[mrweasel]

To some extend I think people are putting way to much weight on his exact words, and not why he says them.

Altman is a man who is quickly running out of lies, so now he starts slinging random arguments that can't stand up to even the briefest of scrutiny.

OpenAI is burning cash and fuel. There are results, and they are, to some extend, impressive, but not impressive enough to justify the cost and Altman are no longer able to cover that up.

[duxup]

I think he's also slinging random business deals too.

The "A letter from Sam & Jony" page is one of the weirdest I've seen in a while: https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

Step after step it seems like a CEO throwing everything at the wall in an insecure manner.

I don't pretend to know if Open AI is doomed or just absurdly over valued but still valuable. I pay for and use their product, it works for my use cases, but watching the business deals and weird quotes from a far makes me less confidant.

[LatencyKills]

I knew OpenAI was in trouble the instant they chose Altman over Ilya Sutskever.

[aleph_minus_one]

> I knew OpenAI was in trouble the instant they chose Altman over Ilya Sutskever.

I am not so sure:

This decision rather tells something important about the priorities of the string-pullers behind the curtain:

They clearly want(ed) to monetize what is there, with the risk that only smaller improvements for the AI models will happen from OpenAI, and thus OpenAI might get outcompeted by competitors who are capable of building and running a much better model.

If this is the priority (no matter whether you like or despise Sam Altman), you will likely prefer Sam Altman over Ilya Sutskever.

If, on the other hand, a fast monetization is less important than making further huge leaps towards much better AI models, you will, of course, strongly prefer Ilya Sutskever over Sam Altman.

Thus, I wouldn't say that choosing Sam Altman over Ilya Sutskever is a sign that OpenAI is in trouble, but a very strong sign where the string-pullers behind the curtain want OpenAI to be. Both Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever are just marionettes for these string pullers. When they have served their role, they get put back into the box.

[f30e3dfed1c9]

> Altman is a man who is quickly running out of lies

Oh I doubt that! The quality of the lies may deteriorate but he ain't ever gonna run out.

[rustyhancock]

My understanding is that subscription based inference and API usage is now profitable.

Subscriptions are highly profitable for the typical chat user.

And API is overall net profitable.

What is extremely taxing to their finances is R&D, training and in particular development of frontier models.

My assessment is that when the music stops those who have the most subs will win.

Companies like Apple who had sat out the battle and built niche moats (privacy), and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic who have the market share will be fine.

In 6-12 months, nearly any lead they have will be eaten by distillation.

What will then happen is they will lose subscriptions to services which offer AI as a tack on like Gemini with Googles regular cloud subscriptions.

This will continue. Companies like Apple will have deep pockets to move on the businesses that go underwater and then can restart training in a much less congested market.

All this is assuming a relatively graceful collapse but that is what's likely given how aware everyone is that the bubble must pop.

Training costs will fall. Companies like Nvidia and other shovel businesses (i.e. selling GPUs and not using them) mostly have their revenue secured with funding from the present.

What I see as confirmations of this pattern is if we stop getting ground busting frontier models and then coast for 3-5 years when competition becomes more incremental.

This is an unpopular opinion, Will OpenAI go bust? No chance. Nor will Anthropic.

[mrweasel]

It probably doesn't matter that subscriptions are profitable, when some estimates put the number of users in the free tier at 96%.

I sort of agree with you, not that it's the most subscriptions necessarily that will be the deciding factor, but the there's going to be some companies better positioned to survive when the free money stops. OpenAI has the brand, so that might help, but mostly I think they'll get absorbed into Microsoft. I don't think they can stand on their own. It doesn't seem like a particularly well managed company, so to me it makes more sense that they are simply acquired for pennies on the dollar by someone with better leadership.

[noduerme]

I'm a bit of an Apple optimist for this exact reason. I think the moat is collapsing, and Apple is best positioned to dispatch their own models in a year on their own widely sold consumer hardware, unless someone has a breakthrough which they can't replicate. Which I don't anticipate.

I'm not really sure what OpenAI's moat is. Anthropic has a chance being so widely accepted by developers, and being a bit better at developing models when it comes to code.

[password54321]

People might not want to hear this but AI is already smarter and more useful than most people ever will be. We are not even talking about by the end of the year or decade anymore.

[poisonborz]

Read and think about what you wrote. How can an ai, completing specific scoped tasks, be in any way comparable to the scale of a human life? Maybe the same thing these execs forgot.

[gizajob]

There’s running out of words and there’s coming across like a complete psychopath who has lost all perspective.