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Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

That’s a strange statement because I definitely canceled my subscription as a result of the happenings. This very public battle confirmed for me how misaligned OpenAI is with the originating charter and mission of its nonprofit. And I didn’t want to financially contribute towards that future anymore.

I guess my subscription didn’t count as a customer.

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This happens to me frequently. When I report an obvious problem in some service it is always the very first time that they've heard of it and no other customers seem to have the issue.

I mean... Given the millions of people who have browsed and used sites I've been responsible for, the number of complaints aren't usually high, and if guest services could narrow it down its usually passed down, but a lot of the time, it's one guy angry enough to report the issue. I've reported issues on several sites now and then, and I'm not even sure if they bothered to respond or ever got my email, how do you get a gmail email through a corporate firewall?

I think a lot of people will just leave your site and go elsewhere vs bother to provide feedback.

I think the true customers of OpenAI are likely not the people paying for a ChatGPT subscription, but paying to use their APIs which is significantly harder to just step away from.

Same. I don’t think it’s the truth. It happens with alarming frequency to our family. We seem to be some kind of stealth customer QA for companies.

The other possibility is that they are lying to cover their ass, but they would never do that… right?

I had a friend who did call center stuff.

It was kind of eye-opening - they took phone calls form late-night tv infomercials and there was a script.

They would take down your name, take your order, and then... upsell, cross-sell, special offer sell, etc.

If the person said anything like "I'm not interested in this, blah blah", they had responses for everything. "But other people have quite upset when they didn't receive these very special offers and called back to complain"

It was carefully calculated. It was refined. It was polished and tested.

The only way OUT of the script was to say "I will cancel my order unless you stop"

If the call center operator didn't follow the script, they would be fired.

(You know this happens now with websites at scale. A/B test until the cancellation message is scary enough. A/B test until you give up on the privacy policy.)

> The only way OUT of the script was to say "I will cancel my order unless you stop"

Hanging up the phone is always an option. If you feel civilised you first say you are not interested and thank the sales person for their time, and then hang up no matter what they try to say. That is a way out of the script of course.

I find it extremely frustrating when people/businesses/organizations take advantage of the general populations politeness.

Ten years ago I would have found it really difficult to hang up on some random phone caller that I didn't want to speak to. Now I don't give it a second thought.

Inch by inch we'rkke all getting ruder and ruder to deal with these motherfuckers, and I can't help but feel that it is spilling out into regular interactions. I would hate to be in mmmmk

This is a universal truth of feedback and customer service. Every user report is an iceberg: for every 1 person there's a much more significant number of people who experienced the problem but never reported it.

Yes, but the company may be as an ice breaker going across the pole in a straight line, and still when asked about hitting ice, the captain will say that this now is literally the first time it ever happened.

So true.

Is there some technicality here that we're missing (e.g., is there a difference between you and other customers?) or is he just lying?

It's called "spin" in a press release/marketing, but we on the outside call it a lie, yes.

It wouldn't shock me to learn all of the events that took place were to get worldwide attention, and strengthen their financial footprint. I'd imagine not being able to be fired, and having the entire company ready to quit to follow you, sends a pretty clear signal to all VC that hitching your cart to any other AI wagon is suicide, because the bulletproof ceo has literally the people at the cutting edge of the entire market ready to go wherever he does. How could anyone give funding to a company besides his at this point? Might as well catch it on fire if you're going to give it to someone else's company.

Because LLMs from competitors already have real use? Ex. kagi.com uses claude by anthropic [1].

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html

Yeah but their CEO can be fired, which would be who the VCs backed

EDIT: The fact that me, average joe, knows all about open ai and its CEO, and even some of its engineers, yet didn't know Kagi was doing anything with AI until your comment, tells me that Kagi is not any sort of competition, not as far as VCs are concerned, anyway.

It might be that there was no net outflow of customers. I am sure customers quit all the time, and others sign up. It probably means that they either didn't see a statistical relevant increase in churn, or that the amount of excess quits was compensated by excess new customers.

Yea this seems like the most likely read to me. The customers lost are indistinguishable from their churn rate.

He's probably somewhat deceptively only referring to enterprise license customers. When there's an enterprise offering, many times the individual personal use licenses are just seen as gravy on top of the potatoes. Not like good gravy though, like the premade jars of gravy you can buy at the grocery store and just heat up.

Yea, he's saying the quiet part out loud.

You users aren't the customer you think you are.

Microsoft and big contracts are the customers.

It counted. It's just most people didn't share your opinion.

But that's the not the main problem. Even if people did share your opinion it wouldn't matter. ChatGPT is a tool. It is a hammer.

People are concerned about the effectiveness of a tool. They are not concerned about whether the hammer has any ethical "misalignments."

They might mean net? Have the same number of customers at the end as the start? Instead of a steep cliff?

“Customer” usually means business customer in this context.

Obviously this. They mean the enterprises that have integrated OpenAI into their platforms (like eg Salesforce has). All of this happened so quickly that no one could have dropped them lol but nevertheless yeah they probably didn't officially lose one - plus they're all locked into annual contracts anyway.

I don't think CEOs are selected for their honesty.

I hear the board wasn't happy with Sam because he wasn't always entirely honest...

If you mean a ChatGPT subscription, I'm assuming no, you're not their primary customer base. I assume their primary customers are paying for significant API usage, and it's a not fully feasible to just migrate overnight.

They didn't lose any of their current customers... /s

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