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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

> OpenAI is so annoying in this aspect. They will regularly give timelines for rollout that not met or simply wrong.

I have empathy for the engineers in this case. You know it’s a combination of sales/marketing/product getting WAY ahead of themselves by doing this. Then the engineers have to explain why they cannot in fact reach an arbitrary deadline.

Meanwhile the people not in the work get to blame those working on the code for not hitting deadlines

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Many of OpenAI's announcements seem to be timed almost perfectly as responses to other events in the industry or market. I think Sam just likes to keep the company in the news and the cultural zeitgeist, and he doesn't really care if what he's announcing is ready to scale to users yet or not.

To be fair, being in the cultural zeitgeist is a huge part of their current moat. To people in the street OpenAI is the company making LLMs. Sam has to make sure it stays that way

Fake it til you make it vibes. I understand why he would do it, what I find strange is that it inspires confidence in the market.

You can wait to release something all over the world which will take time because it’s not an engineering issue but a compliance/legal or other types of issue. Or you can iterate faster by doing the minimum and getting feedback and then releasing it in other markets. Not sure what’s wrong with this approach.

That’s fair, but I was referring to releasing in response to external events. It’s very clear they are trying to one-up each other and create hype, vagueposting etc. I don’t think sama is alone in this but everyone especially from the Thiel school of thought.

Depending on what you’re actually providing, different regions of CSPs might not actually have the features or capacity you need to reliably deliver the feature world wide. That’s probably the exception not the rule, especially for OpenAI.

What are they faking?

Sama as the spokesperson regularly makes grandeur statements, often very vague, can’t show it because ”safety”, trade secrets etc. I think it’s widespread culturally, especially in earlier VC-centric times when investor fomo and mystique is name of the game. But nowadays even large publicly listed companies like Tesla pull this off and even sell consumer products that don’t exist yet. Do you want specific examples of sama statements that I think are horseshit specifically designed to generate buzz? It’s not hard to find.

I fully understand why they do it, and yet I choose to interpret it as blatantly lying. (To be clear I mean the thing where OpenAI seems to announce things relating to news cycles without actually having the thing working yet; I don't mind a limited rollout. But like, that Advanced Voice demo they did--which was clearly just to take some thunder from Google--not only took a long time to get into the hands of anyone, it is nowhere near as good as their demo claimed or made it out to be.)

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