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
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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.
Investors demand growth. The problem is that Microsoft has basically won Capitalism and has no real area to grow to.
Yeah. 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.
as the dynamics stand they’re more enabler than victim, in the terminology of harm. and I’d argue that applies, because this shit is harmful
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)
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