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Comment by superconduct123 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand, what prompted OpenAI recently to need this 1.4T investment?

All of Sam’s shenanigans go back to that one popular post on here many months ago about how AI has no moat. LLMs are a commodity, Chinese companies are just releasing them for free. Sam has gone all in on OpenAI and needs to secure his company, he knows it could be another decade until they discover an innovation on par with tranformers and there’s absolutely no way they can go from burning tens of billions of dollars a year to profitable by selling a rapidly commoditized technology.

LLMs are a commodity but ChatGpt is a brand, for most people AI means ChatGpt. They are not going to use Chinese models.

ChatGpt is also building other products/brands like Sora to capture more mindshare.

Linux is free and yet people use Windows.

An operating system is a lot stickier than a website URL.

Google has stayed on top for 25 years because they're better and free. LLM providers will have to compete on price doing expensive inference.

Google stayed on the top because of business deals with Apple and Firefox and then they got the biggest marketing tool called Chrome.

Chatgpt can become an Ad company just like Google probably bigger than Google.

If a foundation model provider allows fine-tuning on confidential data but the result is locked into the platform, wouldn't that be extremely sticky?

All this transformer tech is a commodity, no one will care about the brand if an alternative is free so it’s a race to the bottom.

Yes people use Windows. Go look up the history of how that came to be, it had nothing to do with their brand. Sam is looking for his IBM.

I don’t buy this argument about brand, in tech history has showed customers will switch overnight if a better option appears and there is no network effects or ecosystem lockin. BlackBerry had a brand too.

ChatGPT has literally no brand moat. Nobody recognizes, or even cares about, the brand. They care about the interface - chat.

If you just take those chinese models and slap them on some decent looking website, nobody will know the difference. People take brand recognition far too seriously.

If Linux was actually indistinguishable from Windows, you bet your ass nobody in their right mind would install Windows. But they're actually different things.

> LLMs are a commodity but ChatGpt is a brand, for most people AI means ChatGpt. They are not going to use Chinese models.

This is still an unknown.

> Linux is free and yet people use Windows.

The moat isn't even 1% of the one that Windows has - and even Windows has been losing ground on the consumer side. While slow, the rate acceleration is definitely there. Compare Oct 2020-Oct 2025 vs the preceding 5-year period.

Netscape was fairly known by the public during the .com bubble, it's now a distant memory at most.

Yes because MS gave away IE for free, why do you think all AI providers including ChatGpt give AI access for free for limited cases?

Believe it or not, that's actually a walkback from the $5 to $7 trillion he was pushing for almost two years ago.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/repor...

I remember and it lends some credence to the notion that Altman is just making up big numbers.

He was just anchoring.

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/w...

Absolutely. It's anchoring in the service of a massive con.

They are going all in, promising so many deals to so many companies that if OpenAI fails, the entire US economy will explode. Expecting the government will bail them out to prevent such a disaster.

Billionaires and corporations too big too fail are bad for democracy. They have an oversized impact on society and the government.

That would do nothing to prevent such a disaster. It would guarantee it.

That's not really true. It may be legit strategy. If they realize they overhyped the whole industry, and everyone is tied to them, and they have strong political allies… if you also realize it's going to crumble. You might just see bailout as only viable option so you make yourself even bigger to fail.

If it turns like this it's extremely cynical and one would wonder how could Altman stay ou of prison (i am sure he will not go to prison).

> what prompted OpenAI recently to need this 1.4T investment?

Capital denial to competitors.

I think every company would like to have that. OpenAI is in a hyped up position that it can get it, so they go for it.

I don't buy that they can create AGI by investing trillions in training models and infrastructure.

If you ask me, this is just more money spent on pollution.

The need to replace humans to be profitable, just sounds like the end goal is to destroy the planet with datacenters and hurt people generally.

Sounds like a net negative for the planet.

Absolutely nothing. They don't, they didn't, it's a poorly stitched together attack job.

The 1.4 T amounts to a broad nearly decade long capex plan, not liabilities.

The loans and backstops etc were a request, not for OpenAI, but on behalf of manufacturers of grid equipment, manufacturers that OpenAI wouldike the government to consider as eligible for money already carved out by the AMIC national investment in chips and AI, and also probably more money as well-- it's a separate group of tangential industries that weren't initially considered, so why not ask? Sure it would help keep the wheels moving in OpenAI and the broad AI and US semiconductor industry, but it's far away from and ask by Altman for a bailout of his company.

Narrator: it was in fact a bailout they were asking for.

What is it that happened roughly 2 months ago? It seems like a disproportionate number of all the low-effort comments on the anti-ai side of things are coming from accounts that age.

I turned 11, and my mom let me get a hacker news account!

The need to say “fuck you” to Elon and one-up him.

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