To your second point, it's very funny how OpenAI seems to have soured the tech crowd on tech.
Welcome to humanity.
You could blame capitalism, but it happened there too. In fact in every system.
All engineers I know in tech are bashing AI left and right and going home to work on AI projects in their free time.
* Is massively overhyped by certain persons and companies, and
* Is both interesting and has loads of promise, so is worth working on in your own time
They aren't contradictory at all.
Meanwhile, I dunno, I have some begrudging admiration for the folks getting rich selling premium GEMMs, but eventually they are going to piss off all their investors and cause a giant mess. Like good luck guys, get that money, but please don’t take us all down with you.
In this particular case, I'm not sour because of OpenAI. I am sour because of deceptive and gross business practices highlighted in the article.
Using OpenAI as an example. ChatGPT is wonderful for the things it's made for. It's a tool, and a great one but that's all it is.
But OpenAI itself is a terrible company and Sam Altman is a power hungry conman that borders on snakeoil salesman.
And I'm soured on people like the CEO of my company who wants to shove a GPT chatbot into our application to do things that it's not at all good at or made for because they see dollar signs.
It was actually free back then I used it the one time and felt grateful enough for the help that I signed up for one cycle and then cancelled (since I didn't have a continued need for it).
Nothing gross or deceptive.
They just had to pay a fine for deceptive advertising. The article lists a number of other deceptive and immoral business practices.
You read an article about it and 7 years later and are convinced they are crooks.
Actually, you read an article and assumed that your anecdotal experience from 7 years ago is more reflective of how a business operates than a current year investigation into that company by a federal agency.
Nobody is arguing that they deceived you personally 7 years ago.
It wasn't an eighteen dollar a month lawyer, so your description of it as "any other" is wrong.
They represent an amplifier for the enshittening that was already souring the tech crown on tech.
LLM's used in this sort of way, which is exactly OpenAI's trillion dollar bet, will just make products appear to have larger capabilities while simultaneously making many capabilities far less reliable.
Most of the "win" in cases like this is for the product vendor cutting capital costs of development while inflating their marketability in the short term, at the expense of making everything they let it touch get more unpredictable and inconsistent. Optimistic/naive users jump in for the market promise of new and more dynamic features, but aren't being coached to anticipate the tradeoff.
It's the same thing we've been seeing in digital products for the last 15 years, and manufactured products for the last 40, but cranked up by an order of magnitude.
It's exhausting and disheartening.