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Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI has already forecast $12B in revenue by the end of this year.

I agree that Google is well-positioned, but the mindshare/product advantage OpenAI has gives them a stupendous amount of leeway

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The hurdle for OpenAI is going to be on the profit side. Google has their own hardware acceleration and their own data centers. OpenAI has to pay a monopolist for hardware acceleration and beholden to another tech giant for data centers. Never mind that Google can customize it's hardware specifically for it's models.

The only way for OpenAI to really get ahead on solid ground is to discover some sort of absolute game changer (new architecture, new algorithm) and manage to keep it bottled away.

OpenAI has now partnered with Jony Ive now and they are going to have thinnest data centers with thinnest servers mounted on thinnest racks. And since everything is so thin, servers can just whisper to each other instead of communicating via fat cables.

I think that will be the game changer OpenAI will show us soon.

All servers will have a single thunderbolt port.

Yep and I heard the servers will only have two USB-C ports for all I/O, but of course dongles will be available.

> OpenAI has to pay a monopolist for hardware acceleration and beholden to another tech giant for data centers.

Don't they have a data center in progress as we speak? Seems by now they're planning on building not just one huge data center in Texas, but more in other countries too.

Well that data center is just going to be full of Nvidia GPUs hence "pay to monopolist" part.

Guess the part I put in quotes should have had a "or" instead of "and" there.

Agreed, its the doubling of that each year for the next 4-5 years that I see as being difficult.

the leeway comes from the grotesque fanboyism the company benefits from

they haven't been number one for quite some time and still people can't stop presenting them as the leaders

People said much the same thing about Apple for decades, and they’re a $3T company; not a bad thing to have fans.

Plus, it’s a consumer product; it doesn’t matter if people are “presenting them as leaders”, it matters if hundreds of millions of totally average people will open their computers and use the product. OpenAI has that.

Actually, their speculative value is about 3 trillion. Their book value is around 68 billion. Their speculative value might be halved (or more) overnight based on the whim of the economy, markets and opinion. A company isn't actually worth its speculative value.

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