1. OpenAI bet largely on consumer. Consumers have mostly rejected AI. And in a lot of cases even hate it (can't go on TikTok or Reddit without people calling something slop, or hating on AI generated content). Anthropic on the other hand went all in on B2B and coding. That seems to be the much better market to be in.
2. Sam Altman is profoundly unlikable.
People like to complain about things, but consumers are heavily using AI.
ChatGPT.com is now up to the 4th most visited website in the world: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users
The difference there is it became hated after it was established and financially successful. If you need to turn free visitors in to paying customers, that general mood of “AI is bad and going to make me lose my job/fuck up society” is yet another hurdle OpenAI will have to overcome.
My point was more that it seems this wave of AI is more profitable if you're in B2B vs. B2C.
The strategy here is more valid in my opinion. The value in AI is much more legible when the consumer uses it directly from their chat UI than whatever enterprises can come up with.
I can suggest many ways that consumers can use it directly from chat window. Value from enterprise use is actually not that clear. I can see coding but that’s about it. Can you tell me ways in which enterprises can use AI in ways that is not just providing their employees with chaggpt access?
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1090/the-amphora-of-great-...
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1092/the-amphora-of-great-...
it's that he has no ethics to speak of at all. it's not that he's out of touch, it's that he simply does not care.
He is clearly disliked by a lot of tech community, I don't see his AGI belief as a big part of that.
And when two people want different things from him, he "resolves" the conflict by agreeing with each of them separately, and then each assumes they got what they wanted, until they talk to the other person and find out that nothing was resolved.
Really not a person who is qualified to run a company, except the constant lying is good for fundraising and PR.
Interesting that he's got as far as he has with this issue. I don't think you can run a company effectively if you don't deal in truth.
Some of his videos have seemed quite bizarre as well, quite sarcastic about concerns people have about AI in general.
And today it seems everyone will at YC hate him but pretend not
The second one is a bunch of SJW hand-wringing about things that are only tangentially related, like indigenous Bolivians being oppressed by Spanish Conquistadors centuries ago. That part I don't care for as much.
Example, Sam Altman and OpenAI hoarding 40% of the RAM supply as unprocessed wafers stored in warehouses bought with magical bubble investors money in GPUs that don't exist yet and that they will not be able to install because there's not enough electricity to feed such botched tech, in data centers that are still to be built, with intention to punch the competence supply, and all the people of the planet in the process along two years (at least).
For a brief moment I thought you were talking about Elon there
You can see it when he talks, he's clearly trying (very unconvincingly) to emulate normal human emotions like concern and empathy. He doesn't feel them.
People like that are capable of great evil and there's a part of our lizard brains that can sense it
I don't and I see Sam Altman as a greater fraud than that (loathsome) individual. And I don't think Sam gets through the coming bubble pop without being widely exposed (and likely prosecuted) as a fraudster.
Besides OpenAI was never going to recoup the billions of dollars based on advertising or $20/month subscriptions
I don't think it is at all
The CEO just has to have followership: the people who work there have to think that this is a good person to follow. Even they don't have to "like" him
Source on that?
Lots of organizations offer ChatGPT subscriptions, and Microsoft pushes Copilot as hard as it can which uses GPT models.
How do you figure?
He and his personality caused people like Ilya to leave. At that point the failure risk of OAI jumped tremendously. The reality he will have to face is, he has caused OAIs demise.
Perhaps hes ok with that as long as OAI goes down with him. Would expect nothing less from him.
The demise of OpenAI is rooted in the bad product market fit, since many people like using ChatGPT for free, but fewer are ready to pay for it. And that’s pretty much all there is to it. OpenAI bet on consumers, made a slopstagram that unsurprisingly didn’t revolutionise content, and doesn’t sell as many licenses as they would like.
He says a lot of fluff, doesn’t try to be very extreme, and focuses on selling. I don’t know him personally but he comes across like an average person if that makes sense (in this environment that is).
I think I personally prefer that over Elon’s self induced mental illnesses and Dario being a doomer promoting the “end” of (insert a profession here) in 12 months every 6 months. It’s hard for me to trust a megalomaniac or a total nerd. So Sam is kinda in the middle there.
I hope OpenAI continues to dominate even if the margins of winning tighten.
Now I have him muted on X.
Personally I don't think Elon is the worst billionaire, he's just the one dumb enough to not have any PR (since 2020). They're all pretty reprehensible creatures.
There will always be enough people willing to suck up to money that they'll have all the yes-men they need to rationalize it as "it's EVERYONE ELSE who's wrong!"
Props to him for letting people mute him on his own platform. The issue with Sam and OpenAI is they their bias on any controversional topic can't be switched off.
If you nail the bar to the floor, then sure, you can pass over it.
> He says a lot of fluff, doesn’t try to be very extreme, and focuses on selling.
I don't now what your definition of extreme is but by mine he's pretty extreme.
> I think I personally prefer that over Elon’s self induced mental illnesses and Dario being a doomer promoting the “end” of (insert a profession here) in 12 months every 6 months.
All of them suffer from thinking their money makes them somehow better.
> I hope OpenAI continues to dominate even if the margins of winning tighten.
I couldn't care less. I'm on the whole impressed with AI, less than happy about all of the slop and the societal problems it brings and wished it had been a more robust world that this had been brought in to because I'm not convinced the current one needed another issue of that magnitude to deal with.
Let's assume they think they're better than others.
What makes you think that they think it's because of their money, as opposed to, say, because of their success at growing their products and businesses to the top of their field?
I think over time it (LLM based) will become like an augmenter, not something like what they’re selling as some doomsday thing. It can help people be more efficient at their jobs by quickly learning something new or helping do some tasks.
I find it makes me a lot more productive because I can have it follow my architecture and other docs to pump out changes across 10 files that I can then review. In the old way, it would have taken me quite a while longer to just draft those 10 files (I work on a fairly complex system), and I had some crazy code gen scripts and shit I’d built over the years. So I’d say it gives me about 50% more efficiency which I think is good.
Of course, everyone’s mileage may vary. Kinda reminds me of when everyone was shitting on GUIs, or scripting languages or opinionated frameworks. Except over time those things made productivity increase and led to a lot more solutions. We can nitpick but I think the broader positive implication remains.