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Comment by jraines | Hacker News Reader

It looks dire but it seems too early for the nearly-always-wrong naysayer crowd to be right & take their victory lap.

Maybe not. But I always thought that, especially with their lobbying efforts and desire to project a sense of seriousness (even if unfounded) around those efforts, that it was very unlikely they would release a next-gen model before the US election.

I agree that the marketing/messaging, esp on social media, is borderline deranged, swinging between “we are basically The Foundation” and “pweese try my pwoduct i hope u love it (heart hands emoji)”

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> it seems too early for the nearly-always-wrong naysayer crowd to be right & take their victory lap.

I agree it's too early to call for sure, but just to clarify: The naysayers are nearly always right. We just only remember the times they were wrong.

> The naysayers are nearly always right. We just only remember the times they were wrong.

Wait what?

Nearly every venture of any sort fails. The only times we remember the naysayers are on the rare occasions where they were wrong and the venture succeeded.

Ah okay, that makes sense.

I'll let parent elaborate more on the intent, but the way I interpreted it was : Saying that a startup will fail (i.e. being a naysayer) and being right about that is the most likely outcome due to the current "success" distribution (most businesses/startups fail).

Also the most memorable ones are when people were dismissive but ultimately wrong about the viability of the business (like the "dropbox" comment).

I think there's a deeper implication that the naysayers _about the subject of the hype_ are usually right, rather than simply about anyone trying to exploit the hype. Metaverse was going to be the next big thing. Naysayers (correctly) laughed. Nobody talks about metaverse now.

Because we mostly remember the things that are still around. Everyone knows about Charles Darwin but nobody knows about Erasmus Darwin, kind of thing.

The vast majority of startups fail. Most attempts at business will fail. It's just the nature of things.

But I think a not uncommon pattern with "too big to fail" startups is that they can change their definition of success or failure in order to claim victory. Or at least, in order for Sam to do so.

They might not reach the stated goal of AGI or even general profitability, but if Sam and some key investors manage to come out ahead at the end of their maneuvering, then I'm sure they'll claim victory (and that they changed the world and all that pomp).

Funny how their definition of changing the world amounts to: Fuck you, got mine.

> Funny how their definition of changing the world amounts to: Fuck you, got mine.

It's sad, but at this point I pretty much assume anyone out of SV who claims they're trying to change the world are either liars, incompetents, or both. That whole culture has just been on a tear of goodwill-burning.

If it wasn't this way, it would mean new things are more likely to succeed than fail.

No.

See the waves of investor hype that immediately preceded the AI hypewave: Metaverse and Blockchain. The naysayers were absolutely right.

Not to worry though, the geniuses at Meta and a16z are sure that AI will stick the landing, after they bet the farm on Metaverse and Blockchain respectively.

Naysayers in the British establishment thought the 13 colonies would come crawling back when their little experiment with democracy failed and they needed some proper aristocrats who knew what they were doing.

The space race had naysayers; the NYT printed the opinion that manned flight would take one to ten million years a week before the Wright Brothers; the iPod was lame with less space than a Nomad; SpaceX and Tesla were both dismissed when they were young; 3D printing likewise dismissed as if it was only plastic trinkets; and I've seen plenty of people here on HackerNews proclaiming that "AI will never ${x}" for various things some of which had already been accomplished by that point.

There's always a naysayer. You can use their mere existence as evidence for much, it has to be the specific arguments.

There's a difference between a naysayer and criticism. Using your iPod example, it was described as lame, in a way to dismiss it out of hand. But it did indeed have less space than a Nomad. That's valid, but ultimately unimportant, criticism.

People here are criticizing the business fundamentals of the openAI company. What are your takes on its finances? Or are you just on board, everything is great, do not look behind the curtain where we hide our five billion dollar losses?

Investment return over the last 30 years:

S&P 6x

Nasdaq 24x

Sticking your money in tech may have ups and downs but has not done badly. Also AI will be huge in a way blockchain and the metaverse were not. Also re blockchain if you'd bought bitcoin rather than some bs startup you'd have done well. Though OpenAI may be in the bs startup category... dunno.

I haven’t owned anything on blockchain in my life.

But I’m not so sure the naysayers are right about blockchain though. The ecosystem is still growing and apparently replacing cash in countries that don’t have a functional currency system.

Which is not the promise of blockchain's hype artists. "Better than using Venezuelan bolivars" is not a high bar.

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