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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

There's an absolutely massive disconnect between the technology Sam Altman is presenting in interviews and what is available. Like they're going to create an AI that will design fusion power plants, but right now they can't turn a profit on a technology that millions of people actually use in their day to day work? Can you sell enough ads to carry you through to the fusion capable AI?

More and more OpenAI is drawing parallels to the Danish scandal of IT Factory. Self-proclaimed world leading innovation and technology in the front, financial sorcery in the back.

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If they really believe their AI is going to be so great, I guess they can just ask it for a business model when it gets there. So their lack of business model is at least self-consistent.

Right now they may be a bit scarce on business plans and revenue, but I hear they're ushering in an era of "post-scarcity" so that should fix it.

That is more or less their actual plan. They ignore or want us to ignore that the technology is commoditising so fast that even if it is great, they won't have enough of an advantage for this to provide an edge for more than a matter of months. Just as Microsoft and anyone betting on AI data centre rollouts want us to ignore that the equipment they are rolling out will be functionally inadequate to support new models in far less time than they can make money to offset the cost; the only part of this capital expenditure that will provide lasting value is the building/power/cooling infrastructure, and probably not all of that.

It's a giant money pit, funding a bunch of people who are not long off the crypto grift train if they are at all.

The LLM space is so weird. On the one hand they are spectacularly amazing tools I use daily to help write code, proofread various documents, understand my home assistant configuration, and occasionally reflect on parenting advice. On the other hand, they are the product of massive tech oligarchs, require $$$$ hardware, dumber than a box of rocks at times, and all the stuff you said. Oh yeah, and it definitely has a whiff of crypto grift all over it, but yet unlike crypto it actually is useful and produces things of value.

Like, where is this tech headed? Is it always going to be something that can only be run economically off shared hardware in a data center or is the day I can run a “near frontier model” on consumer grade hardware just around the corner? Is it always going to be trained and refined by massive centralized powers or will we someday soon be able to join a peer 2 peer training clan ran by denizens of 4chan?

This stuff is so overhyped and yet so under hyped at the same time. I can’t really wrap my head around it.

> the day I can run a “near frontier model” on consumer grade hardware just around the corner?

I suspect it is, in fact. But you can also see why a bunch of very very large, overinvested companies would have incentives to try to make sure it isn't. So it's going to be interesting.

> This stuff is so overhyped and yet so under hyped at the same time. I can’t really wrap my head around it.

perfectly stated, I had to play a lot with some models to get a better picture of how they work and their limitations, before that all the articles I read about them were either "LLMs are the greatest thing ever, totally perfect and made me a 100x engineer" or "LLMs are complete BS and don't provide any value"

I do think we can build great products on top of them, but the way they're being sold implies we'll need no more new product because a chat interface w/ some tool calling is all you'll ever need.

> funding a bunch of people who are not long off the crypto grift train if they are at all.

Your last statement: are you implying that the AI-bubble is perhaps an attempt at building out more cryptocurrency mining outfits?

No I just think it's the same people (because it is the same people). They jump from hype technology to hype technology, and many of them had an enormous incentive to jump from one GPU-investment-heavy technology with a bad reputation for grift to the new shiny-clean-hope-for-the-future thing that might help them make use of their capital investments.

But specifically at least one of these people — Sam Altman —- is not, IMO, off the crypto grift train, because he's still chairman of Worldcoin, which strikes me (and more importantly strikes regulators around the world [0]) as a pretty shoddy operation (not to mention creepy and weird).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)#Legal_and_r...

I never saw it, but I heard that was the actual original pitch deck.

I have basically no sympathy toward them, but that’s cool, that’s ballsy.

I should point out that making the pitch deck sound ballsy and cool was that persons goal. So it may have been a made up story.

"Could it be that, once again", Sam Altman is really not that far removed from a grifter?

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