OpenAI in Talks for Deal That Would Value Company at $80B
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
since it was worth $20 billion, bullish signs are that it remains top of the heap among LLM companies and has managed to scale with demand.
Bearish signs are that peak interest in LLMs is already over, AI search is not popular, hoped-for applications in software development and writing have not materialized, serious resistance to AI is already here with the WGA strike, Andreessen Horowitz is hyping it up.
Edit: I think some of the people replying are not remembering what the hype was like around the time of OpenAI's last major fundraising. Social media feeds like Twitter, Reddit, and HN were absolutely swarming with LLM content. People were seriously saying that this technology was AGI. That it had human-level performance on many tasks and would soon replace working professionals. Serious analysts expected Microsoft's AI-powered search to cut into Google's market share, to such an extent that Google shares lost value.
LLMs are still useful and may eventually be so useful that they even justify this valuation, but I just don't see how we are in a more hopeful world today, knowing that LLMs can not yet replace real professionals, that LLM-derived content was a short-lived fad on social media, that Google's marketshare is steady, etc.
Seems a bit soon to expect this.
It's like saying interest in the internet has peaked a year after it's considered to have been born ~1984.
It depends. In software development it looks to be a big thing already. And it's just half a year. As hobby projects I'm doing things that I even didn't think about because they require learning quite a lot. Those are different libraries that I need probably just once.
That's not a bearish sign.
Brand recognition counts for a lot more than you might like.
Their valuation is based on how well they can market their technology -- not on how well that technology will benefit humanity.
Where are you seeing this? It feels like it's just beginning. Also really not sure that the software development and writing applications have not materialized, I know multiple people who actively use it for both.
It was a protection of payment: specifically, ensuring AI itself could not be given writing credit, nor could it be considered “source material”. These are important distinctions because if AI was considered a “writer” (and potentially thus a “showrunner”), then other human writers in the room could be paid as merely “writing assistants” to what is ultimately itself is supposed to be the assistant, like a tail wagging the dog. Furthermore, AI-generated scripts being unable to be classified as “source material” on their own means a studio can’t simply generate a very rough story outline, have writers actually make it a real story, and pay the writers much less because their work is considered an adaption rather than an original work. These are the same rules e.g. a Wikipedia article, or court case transcripts, etc fall under— they can be used as inspiration, but they don’t effect how much a writer gets paid.
Nowhere is AI usage actually prohibited, on both the studio and writer side of the equation.
Essentially, this would be like if Google announced everyone would be taking a 1-level pay cut because AI potentially makes them more efficient. That doesn’t make sense!
why does using cloudflare mess it up? how does that even work?
TLDR: archive.is doesn’t play nice with its DNS results and Cloudflare refuses to fix it on their end.
The mature thing to do would be to switch to something like anycast IP routing, which is robust against issues like this.
I suspect the “problem” isn’t actually that big a deal to begin with, and the archive folks are making a mountain out of a molehill for philosophical reasons.
In other words they hate Cloudflare and will find any excuse to start a fight.
Media savvy, folks
Seems like there are no new shares being generated, this is good for MS and early investors
In fact given what we know now, it likely wasn't nearly as good as it looked. So was hard to say at that point if this whole language model thing will pan out or become yet another useless learning approach that's unfeasible to apply to anything.
I use GPT-4 for so much stuff. I was pondering the other day how much I’d be willing to pay should they decide to increase the price and realised it was almost order of magnitude more.
I love new technology and tried really hard to like crypto but never understood what I could actually use it for. Tried making some web3 apps etc. just seemed like it wasn’t really any better than a mysql db.
But I find new things to do with AI daily. I save myself hours and hours of time in work and personal life. If you can’t find something useful to use it for, I’d say try harder.
Also, it’s specifically GPT-4 that is amazing compared to anything else I’ve used.
If I had better privacy I would use this for even more tasks. I’d love to train something like this on reminding and prioritizing tasks for me based on my actual behaviour vs actions, for example. There’s enormous potential that previously wouldn’t have been possible with my skills as an individual (and evidently, within the capacity of entire companies. That product doesn’t exist in a form that I’d care to use yet).
Keep in mind that the valuation is based on speculation, too. It isn’t saying GPT-4 is worth 80B. It’s also saying there’s confidence that GPT-5 and successors will unveil meaningful possibilities with real value. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I don’t think it maps to 80B, but that’s not my business. I just don’t think it’s crazy to see value here.
How so? I find it to be most useful in that exact area. Taking your existing code and turning it into another language, implementing something with a library you want to try but can't be arsed to read the docs for, making a first draft of an implementation you're not sure how to begin, or just researching what exists in general. Learning new things has never been this easy.
Having said that, I still like to dig around the internet and go on tangents. Having fast answers is great in some contexts, but I still value going on deep dives and collecting all kinds of unexpected (even if irrelevant) bits of knowledge. That’s actually preferably, but only possible when I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. Which isn’t very often.
I created the serialized state as JSON and planned to work backward from there. This would allow me to describe the capabilities of the machines and how their features would work in practice. I was able to feed that serialized machine into GPT and ask how to implement various features, and it was remarkably effective.
Most of it was trivial to implement, but there was the odd bit where GPT saw various connections between features which I was missing. It also made some mistakes of course, but generally did a good job of keeping the ball rolling.
I could have done this alone without a doubt. It was so smooth and easy with GPT though that I finished fairly quickly and really enjoyed it. I generally got what I wanted out of the project without going down rabbit holes or dumping more time than I could afford.
Otherwise it helped me figure out how to arbitrarily generate a jigsaw puzzle based on an image and a few parameters in three.js. That was a bit out of my comfort zone but all of its suggestions and solutions were sufficient to keep me moving and solving the problems. I’m not sure I would have finished otherwise. My goal is to make a multiplayer puzzle game with the intent of demonstrating how to manage moves, interactions, and play states over multiple clients and servers. That part is east for me, but creating a usable demo in three was not. Yet relatively attainable in a reasonable timeframe with GPT.
It could be that I learn slowly. I’m over a decade into my career and still find myself poring over documentation of things I suspect I should know by now. Like the math for creating a jigsaw puzzle. It’s basic stuff but I totally drew blanks at first. If that’s the case, perhaps it’s why GPT is so useful to me. It breaks down the odd barrier that might otherwise become a rabbit hole or a major time sink.
At least it is a better situation than Stripe, which got very greedy at that $95B inflated valuation until it lost 50% of that with a massive downround.
$80B - $95B for OpenAI seems already extremely overvalued and not taking into account for competition at all.
$800B is just borderline nonsense at this point.
I suppose this round is mainly present to retain those employees who want to buy houses from their shares, as in big tech they would be getting, after vesting, highly liquid RSUs. The fact that the company leadership makes an entire round just for them shows what immense bargaining power they have.
OpenAI is aiming far higher than 800 billion, and with no public offering, there’s no other way to be part of it.
I am happy to have the tools, but the hype, the valuation, the "we have solved everything" mentality. It's just so offputting.
The model (iPhone) has some value, but the company itself and all its resource are worth more than the product they provide.