The OpenAI Deployment Company | Hacker News Reader

The OpenAI Deployment Company

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42 pointsj4mie33 comments

Nothing says easy to use revolutionary new way to work like requiring implementation middlemen. Salesforce would be proud.

An indictment of the technology and the modern corporation. We're supposed to believe this technology is all-powerful and these corporations are efficient and innovative, by the way.

Which is why I found the Claude Super Bowl ads really weird.

They seemed like an indictment of the technology as a whole. The LLM character proxies all spoke with the LLM-cadence and phrasing. Because we all know it. LLM writing is very uncanny valley. And they didn't even try to deny this. It made LLMs itself look like a joke.

I mean, to be fair to OpenAI and this approach, new general purpose technologies (like LLMs) are normally pretty hard to work with at first.

Look at electricity in factories and how long it took to have an impact, as well as the massive, massive lag between Visicalc and economy wide productivity increases.

I personally do believe that the foundation model companies are a terrible business, but that the technology itself is definitely useful (even if it's vastly unlikely to go full Singularity).

I love the tagline: "build businesses around intelligence"

As if they are all built around un-intelligence now...

People laugh at this, myself included in the past, but it works. I remember scoffing at AWS partnering with Deloitte and Accenture over a decade ago. My exact thoughts were "Our technology is great, why do we need these people to sell it?", and it turns out that selling to enterprises at scale is a lot more like an American high school experience than anything else.

> Forward Deployed Engineers

We have a word for this, it's "consultant".

No thats different.

Consultant you pay to come to your company. Forward Deployed Engineers are payed by the other company to push you spending money at their company.

Well, in this case the FWE will be payed by you to push you spending more money so the ceo is being able to brag that they are working with openai (instead of mckenzie)

Surely the various contracts are pricing in the salary for the FDE, as a feature. "Not only are we giving you terrible software that is impossible for outsiders to learn and operate, but we are also installing a double-agent in your organization who will ensure you don't migrate elsewhere. Pay up unless you want to lose out on the AIs."

There might be other motivations but at least thats how the term differenciates.

For OpenAI having more companies using OpenAI and buying tokens etc. helps them and they do have a typical issue: they can move as fast as they want, if no one else is moving with them...

These are much worse. You can generally fire consultants. These people are from OpenAI. Good luck ever cancelling or reducing your OpenAI contracts when they have people inside your organization. Have fun trying to even discuss it as these people will no doubt insert themselves into every meeting and watercooler discussion involving the contracts they are are paid to protect.

Doesn't ASML have Engineers who work with TSMC to make sure their complex machines works optimally within their manufacturing facility? How is this any different?

Yeah, this is a totally normal thing that businesses do (particularly for complicated technology). However, the dysfunctions of many companies make these kinds of people far more powerful than they should be.

Yes but when you buy any billion-dollar machine you are committed to a long term relationship with the vendor. OpenAI is more akin to a cloud service. In a few months you may wish to switch to a different service. Asml customers operated on decades, not months.

Different, this would be a "field engineer", which is pretty common for supporting customers which might have a lot of technical needs around your product. For example, some microcontroller vendors are pretty famous for having poor or non-existent documentation and instead rely on the dude on-site to tell your engineers how everything works.

I run a dev agency, and I can spot one when I see one.

The trouble with dev agencies, "services companies", integration specialists and "forward deployed engineers" is that they scale lineraly with the number of people.

You can't 100x your revenue without at least 80x-ing your headcount.Oh, you might go for that once due to AI - but so can everyone else. After that, it's boring linear growth.

When I say "boring", I don't mean as "capitalism requires exponential growth" critique. I mean OpenAI valuation is not priced for that. They're priced for singularity. If the bulk of their revenue turns out to be bodyshop, that's...quite a different math.

The way to charge big with this kind of work is to do what big consultancies (MBB, IBM, etc) do: brand equity and (supposed) expertise in solving domain problems. OpenAI has ... interesting tech.

It's going to be interesting seeing if they can pull this off. If I were a betting man, my money would be on "no".

The problem with these kinds of businesses is you have no capital. You have labourers.

If you’re SAP, you build SAP once and you sell it. If you’re an author, you write the book once.

With consulting, you have to keep doing the same work every year just to stand still. You don’t own an actual product.

Mostly.

Many of these companies do build up internal know-how.

In case of big consulting companies, they have huge internal knowledge bases, decks, cases etc from previous engagements. In case of product companies with FDEs, the feedback from customers ideally trickles down to product improvements. In case of OpenAI, they can improve their models.

Whether that's actually valuable enough to turn a blind eye to the downsides of consulting, I don't know.

> The OpenAI Deployment Company is a committed partnership between OpenAI and 19 leading global investment firms, consultancies, and system integrators. The partnership is led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners, and B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank Corp., Warburg Pincus, and WCAS as founding partners.

> Investors also include leading consulting and systems integration firms, including Bain & Company, Capgemini, and McKinsey & Company.

All of these companies are invested in Palantir too right? Why does this “deployment company” sound like more Palantir?

I guess this is a sign that Mistral AI is on to something.

So this is body leasing for ai experts under the umbrella of the openai brand? are they moving all their existing fde under this new company?

This sounds like forward engineering as a service

For those who have not read it this is a terrific overview on the value of the FDE trend https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir

this was a great read, thank you for sharing it.

Is the sentiment around OpenAI already so bad that it's even fallen off the front page of Hacker News in two hours?

Well, it is a repulsive corporation, with a very repulsive CEO.

But so is Anthropic and all of Big Tech, so there's that.

even ant?

Agi 2027 btw

or smth

Surely bodyshop work will scale to trillions of dollars

too little too late

So basically people who will wrap the openai SDK but sit at your company's offices lol what a joke

Yes, that is more or less correct.

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