sending the emails only when demand is low and/or at times of day when you get the best click through rate. And then next you can start measuring the increase in revenue from sending those emails.

Before long, you have a whole marketing and comms team. Which you probably want as a big company anyway.

Heck, dogfood your own product and hire someone to ask ChatGTP to do it!

The peanut gallery could (and does) say this about 1000 little features that 1000 different people claim to be so necessary that OpenAI is incompetent for not having, yet none of those people agree that those other features are priorities.

They could hire 1000 new developers a month and still be understaffed vs any company in history with thier valuation.

The fact that they are so succesful despite their low headcount is an argument that there are advantages to keeping the headcount low.

I'm sure we've all seen companies grow too fast become less productive than when there were a ten person startup.

Why isn't GPT4 running the company and handling these marketing missteps? j/k

We don't have evidence that this isn't the case

And then the moment you got this email you'd post to HN and everyone else would be "OMG, why don't I have that option"

Incremental rollouts are hard.

And then while one person wants the update, another person complains it's spam...

Incremental rollouts are hard, and so is communicating in a way that makes everyone happy.

> fastest growing start-up in history.

What are some metrics that justify this claim?

They have been the fastest company ever to go from 0 to 100 million users. [0]

They are also on pace to exceed $1B in revenue. [1]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-faste...

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-passes-1-bill...

both of those are either estimated or anonymous sources

not credible

Well they are a private company so you are going to have to evaluate it on that basis, but reuters is generally considered credible.

> Well they are a private company so you are going to have to evaluate it on that basis, but reuters is generally considered credible.

well that would be good if Reuters were the source of the figure

but they're not, they're simply reporting on what SimilarWeb has estimated

and that estimate is essentially based on nothing

Are either of those things indicative of "fastest growth ever"? Maybe 100 million users, but we live in a world where it's hard to know how meaningful that is (ie Tucker's X videos getting 300 million views).

MrBeast[0] has about 182m subscribers, and it is probably easier to get a subscriber on youtube than a user.

Views are easy to inflate, I wouldn't even consider it in the same ballpark. This video[1] of Vivaldis 4 seasons has about 1/4 billion views.

The shortest time to 100 million users is almost a definition of the quickest growing company.

[0]: first or second largest youtuber. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRxofEmo3HA

At what point to you go from startup to not when you have 10 billion invested and countless employees and is practically a sub branch of microsoft. Sounds cooler though I guess

I think you stop being a startup when there are engineers who do not know the CEO. I would guess OpenAI is still a startup by that definition (they don't have that many engineers IIRC) but I don't actually know.

That's really a function of what kind of CEO the company has, and what do you mean by "know". I worked remotely for a company employing hundreds of people, around for couple decades and with offices in different regions of the world, and I still got to talk to the CEO a couple times, and he knows me by name, all by virtue of bumping into him a couple times on corridor while on one of my infrequent visits to the office.

I'm not sure when a company begins to not be a start up, but by the time they have a wave of news claiming their product kills teenagers, or they're engaging in antitrust, or they're effectively using space labor, that's when they are definitely no longer a start up.

That hasn't happened yet for OpenAI, but I'm sure it will happen eventually, and then we'll know.

Considering the field and progress that is being made I find this idea terrifying. All the big problems like "How will we actually control what we're building?" being answered "that's too hard; let's punt and solve that after we figure out how to consume voice data". One way or another this is likely the last technological advance that humans will make.

The last technological advance that humans will make? What gives you that impression

_if_ it is better at making advances then us then everything in human nature points to us letting it make all future advances.

Im not sure. I suspect it might be better at some advances but not necessarily better at everything.

As long as it's better at some of the advances that would make it even better at those advances, or better at more advances, then it'll quickly become better than us in approximately everything, and at that point humans become NPCs of their own story.

Is that how apes feel? You think apes look at us and feel like NPCs?

My perception is apes still feel like the main character, each and every one of them.

I don't know if @skeeter2020's assertion is correct, but it is certainly the goal.

To use a fictional but entirely apt quote:

> I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about: Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.

> How will we actually control what we're building?

This question is poorly formed because it’s not clear who the “we” is. If it’s you and me, that train left the station a while ago. If it’s any humans, well Sam Altman is probably a human and all of these are impressive products, but still just tools.

Yeah but to be honest, I'd wonder how such a simple thing falls to the wayside.

This happens when there are thousands other simple things and a lot of complicated things. When your devs are stretched, you sort by priority and I can tell you this is not that important.

I think their main goal is to be perceived as the most advanced AI company. Why? Because that's how you get the best people working for you. The main determinant of success for companies like OpenAI is people.

But this issue far predates their current success. GPT2 was held back for a while. GPT3 launched as "waitlist only" with an application process, and so did GPT3.5.

