Comment by jjcm

8 hours ago

Not only has OpenAI's market share gone down significantly in the last 6mo, Nvidia has been using its newfound liquid funds to train its own family of models[1]. An alliance with OpenAI just makes less sense today than it did 6mo ago.

[1] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/open-models-data-tools-acceler...

> Nvidia has been using its newfound liquid funds to train its own family of models

Nvidia has always had its own family of models, it's nothing new and not something you should read too much into IMHO. They use those as template other people can leverage and they are of course optimized for Nvidia hardware.

Nvidia has been training models in the Megatron family as well as many others since at least 2019 which was used as blueprint by many players. [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.08053

I think there are two things that happened

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.

  • #2 cannot be understated

  • Instead of anecdotes about “what you saw on TikTok and Reddit”, it’s really not that hard to lookup how many paid users ChatGPT has.

    Besides OpenAI was never going to recoup the billions of dollars based on advertising or $20/month subscriptions

  • Is CEO likeability a reliable predictor?

    • I think it depends how visible the CEO is to (potential) customers, in this case very visible, he is in the media all the time.

      1 reply →

    • good point.

      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

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  • You have to give credit to Sam, he’s charismatic enough to the right people to climb man made corporate structures. He was also smart enough to be at the right place at the right time to enrich himself (Silicon Valley). He seems to be pretty good at cutting deals. Unfortunately all of the above seems to be at odds with having any sort of moral core.

    • Ermmm what?

      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.

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  • I actually think Sam is “better” than say Elon or Dario because he seems like a typical SF/SV tech bro. You probably know the type (not talking about some 600k TC fang worker, I mean entrepreneurs).

    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.

    • Not extreme? Have you seen his interviews? I guess his wording and delivery are not extreme, but if you really listen to what he's saying, it's kinda nuts.

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    • He's definitely not. If Altman. Is a "typical" SF/SV tech bro then that's an indication the valley has turned full d-bag. Altman's past is gross. So, if he's the norm then I will vehemently avoid any dollars of mine going to OAI. I paid for an account for a while, but just like Musk I lose nothing over actively avoiding his Ponzi scheme of a company.

    • Altman is a consummate liar and manipulator with no moral scruples. I think this LLM business is ethically compromised from the start, but Dario is easily the least worst of the three.

      9 replies →

    • > I actually think Sam is “better” than say Elon or even Dario because he seems like a typical SF/SV tech bro.

      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.

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And the whole AI craze is becoming nothing but a commodity business where all kinds of models are popping in and out, one better this update, the other better the next update etc. In short - they're basically indistinguishable for the average layman.

Commodity businesses are price chasers. That's the only thing to compete on when product offerings are similar enough. AI valuations are not setup for this. AI Valuations are for 'winner takes all' implications. These are clearly now falling apart.

Yeah. Even if OpenAI models were the best, I still wouldn't used them, given how the Sam Altman persona is despicable (constantly hyping, lying, asking for no regulations, then asking for regulations, leaked emails where founders say they just wanna get rich without any consideration of their initial "open" claims...). I know other companies are not better, but at least they have a business model and something to lose.

  • > leaked emails where founders say they just wanna get rich without any consideration of their initial "open" claims

    Point me to these? Would like to have a look.

    • Sorry, not leaked emails, but it's the Greg Brockman's diary and leaked texts.

      I didn't find the original lawsuit documents, but there's a screenshot in this video: https://youtu.be/csybdOY_CQM?si=otx3yn4N26iZoN7L&t=182 (timestamp is 3:02 if you don't see it)

      There's more details about the behind-the-scenes and greg brockman's diary leaks in this article: https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/open-ai-lawsuit-exposed-the... Some documents are made public thanks to the Musk-OpenAI trial.

      I'll let you read a few articles about this lawsuit, but basically they said to Musk (and frankly, to everyone else) that they were committed to the non-profit model, while behind the scenes thinking about "making the billion" and turning for-profit.

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