OpenAI Is in Trouble | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI Is in Trouble

theatlantic.com

28 pointsent10111 comments

The competitive advantage was supposed to be open, nonprofit, and good of humanity.

Around May, Altman said to FT that his job was the "most important job maybe in history" (FT: https://www.ft.com/content/a3d65804-1cf3-4d67-ac79-9b78a10b6...). He did come back from brink of death before as well. But steering OpenAI into an "ecosystem" rather than a focusing on the product when you are up against the likes of Google? Seems like cashing in on the hype too early.

> Altman said to FT that his job was the "most important job maybe in history"

The lack of self-awareness in some experienced senior execs (who should know better) continues to stun me. Even if I suspected that sentiment about the importance of the job I was doing might be correct, I'd never say it - especially in an on-the-record media interview. Two reasons: 1. Any statement like that has a high probability of coming across very poorly, 2. It's a proposition that can only be judged in retrospect by people external to the context.

Frankly, I think the odds are at least 50/50 that Open AI will someday be considered the Pets.com (or even Enron) of early AI.

> Open AI will someday be considered the Pets.com (or even Enron) of early AI.

Very unlikely.

Pets.com never produced anything of note. OpenAI was the leader in AI for 3 years. Maybe now Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 are slightly ahead, but that's a bit subjective. For all practical purposes OpenAI is in a 3-way tie with Google and Anthropic.

Google would love to sink them and Anthropic, and remain the monopoly in the AI space, like they are in the search space.

But Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, and a few others, would be much less happy with a monopolistic Google, and they'll do their best to help OpenAI and Anthropic stay afloat (as long as it does not cost their business to much to do so).

As for Enron, I don't think another Enron is likely to happen, not at this level of visibility. People simply don't like going to prison. Could one person try to fudge some numbers? Maybe. Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind. But Theranos did not have 800 million active users, did not have every analyst in the world scrutinizing them. At the level of OpenAI, you would need many people to be in a conspiracy to fudge numbers, and when there's many people, there's many possibilities for someone to blow the whistle.

Does it boil down to innovation? Also. I wonder if extreme competition will encourage bigger risk taking?

I only see three fairly superficial paragraphs. Is there more to the article behind a paywall?

mirror: https://archive.ph/9nuVk

There are several published methods for reading Atlantic articles. I don't think anyone can make the judgement call for what you should and shouldn't read. Why not give it a shot?

I didn't ask about what I should or shouldn't do and don't really care about your opinion on what I should read. I was surprised by how short and superficial the article was as originally linked and wanted to know if that was due to a paywall blocking the more substantive portion of the article or whether the article is just three brief paragraphs.

I count 8 fairly brief paragraphs in the article. The last sentence is "Altman’s “code red” declaration is a reminder that, despite OpenAI’s unprecedented rise, it remains very much a start-up."

I use a Firefox add-on to Bypass Paywalls.

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