If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.
xAI isn't allowing people to use the Twitter feed to train AI
Google is keeping it's properties for Gemini
Microsoft, who presumably could let OpenAI use it's data fields appears (publicly at least) to be in a love/hate relationship with OpenAI these days.
So you plant a meadow of tasty human interaction morsels to get humans to sit around and munch on them while you hook up your milking machine to their data teats and start sucking data.
Rather than directly admit fault they'll regularly respond in subtle (moreso o3) to not so subtle roundabout ways that deflect blame rather than admit direct fault, even when it's an inarguable factual error about even conceptually non-heated things like API methods.
It's an annoying behavior of their models and in complete contrast to say Anthropic's Claude which ime will immediately and directly admit to things it had responded incorrectly about when the user mentions it (perhaps too eagerly).
I have wondered if this is something its learned based on training from places like Reddit, or if OpenAI deliberately taught it or instructed via system prompts to seem more infallible or if models like Claude were made to deliberately reduce that aspect.
I don't know whats better here. ChatGPT did have a tendency to reply with things like "Oh, I'm sorry, you are right that x is wrong because of y. Instead of x, you should do x"
Human-level AI is closer than I'd realised... at this rate it'll have a seat in the senate by 2030.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/2025/feb/14/gua...
Your sense of injustice or whatevs you want to call it is aimed in the opposite direction.
If you don't like the fair use of open information, I would expect you to be cheering this rather than losing respect for those involved.
Instead, I’m just going to hang out here in this hacker meadow and on FOSS social networks where something like that would never happen!
sama probably would like to take Satya's seat for what he no doubt sees as unblocking the path to utopia. The slight problem is he's becoming a bit lonely in that thinking.
My guess is that they’re trying other things to diversify themselves and/or to try to keep investors interested. Whether or not it works is irrelevant as long as they can convince others it will increase their usage.
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C suites are usually made of up really out of touch and weird workaholics, because that is what it takes to make it to the C suite of a large company. They buy DSS (decision support service / software) from vendors, usually marketing groups, that basically tell them what is in and what isn't. Many marketing companies are now getting that data from twitter and reddit, and portraying it as the broad social trend. This is a problem because twitter and reddit are both extremely curated and censored, and the tone of the conversation there is really artificial, and can lead to really bad conclusions.
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This is only somewhat related, but if OpenAI did actually succeed in building their own successful social media platform (doubtful) they would be basing a lot of their model on whatever subset of people wanted to be part of the OpenAI social media platform. The opportunity for both mundane and malicious bias in models there seems huge.
Somewhat related, apparently a lot of English spellings were standardized by the invention of the printing press. This isn't surprising; it was one of the first technologies to really democratize written materials, and so it had a very outsized power to set standards. LLMs feel like they could be a bit like this, particularly if everyone continues with their current trends of intentionally building reliance on them into their products / companies / workflows. As a real life example, someone at work realized you could ask co-pilot to rate the professionalism of your communication during a meeting. This seems quite chilling, since you're not really rating your professionalism, but measuring yourself against whatever weird bell curve exists in co-pilot.
I'm absolutely baffled that LLMs are seeing broad adoption, and absolutely baffled that people intentionally adopting and integrating them into their lives. I'm in my early 40s now. I'm not sure if I can get out of the tech field at this point, but I'm seriously thinking about options at this point.
The social harm inflicted by journalists thinking "Damn, I can just go on twitter to find out what is going on and how people feel about it!"
I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too.
Death-knell? Maybe… but I wouldn’t read into it. I’d be looking more at their key employees leaving. That’s what kills companies.
- Their brand value is terrible. Many people loathe AI for what it's going to do for jobs, and the people who like it are just as happy to use CoPilot or Cursor or Gemini. Frontier models are mostly fungible to consumers. No one is brand-loyal to OpenAI.
- Many key employees have already left or been forced out.
It might not be the best but people of whom you'd have never thought that they would use it, are using it. Many non technical people in my circle are all over it and they have never even heard of Claude. They also wouldn't understand why people would loathe AI because they simply don't understand those reasons.
But I'd be stupid not to use it. It has made boilerplate work so much easier. It's even added an interesting element where I use it to brain storm.
Even most haters will end up using it.
I think eventually people will realize it's not replacing anyone directly and is really just a productivity multiplier. People were worried that email would remove jobs from the economy too.
I'm not convinced our general AIs are going to get much better than they are now. It feels like we're we are at with mobile phones.
And it did. Together with other technology, but yes:
https://archive.is/20200118212150/https://www.wsj.com/articl...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-executive-assista...
Sam Altman is incredibly popular with young people on TikTok. He cured homework - mostly for free - and has a nice haircut. Videos of him driving his McLaren have comment sections in near total agreement that he deserves it.
People argue about the damage COVID lockdowns did to education, but surely we're staring down the barrel of a bigger problem where people can go through school without ever having to think or work for themselves.
