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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I do worry about the viability of OpenAI in particular. So much of its talent went to other firms which then built up amazing capaibilities like Anthropic with Claude. And then they also have the threat of OpenSource models like DeepSeek v3.1 and soon DeepSeek R2 while at the same time OpenAI is raising its prices to absurd levels. I guess they are trying to be the Apple of the AI world... maybe...

That said, I expect protectionist policies will be enabled by the US government to protect them and also X.AI/Grok from foreign competition, in particular Chinese.

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> worry about the viability of OpenAI in particular [...] they also have the threat of OpenSource models

It's a real shame OpenAI didn't succeed with their core and most fundamental mission of being open and improving humanity as a whole, where new FOSS models would have been seen as a success, not as a competitor or threat. We're all worse off because of it.

> It's a real shame OpenAI didn't succeed with their core and most fundamental mission of being open and improving humanity as a whole

You frame it like they sincerely had this mission at all. Which I doubt seriously. Why would anyone who funded them have such aim?

Well, I mean, if we take what they themselves said (at the time) as truth, then that was their sincere mission:

> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/

Of course, they could have been lying at that point, in order to gain interest I suppose , but they were pretty outspoken about that idea at least in the beginning.

> Of course, they could have been lying at that point, in order to gain interest I suppose , but they were pretty outspoken about that idea at least in the beginning.

We're talking about Sam Altman here. Of course he was lying from the beginning, just as he's lying to his investors now about the future of his company. I think most of us are just confused why the world seems to have perpetual amnesia when it comes to Sam Altman—he can do and say whatever he wants to get ahead and a year later people are still taking him at his word.

> Well, I mean, if we take what they themselves said (at the time) as truth, then that was their sincere mission

In general, you should never take anything a corporation or an extremely wealthy person says as sincere.

Like an LLM, what they say corresponds occasionally with "beliefs" but don't confuse that with holding sincere beliefs. It's mostly transactional.

The few exceptions to this rule - who are rarely the most wealthy/powerful - are generally considered traitors to their class.

>Of course, they could have been lying at that point, in order to gain interest I suppose , but they were pretty outspoken about that idea at least in the beginning.

I don't see how those notions contradict each other when it's all to get funding.

That's not what investors want to hear, so it definitely wasn't to get funding

It was to get engineers. No one wants to hear they are working for the next orphan crushing machine.

Yet...

Or, to put it another way, you presume that investors want to hear how they will make money, as opposed to wanting to hear that OpenAI can 'talk the talk'

I don't mean to engage in conspiratorial thinking but I believe in this industry we have to assume dishonesty. It's just so many orders of magnitude easier to run a con than actually do the thing being promised.

Some of the parties involved are known for long-cons, shameless backstabbing, and generally ruthless self-interest.

So I would wouldn't be surprised if the "open" and "non-profit" was just a thin PR veneer from the start.

It would also explain how values consistent with their supposed mission seem to have been zero consideration in hiring. (Given that, during what looked like a coup, almost all of those hires lined up to effectively say they would discard the values in exchange for more money.)

US tax law is designed to help with this - the tax status of nonprofits is evaluated based on if their activity supports their published mission.

Those mission statements (ostensibly) have teeth!

And US law is rigorously enforced these days.

Worried? Their mission is to make sure that AI benefits all of humanity. Surely they must be thrilled that there is a ton of competition undercutting their prices and eating their market share. I bet Sam Altman is popping champagne as we speak.

> We are building safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.

Source: https://openai.com/about/

> OpenAI is raising its prices to absurd levels

When customers don't know how to differentiate on quality, they use price as a signal.

Although I dislike the pricing, OpenAI do sit on some of the best models/processes. o1 Pro mode is a literal beast even compared to newer R1 and Sonnet 3.7. I'm not sure I'd call it 10x better (than R1 specifically) perhaps, but it certainly is better (and slower).

A literal beast

In some ways it resembles the drug industry. Heavy investment in what looks like a promising line of development only to have it flop like 4.5 with marginal improvements.

> I guess they are trying to be the Apple of the AI world...

They're looking more like Alta Vista.

It also seems OpenAI is struggling to scale. I'm a premium subscriber and the site is totally unusable for multiple hours every week. Now that Claude has web search I may switch away from OpenAI permanently.

This is also happening to Anthropic. The adoption of AI is accelerating right now, or at least token usage is accelerating is with agentic workflows coming on online.

Hate to burst your bubble but Anthropic has vastly tighter usage limits and is down much more often.

Good to know. I guess since OpenAI is my primary driver I haven't had a chance to experience anthropic downtime.

