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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Running an app store for consumers just seems wayyyy off course from their stated goal of building AGI. Running any kind of two-sided marketplace with paying customers is quite a big undertaking, I just can't see how this is the best use of their resources and attention if they want to pursue their mission.

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Or, just maybe, AGI is a mirage with the bulk of its current utility as a marketing tool for much more realistic, if ultimately mundane, applications. OpenAI, of course, knows this.

Whether it's real or illusory, I feel like they turned the bitrate down significantly since launch. I'm not getting as many smart electrons per question as I used to.

This is measurably true. They claim they don't know why because "they haven't changed anything" but it is true at the very least

I think at least some of this is expectation setting. I'd been saving my prompts from the beginning. In some cases I saved the results.

On the API: My prompts are getting 'harder' and expecting more. My old prompts still work just fine still.

On the website: Copy pasting the same old prompts still work... but the 'flavor' of the text that pops out definitely feels worse.

I haven't seen any actual data showing a degredation.

Why are so many HN commenters like this

skeptical about AGI?

no, presuming that other people working on things are both cynical and deceptive; it's projection, imo.

Pessimism is more infective than optimism. It’s also easier to be a naysayer, since most new ventures do failed you can point and say you were right regardless of merit.

maybe they need some sort of profit center to keep themselves funded to reach their goals

AGI will very likely develop atop the mundane applications that AI will be utilized for at the onset - if it ever develops.

Regardless, mirage or not - as a mundane tool with realistic application this is still revolutionary

There are two possibility that AGI is just an algorithm away and anyone could build it if they discover that. Or the second is that it would require large amount of talent and compute(or in other words money) that they don't have.

Maximizing the deployable money for AGI seems like a good strategy to me if we assume AGI is not possible in near term. And moves like these increases money and funding by multiple times. And the resources needed to build a marketplace is tiny in comparison. Any good tech consulting firm can do it for less than few million dollars.

It’s on mission to the degree you think it will help the public slowly and naturally become acclimated to agents.

Presumably it generates revenue and gives them more data. Both can be useful for that goal.

It’s a great source of first party training data in a variety of diverse scenarios

If they want to learn how it's going to fuck over society (even if they want to avoid that) it makes some weird sort of sense to be the ones applying the breaking pressure. Assuming good faith, this is where they'd best learn how to avoid the pitfalls.

I'm not sure assuming good faith is the right approach tho

Sam Altman special

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