OpenAI Is A Bad Business
OpenAI Is A Bad Business
OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after
It's incredibly frustrating to try and figure out how this grift works. The company is bleeeing money at high pressure. The more users they get, the faster they lose money. Even if you're a true believer who thinks their product is useful and will be ubiquitous in the near future, there's no way this makes sense as an investment.
It could be a greater fool scam, but if you're goddamn Softbank, Microsoft, or NVIDIA investing hundreds of millions, surely you are the biggest fool already? Who's MSFT gonna flip their share to? Scrooge McDuck? A G7 member government? God?
Or maybe they're expecting to become so ubiquitous you can't live without ChatGPT, at which point they will jack up the price (the good old MS EEE/Oracle Hustle). I suppose that would parse, but the novelty is already fading and public sentiment is at a downward slope. Even if you're a true believer, you'd have to beat the competition first. You could also hope for a magician to come along and suddenly invent chips that are an order of magnitude more efficient, but you'd still need to pay another king's ransom to have them designed, manufactured and sold to you (and absolutely not to your competitors).
How do they get away with these bonkers numbers? They're somehow going to make 20 times more revenue in the remaining year than they have until now? They're going to nearly double their earnings every year? They're gonna fucking invest seven trillion in TSMC chip fabs? These numbers are made up by a nine-year old. My burger restaurant where we use natural diamonds as grill charcoal is gonna be worth inifite plus one zillion brazillion skibidillion dollars next year. Please invest in it.
27Investors demand growth. The problem is that Microsoft has basically won Capitalism and has no real area to grow to.
10Yeah. Microsoft is actually kind of the victim here, since they're investing both financially and materially in LLM hardware (and giving Altman and friends a massive discount on Azure resources) when the demand is really not materializing. Facebook went all-in in the metaverse and was eventually chastened for it as much as an organization that size ever can be. Microsoft is doing the same with OpenAI, though with far more capital expended.
3
Look, we just need to get enough money to launch von neumann probes to the moon, disassemble it and build a shell of computronium around the earth, and then AI will be able to do my job. Trust me bro, just one moon (it won't even get mad)
9This post is endorsed by Unicron
3Investors demand growth. The problem is that Microsoft has basically won Capitalism and has no real area to grow to.
2
That same tired script of "You can't say AI is useless, I use it as a $productivityApp, so it's clearly not worth nothing, which invalidates all your claims." shows up in Zitron's comment box, it's like clockwork.
I dunno man, maybe it's because the ability to generate templates and spellcheck is a free feature in most IDEs and would be a rounding error of a rounding error when we're talking about billion dollar investments?
23Oh my god, this particular point has been so frustrating to me. People talking about how much time it saves them with boilerplate code: If it's that boilerplate make yourself a fucking template! Learn your IDE's damn features, because most have code snippet features now where you can save them right in the damn IDE.
There's vanishly little that LLMs are actually being used for that can't be done far cheaper (computatiomally and cost-wise) with existing tools.
15There’s vanishly little that LLMs are actually being used for that can’t be done far cheaper (computatiomally and cost-wise) with existing tools.
Reminds me of the most recent Adam Conover podcast. He had as guests two computer scientists who were purportedly critical of AI, and one of them still shat out something to the effect of:
It does have a use case where something takes longer to produce than it does to verify. For example, a website ...
5
Yeah I’m sure it’s helpful sometimes. The issue is it useful enough to enough people to justify burning billions of dollars on training?
Ed isn’t criticizing GenAI, he’s criticizing OpenAi’s business model. Big difference.
8
This landed on HN like a dead fish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41722985
Another submission with what looks like a lot more positive spin got more reaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726603
Edit choice comment from the latter
If you assume that the costs of inference would continue to decrease while they would be able to get billion people hooked on 42 per dollar plan..
That’s $0.5 trillion revenue rate
A billion people. Paying the equivalent of a premium streaming service. For something that can't even generate pr0n.
Color me skeptical.
20Thank you Ed for validating my off-the-cuff comment I made on the train this morning:
https://lobste.rs/s/92qcme/insatiable_hunger_open_ai#c_vgiyrk
12ClosedAI
10Hand me the rubber hose, I'm bout to mainline this ed
9(I've made a Kendrick joke before, and fuck it I'm gonna make it again)
7tangent but something I don't really understand is why openai doesn't sell ads against their chats with non-paying users. I can't recall even seeing it brought up as an option. why is that?
6