Comment by TheOtherHobbes
2 hours ago
It's the nature of bubbles to overpromise and underdeliver.
So - do Altman and Andreesen really believe that, or is it just a marketing and investment pitch?
A reminder that OpenAI has its own explicit definition of AGI: "Highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."
The MS/OAI agreement quantifies that as "profits of $100bn/yr."
This seems rather stupid to me. If you can get multiple AGIs all generating profits of $100bn a year - roughly half an Apple, or two thirds of a Meta - you no longer have anything recognisable as a pre-AI economy, because most of the white collar population is out of work and no longer earning anything. And most of the blue collar population that depends on white collar earnings is in the same boat.
So you have to ask "Profits from doing what, and selling to whom?"
The Altman pitch seems to be "Promise it first, collect investor cash, and worry about the rest later."
> do Altman and Andreesen really believe that, or is it just a marketing and investment pitch?
As for Andreessen, I don't think he even cares. As the author writes:
"for the venture capitalists that have driven so much of field, scaling, even if it fails, has been a great run: it’s been a way to take their 2% management fee investing someone else’s money on plausible-ish sounding bets that were truly massive, which makes them rich no matter how things turn out"
VCs win every time. Even if it's a bubble and it bursts, they still win. In fact, they are the only party that wins.
Heck, the bigger the bubble, the more money is poured into it, and the bigger the commissions. So VCs have an interest in pumping it up.