Sam Altman and OpenAI Are Victims of Their Own Hype

"The commercial project of AI, while less evocative, is no less speculative: People believe that they stand to make inconceivable amounts of money, and OpenAI appeared to be the start-up to end all start-ups. But it also has revenues of about a billion dollars a year, was recently rumored to be raising money at an $86 billion valuation, and currently “incinerates” money on computing power. Microsoft is still in the early stages of trying to commercialize OpenAI’s technology in Windows, Office, Github, and Bing. Google has invested billions of dollars in generative AI products that mostly remain in testing; Meta, Amazon, and practically every other large tech company are in the process of rolling out new tools, but nobody’s making any real money on this stuff, yet. Almost across the board, in fact, these companies are hemorrhaging money on AI. They’re doing this on purpose, of course. Investors and companies are placing bets. Some of them are confident. Others don’t want to miss out. None of them, of course, actually know what’s going to happen. "

This AI hype reminds me of the early streaming wars. Content companies dumping obscene amounts of cash because somehow streaming is going to change everything, and the winner will be making 100x of what their content is making now.

Fast forward and the same companies are forced to consolidate, kill own content for tax purposes, and raise prices. Streaming is here, but the streamers are resembling much closer the cable companies they tried to replace.

AI of course is going to have its uses, but once the dust settles and people are tired of feeding ChatGPT stupid prompts to get back funny shit or Thanksgiving recipes, what will get distilled down is going to be a glorified code auto-complete and boring data applications, like insurance.

Speaking of, how is that going?

https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/why-insurance-leaders-...

"While virtually all insurance companies are using AI today, its impact has fallen short of the transformative change that many had hoped for."

Oh, never mind.

I feel AI lit up after crypto for people with more money than they can do anything with.

It's bs.