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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Nah, I think Microsoft will end up buying some form of assets off of OpenAI (it's a non-profit with odd corporate governance that Altman doesn't own stock in, so I don't think they'll buy the whole company) for an extremely exorbitant price. Altman will put in some ambitious but clueless Microsoft manager to run it and move on to his next thing. Then it'll turn out that Gen AI is dramatically overhyped and the real-world utility is far less than expected. Shit'll get fucked up, people will forget about it, and Microsoft will write down their investment by a large margin - kinda like Hotmail, and Skype, and Nokia, and Minecraft, and what's starting to happen to GitHub and LinkedIn. And so it goes, a classic Silicon Valley love story.

But I have enough faith in Altman's ability to fuck shit up without facing personal consequences that I'm pretty sure he'll navigate some sort of sale before everything goes south.

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> Altman will put in some ambitious but clueless Microsoft manager to run it and move on to his next thing

Gervais principle agrees with you.

Your appraisal seems to stem from a lot of people's disillusionment with the whole OpenAI thing: namely that GenAI is a hype train and will fade away as a gimmicky toy with limited real world-use cases. It's interesting seeing that perspective, because while I think it's based on a comparison of GenAI with prior "change everything" hype trains (VR, crypto), it's clearly not the same, and you and most people really don't understand just how much everything is about to change. GenAI isn't just any other technology.

> real-world utility is far less than expected

The real-world utility is already enormous in the form it is now. You really think there's no real-world utility to GPT-4, Claude, and all the models that are coming out?

> most people really don't understand just how much everything is about to change

So instead of hedging and saying "it's going to change some things", you play into the "it's going to change everything?". Its stereotypical grandstanding when nobody really knows what is going to happen. The AI bros and AI deniers are both exhausting crowds.

because it will change everything

everything good in your life is because of applied intelligence

now imagine 1000x the intelligence at 1000x the intensity

> everything good in your life is because of applied intelligence

If this is true then everything bad in my life is also due to applied intelligence as intelligence itself doesn't have a moral connotation. "[N]ow imagine 1000x the intelligence at 1000x the intensity".

Both claims (everything good/bad because of intelligence) sound false to me. I guess the litmus test to the 1000x engineer (for example) is do we have 1000x the speed of product development.

I can imagine it. You're skipping over the actually hard part, which is the question of where the current AI paradigm will top out. Don't pretend this is not an open question.

>The real-world utility is already enormous in the form it is now. You really think there's no real-world utility to GPT-4, Claude, and all the models that are coming out?

I'm not who you're responding to, but I think it's at least true that there is enough competition, including open source competition, to make some of the current valuations a bit fanciful.

open source models cannot compete

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