All I can say to the investors, with the best of hopes, is:
Good luck! You'll need it!
https://www.threads.net/@nixcraft/post/C5vj0naNlEq
If they haven't built AGI yet that just means you should give them more billions so they can build the AGI. You wouldn't want your earlier investments to go to waste, right?
Assuming money even makes sense in a world with AGI, that is.
As for a post-money world, if AGI can do every economically viable thing better than any human, the rational economic agent will at the very least let go all humans from all jobs.
That's what the competition with OpenAI looks like to me. There are at least three other American companies with near-peer models plus strong open-weights models coming from multiple countries. No single institution or country is going to end up with a ruling-the-Earth lead in AI.
Fanciful, yes, but that is the AI fantasy.
With AI, I think there is extremely strong power laws that benefit the top performing models. The best model can attract the most users, which then attracts the most capital, most data, and best researchers to make an even better model.
So while there is no hard moat, one only needs to hold the pole position until the competition runs out of money.
Also, even if no single AI company will rule the earth, if AI turns out to be useful, the AI companies might get a chunk of the profits from the additional usefulness. If the usefulness is sufficiently large, the chunk doesn't have to be large percentually to be large in absolute terms.
Now, the question is: would you trust it? As a human, a manager, a president? With the current generation, I treat is as a dumb but quick typist, it can create code much faster than I can, but the responsibility to verify it all is entirely on me. We would need decades of proof such an AGI is reliable in order to actually start trusting it - and even then, I'm not sure how safe it would be.
You have no option but to trust an ASI as it is all-powerful by definition. If you don't trust ASI, your only option is to prevent it from existing to begin with.
Edit: please note that AGI ≠ "human intelligence," just a general intelligence (that may exceed humans in some areas and fall behind in others.)
By this definition a calculator would be an AGI. (Behold -- a man!)
But if I can't convince you, maybe Norvig can: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
Maybe.
> Could it accomplish even the most basic tasks?
Definitely: https://youtu.be/Sq1QZB5baNw
I don't understand this sentence. I don't trust Generative AI because it often spits out false, inaccurate or made up answers, but I don't believe my "only option is to prevent it from existing".
Because if you don't trust it, you're fucked:
- Your attempts to limit its influence on your life will be effective only if the ASI decides to willfully ignore or not notice you.
- If it lies or not, there's nothing you can really do. The outcome it wants is practically guaranteed regardless. It will be running circles around your mental capacity like a human drawing circles around an ant on a piece of paper.
So what option do you really have but to trust it? I mean, sure, you can not trust the all-powerful god, but your lack of trust will never really have any effect on the real world, or even your life, as the ASI will always get what it wants.
Really, your only option is to prevent it from happening to begin with.
All that said - I think ASI will be great and people's concerns are overblown.
That's a huge assumption.
AI in SF: all-powerful all-controlling abstract entity.
AI in reality: LLMs on thousands of servers with GPUs, operated and controlled by engineers, gated by a startup masquerading as a non-profit and operating for years at a loss, with a web interface and an API, fragile enough that it becomes unavailable at times.
Making the central planner an AGI would just make it worse, because there's no guarantee that just because it's (super)intelligent it can empathize with its wards and optimize for their needs and desires.
Most humans can not lie all the time. Their true intentions do come out from time to time.
AGI might not have that problem - AGI might hide its true intentions for hundreds of years.
It is an argument about signal bandwidth, compression, and noise.
I wouldn't even be surprised if they were losing money on paying ChatGPT users on inference compute alone, and that isn't even factoring in the development of new models.
There was an interesting article here (can't find the link unfortunately) that was arguing that model training costs should be accounted for as operating costs, not investments, since last year's model is essentially a total write-off, and to stay competitive, an AI company needs to continue training newer frontier models essentially continuously.
Really their biggest risk is total compute costs falling too quickly or poor management.
I don’t think it’s very likely, but think of it like an auction. In a room with 100 people 99 of them should think the winner overpaid. In general most people should feel a given startup was overvalued and only looking back will some of these deals look like a good investment.
As long as we’re talking independent revenue streams it’s worth counting separately from an investment standpoint.
I'd be surprised it that was the case. How many tokens is the average user going through? I'd be surprised if the avg user even hit a 1m tokens much less 20m.
Even for regular old 4o: You’re comparing to their API rates here, which might or might not cover their compute cost.
Voice mode is around $0.25 per minute via API. I don't use that much, but 3 minutes ago per day would already exceed the cost of a ChatGPT Plus subscription by quite a bit.
I’m not sure I understand this, sorry. I see GPT-4o at $3.75 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, on OpenAI’s pricing page.
That’s expensive and I can’t see how they can run Copilot on the standard API pricing. But, it makes a message (one interaction?) lower cost than $4 to me.
How many tokens are in a typical message for you?
In times gone by this would be a public company already. It's just an investment in a company with almost 2000 employees, revenue, products, brand etc. It's not an early stage VC investment, they aren't looking for a 10x.
The legal and compliance regime + depth of private capital + fear of reported vol in the US has made private investing the new public investing.
If they can IPO, they will easily hit a $1.5T valuation. All Altman would have to do is follow what Elon did with Tesla. Lots of massive promises marinated in trending hype that tickles the hearts of dumb money. No need to deliver, just keep promising. He is already doing it.
