Comment by ryanSrich
7 hours ago
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.
> Consumers have mostly rejected AI.
People like to complain about things, but consumers are heavily using AI.
ChatGPT.com is now up to the 4th most visited website in the world: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users
#2 cannot be understated
Was the golden boy for a while? What shifted? I don't even remember what he did "first" to get the status. Is it maybe just a case of familiarity breeding contempt?
It is starting to become clear to more and more people that Sam is a dyed in the wool True Believer in AGI. While it's obvious in hindsight that OpenAI would never have gotten anywhere if he wasn't, seeing it so starkly is really rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.
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Well, he made mistake many billionaires do, he opened his mouth with his own thoughts, instead of just reading what PR department told him to read
All the manipulation and lying that got him fired.
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*Overstated
Cringey to watch their interviews.
Indeed. Sama seems to be incredibly delusional. OAI going bust is going to really damage his well-being, irrespective of his financial wealth. Brother really thought he was going to take over the world at one point.
Scariest part is it probably won't, and he'll be back in five year with something else.
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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.
They pay to be in the media
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
Ask Tesla about the impact of their CEOs likeability on their sales.
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.
All this drama is mostly irrelevant outside a very narrow and very online community.
The demise of OpenAI is rooted in the bad product market fit, since many people like using ChatGPT for free, but fewer are ready to pay for it. And that’s pretty much all there is to it. OpenAI bet on consumers, made a slopstagram that unsurprisingly didn’t revolutionise content, and doesn’t sell as many licenses as they would like.
Ilya took a swing at the king and missed. It would have been awkward to hang around after that debacle.
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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.
Elon is one of the most unlikable people on the planet, so I wouldn't consider him much of a bar.
Hah, you beat me to it, serves me right for writing longer comments. Have an upvote ;)
It’s kind of sad. I can’t believe I used to like him back in the iron man days. Back then I thought he was cool for the various ideas and projects he was working on. I still think many of those are great but he as a person let me down.
Now I have him muted on X.
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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.
That Dyson sphere interview should've been a wake up call for the OpenAI faithful.
I understand what GP is saying in the sense that, yes, on an objective scale, what Sam is saying is absolutely and completely nuts... but on a relative scale he's just hyping his startup. Relative to the scale he's at, it’s no worse than the average support tool startup founder claiming they will defeat Salesforce, for example.
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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.
Darío unsettles me the most, he kinda reminds me of SBF, I wouldn’t be surprised if, well they’re all bad its to stack rank them.
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There’s 4 though, where does Demis fit in the stack rank?
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Pfft. Dario has been making nonsense fear mongering that never comes true.
> 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.
> All of them suffer from thinking their money makes them somehow better.
Let's assume they think they're better than others.
What makes you think that they think it's because of their money, as opposed to, say, because of their success at growing their products and businesses to the top of their field?
That’s ok, but AI is useful in particular use cases for many people. I use it a lot and I prefer the Codex 5.2 extra high reasoning model. The AI slop and dumb shit on IG/YT is like the LCD of humans though. They’ve always been there and always will be there to be annoying af. Before AI slop we had brain rot made by humans.
I think over time it (LLM based) will become like an augmenter, not something like what they’re selling as some doomsday thing. It can help people be more efficient at their jobs by quickly learning something new or helping do some tasks.
I find it makes me a lot more productive because I can have it follow my architecture and other docs to pump out changes across 10 files that I can then review. In the old way, it would have taken me quite a while longer to just draft those 10 files (I work on a fairly complex system), and I had some crazy code gen scripts and shit I’d built over the years. So I’d say it gives me about 50% more efficiency which I think is good.
Of course, everyone’s mileage may vary. Kinda reminds me of when everyone was shitting on GUIs, or scripting languages or opinionated frameworks. Except over time those things made productivity increase and led to a lot more solutions. We can nitpick but I think the broader positive implication remains.
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