It is not only the downtime but they have much more restrictive chat usage limits. That coupled with historically not having enough GPUs to service load has made it sometimes difficult to use. On that last point, it has gotten better in recent weeks.

> OpenAI is raising its prices to absurd levels

When did they raise prices? I don't recall them ever raising prices.

> That said, I expect protectionist policies will be enabled by the US government to protect them and also X.AI/Grok from foreign competition, in particular Chinese

People love to say this but its hard to imagine which American or European businesses would be actively using models that are being run and hosted within mainland China. The risks are too great. Protectionist policies can be entirely ignored.

> When did they raise prices? I don't recall them ever raising prices.

I am referring to their new models having absurdly high prices. GPT-4.5 is $75/150 and o1 is $15/60, whereas GPT-4o is $2.5/10.

> models that are being run and hosted within mainland China.

The models are open source so one can run them locally.

> I am referring to their new models having absurdly high prices. GPT-4.5 is $75/150 and o1 is $15/60, whereas GPT-4o is $2.5/10.

That is a new product not a price increase.

> The models are open source so one can run them locally.

Again, not sure how any policies will stop opensource code from being run. At any rate those models still don't compare to O1 Pro and the full tool suite.

> Again, not sure how any policies will stop opensource code from being run.

There is already a bill in circulation that would ban the "import" of Chinese artificial intelligence technology and you can be sure that this means you won't be able to download the DeepSeek app or download its model:

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-introduces-legislation-...

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/deepseek-users-could-face-...

The stated penalties are up to "20 years in prison and a $100 million fine."

This bill likely is an early one but this is the direction that many want to head in.

> and you can be sure that this means you won't be able to download the DeepSeek app or download its model

The first part is clear, but my thesis is that no Western company would be downloading a DeepSeek app in the first place.

The second part is much more ambiguous, and unfortunately, the bill lacks specificity. I’d be surprised if it made it very far, and even more surprised if any of the hyperscalers supported it. It doesn’t do much to protect their moa because again, no one in the Western world is going to run a Chinese-hosted model anyway. And without clearer language, it could end up blocking the use of foreign research that could actually strengthen U.S. companies.

> The second part is much more ambiguous, and unfortunately, the bill lacks specificity.

OpenAI wants to ban the use of DeepSeek models: "As with Huawei, there is significant risk in building on top of DeepSeek models in critical‬‭ infrastructure and other high-risk use cases given the potential that DeepSeek could be‬‭ compelled by the CCP to manipulate its models to cause harm." from: https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/ostp-rfi/ec680b75-d539...

> I’d be surprised if it made it very far, and even more surprised if any of the hyperscalers supported it

OpenAI is calling for legislation:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-deepseek-stat...

> no one in the Western world is going to run a Chinese-hosted model anyway

AWS offers DeepSeek already:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/deepseek-r1-mo...

"Chinese-hosted" I am not talking about AWS running a opensource model.

> OpenAI is calling for legislation:

OpenAI is not a hyperscaler.

I am not disagreeing but I think (but could be wrong) that most of this is a moot point over the medium-term.

> I guess they are trying to be the Apple of the AI world...

iOS and MacOS are apple's moat, OpenAI has Altman's big mouth and all those nonsense from that big mouth.

Anthropic didn’t build shit, it’s got the same closed output rules as ClosedAI and xAI and Perplexity and the Gemini API. Send them your precious questions and code and what do you get back? Output you with a prohibition era policy telling you not to use it to compete with their thing that does everything. That’s such a dumb deal, I immediately think people are dumb when I hear them mention using closed output AI services. Government protections for explicitly anticompetitive services? What a joke!

> Anthropic didn’t build shit, it’s got the same closed output rules as ClosedAI and xAI and Perplexity and the Gemini API

Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI employees and they built an effective competitor to OpenAI as evidenced by their valuation, e.g. +$60B USD. If building a company with a +$60B valuation is considered shit, well, I guess I want to know what you built that is better?

Using a company's valuation as a way to measure the effectiveness of the company or product is not a good idea.

See anything related to NFTs as an example, or WeWork immediately sprang to mind as another one.

Did Adam Neumann build anything noteworthy, or was he charismatic and connected enough to dupe many high net worth individuals and investment firms?

> I immediately think people are dumb when ... What a joke!

Are there specific policies that come to mind?

The most obvious one being proposed is banning Chinese models from the US (like China bans Google, etc).

At the extreme end, some members of the administration has already floated ideas like prosecuting users who download Chinese models.

How would that even be enforced?

... worry?

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