As Isaac Newton once said, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."[a]
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[a] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/74548-i-can-calculate-the-m...
And that's going by Nissan's claimed range, not even real world. So that's on a 100% charge, when the car is brand new with no battery degradation, and under the ideal efficiency conditions that you never really get.
Tesla has really dropped off on its 50% CAGR number so now it is worth half that.
I thought Satya said Microsoft had access to everything during the Altman debacle.
Your general sense that the later stage higher dollar figure raises look for a lower multiple than the earlier ones is correct, but they’d consider 2x a dud.
If they fall short of AGI there are still many ways a more limited but still quite useful AI might make them worth far more than Meta.
I don’t know how to handicap the odds of them doing either of these at all, but they would seem to have the best chance at it of anyone right now.
OpenAI valuation is reliant IMO on them on them 1) AGI possible through NNs, 2) them developing AGI first and 3) it being somewhat hard to replicate. Personally I’d probably stick 10%, 40%, and 10% on those but I’m sure others would have very different opinions or even disagree with my whole premise.
A lot of people said Microsoft’s Windows moat in desktop operating systems was gone when you could do most of the things that a program did inside a browser instead, but it’s been decades now and they still have a 70% market share.
If you establish a lead in a product, it’s usually not that hard to find a moat.
Windows’ moat is enterprise integration, and the sheer amount of software targeting it (despite appearances, the whole world doest’t run on the web), including hardware drivers (which, among other things, makes it the gaming platform that it is).
OpenAI could build a moat on integrations, as I mentioned.
OpenAI could build a moat in a lot of different ways including ones that haven’t been thought of yet.
They’ll find several I am sure.
Alternatively, what are you imagining this “AGI” you speak of to be?
ChatGPT is not autonomous or capable of doubling global GDP.
The founders of OpenAI were drawn from an intellectual movement that made very specific, falsifiable predictions about the pipeline from AGI (original definition) to superintelligence, predictions which have since been entirely falsified. OpenAI talks about AGI as if it were ASI, because in their minds AGI inevitably leads to ASI in very short order (weeks or months was the standard assumption). That has proven not to be the case.
General: able to solve problem instances drawn from arbitrary domains.
Intelligence: definitions vary, but the application of existing knowledge to the solution of posed problems works here.
Artificial. General. Intelligence. AGI.
As in contrast to narrow intelligence, like AlphaGo or DeepBlue or air traffic control expert systems, ChatGPT is a general intelligence. It is an AGI.
What you are talking about is, I assume, a superintelligence (ASI). Bostrom is careful to distinguish these in his writing. Bostrom, Yudkowsky et al make some implicit assumptions that led them to believe that any AGI would very quickly lead to ASI. This is why, for example, Yudkowsky has a very public meltdown two years ago, declaring the sky is falling:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-annou...
(Ignore the date. This was released on April 1st to give plausible deniability. It has since become clear this really represents his view.)
The sky is not falling. ChatGPT is artificial general intelligence, but it is not superintelligence. The theoretical model used by Bostrom et al to model AGI behavior does not match reality.
Your assumptions about AGI and superintelligence are almost certainly downstream from Bostrom and Yudkowsky. The model upon which those predictions were made has been falsified. I would recommend reconsidering your views and adjusting your expectations accordingly.
The issue with the “once OpenAI achieves AGI [sic], everything changes” narrative is that it is based off models with infinite integrals in them. If you assume infinite compute capability, anything becomes easy. In reality as we’ve seen, applying GPT-like intelligence to achieve superhuman capabilities, where it is possible at all, is actually quite difficult, field-specific, and time intensive.
Anthropic because their investment in tools for understanding/debugging AI.
Meta because free/open source.
Another issue here is that at this value level they are now required to become a public company and a direct competitor to their largest partners. It will be interesting to see how the competitive landscape changes.
I'd say that's very high risk.
Once they were the default option, they merely had to be the "same" as other options. If someone were to make a 1:1 clone of google with ~5% fewer ads - I do not believe they would break get a substantial market share of web search traffic (see bing).
OpenAI on the other hand has to spend billions to train every new iteration of their model and still loses money on every query you make. They can't scale their way out of the problem – scaling will only make it worse. They are counting on (1) the price of GPUs to come down in the near term or (2) the development of AGI, and neither of these may realistically happen.
Previous to this, they had about ~10B (via MS), and they've been operating for about 2 years at this scale. Unless they got this $$$ like a week away from being bankrupt, which I highly doubt.
Note: I'm not arguing they're profitable.
I think the question is, is OpenAI that company and is market dominance possible given all other players? I believe some investors are betting that it is OpenAI, while you and others are sceptic.
Personally I agree with you, or rather hope that it is not, primarily as I don’t trust Sam Altman and wouldn’t want him to have that power. But so far things are looking good for OpenAI.
But as far as the technology, we're drowning in a flood of good AI models, which are all neck to neck in benchmarks. Claude might be slightly stronger for my use, but only by a hair. Gemini might be slightly behind, but it has a natural mass market platform with Android
I don't see how a single player sticks their neck out without being copied within a few months. There is — still — no moat.