In the worst case he's poisoned an entire generation. If ChatGPT doctors, architects and engineers are anything like ChatGPT "vibe-coders" we're fucked.
If you're doing deep deals with MSFT you're going to be strongly discouraged from using Gemini.
Counter-Counterpoint, I still feel investors priced in a bit more than that. Yahoo! Had major buy in as well and AGI believers were selling investors not just on the next Unicorn, but rather the next industry, AGI not being merely a Google in the 90s, but rather all of the internet and what that would become over the decades to this day. Anything less than delivering that, is not exactly what a large part of investors bought. But then again, any bubble has to burst someday.
Even if you believe all that to be true, it in no way contradicts what you quoted or makes it unfair. Having a kick ass product and good brand awareness in no way correlates to being close to AGI.
Or even if you did come up with AGI, so would everyone else. Gemini is arguably better than ChatGPT now.
I remember at Google they said well if source code leaks nobody is actually worried about stealing tech, the vast majority of code is open to all employees, with some exceptions like spam-, ranking, etc. It’s still protected, but not considered moat.
The moat comes from other things, such as datacenter & global networking infrastructure, marketing new products by pushing them through existing products (put Gemini in search, add chrome to Android etc). Most importantly you can use data you already have to bootstrap new products, say Gmail and calendar integrated with personalized assistants.
If you play your cards right, yes there’s some first-mover advantages, but they are more superficial than your average Twitter hype thread makes you think. It can give you the ability to set unofficial standards and APIs, like Kubernetes, S3 – (maybe OpenAI APIs?). And you can set certain agendas and market your name for recognition and trust. But all that can slip through your fingers if a behemoth picks up where you left off. They have so many advantages, except for being the fastest.
If it’s not obvious already, I believe we are far away from that with LLMs and that the attention those working in model safety give to AGI over current day concerns like Meta just torrenting for model data, are not very serious people, but I have accepted that this isn’t a popular opinion amongst industry professionals.
Not least because letting laws prevent them from model training is bad according to them, either for the same weird logic Musk uses to justify testing FSD Betas on an unwilling public due to the potential to prevent future deaths, or because they genuinely took RB seriously. No idea what’s worse for serious adults…
There has never been an AGI, and there's no clear path to get there. And no, LLMs are not bringing us any closer to a real AGI, no matter how much Sam Altman wants to try to redefine what "AGI" means so that he can claim he has it.
The difference between AGI funding and fusion funding is the people hawking AGI are better liars and the people funding are far more gullible than the people trying to make fusion power a reality.
We already know that computation has grown exponentially in scale and cost, for decades. With breakthrough software tech showing up reliably as it harnesses greater computational power, even if unpredictably and sparsely.
If we view AI across decades, it has reliably improved. Even through its “winters”. It just took time to hit thresholds of usefulness making relatively smooth progress look very random from a consumers point of view.
As computational power grows, and current models become more efficient, the hardware overhang for the next major step is growing rapidly.
That just hasn’t been the case for fusion.
Wait for it
Google Gemini 2.5 Pro was remarkably good and I’m not sure how they did it. It’s like an elite athlete doing a jump forward despite harsh competition. They probably have excellent training methodology and data quality.
DeepSeek made huge inroads in affordability…
But even with those, intelligence itself is seeing diminishing returns while training costs are not.
So OpenAI _needs_ to diversify - somehow. If they rely on intelligence alone, then they’re toast. So they can’t.
Right now OAI's synthetic data pipeline is very heavily weighted to 1-on-1 conversations.
But models are being deployed into multi-user spaces that OAI doesn't have access to.
If you look at where their products are headed right now, this is very much the right move.
Expect it to be TikTok style media formats.
As for whether it will work, I don't know how they're possibly going to get the "seed community" which will encourage others to join up. Maybe they're hoping that all the people making slop posts on other social networks want to cut out the middleman and have communities of people who actually enjoy that. As always, the sfw/nsfw censorship line will be an important definer, and I can't imagine them choosing NSFW.
You don't need some mythical AI to be a great company. You need great products, which OpenAI has, and they keep improving them.
Now they've hamstrung themselves into this AGI nonsense to try and entice investors further, I guess.
AFAIK, they've been on the AGI hype-train for a very long time, before they reached mainstream popularity for sure. From their own blog (2020 - https://openai.com/index/organizational-update/), here is a mention of their "mission":
> We’re proud of these and other research breakthroughs by our team, all made as part of our mission to achieve general-purpose AI that is safe and reliable, and which benefits all humanity.
I'm not sure OpenAI trying to reach AGI is a "strategic mistake" as much as "the basis for the business" (which, to be fair, was a non-profit organization initially).
Also, I don't think Sama thinks like a typical large org managers. OpenAI has enough money to have all sorts of products/labs that are startup like. No reason to standby waiting for the research work.
OpenAI doesn't have enough money to even run ChatGPT in perpetuity, so building internal moonshots is an irresponsible waste of investor funds.