This is a large part of what held them back: GPT3.5 had most of the capabilities of the initial ChatGPT release, just with a different interface. Yet GPT3.5 failed to get any hype because the rollout was glacial. They made some claims that it was great, but to verify this for yourself you had to wait months. Only when they finally made a product that everyone could try out at the same time, with minimal hassle, did OpenAI turn from a "niche research company" to the fastest growing start-up. And this seems to have been a one-time thing, now they are back to staggered releases.

Turns out that getting enough compute power to meet demand for AI is hard.

> GPT3.5 had most of the capabilities of the initial ChatGPT release, just with a different interface

I believe two other factors were the cost (especially of fine tuned models, IIRC fine tuned davinci cost $0.20 per thousand tokens) and also that OpenAI hadn't very clearly shown just how much higher the quality could get once RLHF'd. I remember asking davinci-instruct to parse some data, and the reliability really seemed much lower than ChatGPT at launch, to the point that, at the time, I thought GPT-4 was secretly powering ChatGPT.

They could send over ChatGPTed newsletters. Marketing bullshit is one thing ChatGPT excels at.

They do marketing like a 3-person startup that found a saas starter template, connected Stripe with shoestrings, and hasn't looked back. In order to start using the API, I actually had to cancel and sign back up again (because I think I was on a previous rev of the billing model).

I do love these companies that succeed in spite of their marketing & design and not because of it. It shows you have something very special.

We're heading for the singularity and you're complaining about marketing?

Yeah I don’t think OpenAI needs any marketing at this point.

The singularity huh… what do you think, it will run in Kubernetes or Docker?

> my only recourse is.... check back daily

Sounds like their marketing is doing just fine. If you were to just leave and forget about it, then sure, they need to work on their retention. But you won’t, so they don’t.

Imagine how fantastic you are doing, when your biggest user complaint stems from frustration with features they can not use just yet.

They do explain why in the post. (Still, you may not agree, of course.)

> We are deploying image and voice capabilities gradually > > OpenAI’s goal is to build AGI that is safe and beneficial. We believe in making our tools available gradually, which allows us to make improvements and refine risk mitigations over time while also preparing everyone for more powerful systems in the future. This strategy becomes even more important with advanced models involving voice and vision.

My issue isn't fully with them rolling out slowly, my issue is never knowing when you will get the feature or rather not being told when you do get it. I'm fine with "sometime in the next X days/months you will get feature Y", my issue is the only way to see if you got feature Y is to check back daily.

It's the first sentence in the 3rd paragraph, repeated again at the end of the blog post.

> We’re rolling out voice and images in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise users over the next two weeks.

First of all, I understand what you're saying. Communication is important. I just think it's funny to ever talk about "lack of communication". All I want is for businesses to stop communicating with me. Even better if I don't have to ask (unsubscribe).

That's fair, I completely understand where you are coming from. From a growth/money-making perspective it'd be smart to message customers about new features but table stakes would be something like:

    Voice Chat (Not available yet) [Click here to be notified when you have access]

Or something along those lines. It sours my opinion of ChatGPT every time I go to use a newly announced feature to find out I don't have it yet and have no clue when I will.

User impressions and revisit rate are key factors in raising money and showing success. It’s natural that they would select for user flows that keep you coming back daily rather than risk you don’t use it for a day or two waiting for an email.

They're focused on scaling to meet the current (overwhelming) demand. Given the 'if you build it, they will come' dynamic they're experiencing, any focus on marketing would be a waste of resources.

> My biggest complaint with OpenAI/ChatGPT is their horrible "marketing"

Agreed. Other notable mentions: choosing "ChatGPT" as their product name and not having mobile apps.

They do have mobile apps though?

Oops, missed that announcement.

It has always seemed like OpenAI succeeds in spite of itself. API access was historically an absolute nightmare, and it just seemed like they didn't even want customers.

it hasn't rolled out to me yet (which is frustrating as a paying customer)

Frustratingly, at least the image gen is live on Bing, but I guess Microsoft is paying more than me for access.

I can honestly wait. I am excited for 5 and 10 years from now. I really am. This is going to be amazing. If I miss out for a week or a month in the meantime I don't mind.

At least you’re seeing an option for ‘New Features’ in settings. I don’t see it and I’m supposedly up to date (and a Plus subscriber).

Your complaint is they don't email you enough?

Sarcasm aside, I understand your complaint, but still, a little funny.

Do they email you a lot?

I'm a plus customer and an API user, and they barely send me anything. One day I just signed in and saw that I suddenly had interpreter access, for instane.

The companies you want to hear back from never email you, the ones that do you don't care about.

In general, if companies e-mail you, it's almost always with worthless bullshit and/or attempts at tricking you into spending more money. OpenAI is not doing that, hence radio silence.

Maybe they need an RSS feed or something

I got an email indicating I was accepted for plugin use, fwiw.