One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams.

At the same time, Deepseek/Qwen, etc. are open sourcing stuff to undercut them on the other side. It's a classic squeeze on their already fairly dubious business model.

Interestingly enough, apart from Google, I've never seen an organization take the actual proper steps (fire mid-management and PMs) to prevent the same thing from happening again. Will be interesting to see how OAI handles this.

Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time.

Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.

Genuine question: How is it possible for OpenAI to NOT successfully pre-train a model?

I understand it's very difficult, but they've already successfully done this and they have a ton of incredibly skilled and knowledgeable, well-paid and highly knowledgeable employees.

I get that there's some randomness involved but it seems like they should be able to (at a minimum) just re-run the pre-training from 2024, yes?

Maybe the process is more ad-hoc (and less reproducible?) than I'm assuming? Is the newer data causing problems for the process that worked in 2024?

Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated, and apologies again if this was asked already!

There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.

The risk is straightforward: if OpenAI falls behind or can’t generate enough revenue to support these commitments, it would struggle to honor its long-term agreements. That failure would cascade. Oracle, for example, could be left with massive liabilities and no matching revenue stream, putting pressure on its ability to service the debt it already issued.

Given the scale and systemic importance of these projects — touching energy grids, semiconductor supply chains, and national competitiveness — it’s not hard to imagine a future where government intervention becomes necessary. Even though Altman insists he won’t seek a bailout, the incentives may shift if the alternative is a multi-company failure with national-security implications.

It's easily worth the monthly cost, and I'm happy to pay - something which I didn't even consider doing a year ago. OpenAI just doesn't have the same bundle effect.

Obviously power users and companies will likely consider Anthropic. I don't know what OpenAI's actual product moat is any more outside of a well-known name.

These plus working with Jony Ive on hardware, makes it sound like they took their eyes off the ball.

Surely they know that they can't just keep scraping the internet to train models.

If I don't use a Microsoft product, I'd have to go out of my way to use an OpenAI service. But they don't have a specialized "service" (like anthropic and developers) either. Gemini is there by default with Google/Reddit. To retain their first-to-market advantage, they'd need to be the default in more places, or invest in models and services that cater to very specific audiences.

I think their best best is to partner with different entities. But they lost reddit and twitter, and FB is doing their own thing too, so who's left? linkedin? school systems (but ChromeBook has them beat there), perhaps telecoms preloading chatgpt apps into phones?

In my layperson's opinion, I think they have an access problem. Windows 11/Copilot (Github and in windows) seems to be the main access stream and people hate both, and they don't have branding there either, just back-end. There is no device you can buy, service you can get that has an OpenAI branded thing on it as a value added feature.

I'm sure they'll do ok, but i keep hearing they need to do a lot more than just 'ok'.

But at the moment Nvidia's 75-80% gross margin is slowly killing its customers like OpenAI. Eventually Nvidia will drop its margins, because non-0 profit from OpenAI is better than the 0 it'll be if OpenAI doesn't survive. Will be interesting to see if, say, 1/3 the chip cost would make OpenAI gross margin profitable... numbers bandied in this thread of $20B revenue with $115B cost imply they need 1/6 the chip cost, but I doubt those numbers are right (hard to get accurate $ numbers for a private company for the benefit of us arm-chair commenters).

I fear a Google dystopia. I hope DeepSeek or somebody else will counter-balance their power.

I am not sure who OpenAI aims to please by nerfing their own product in this way. It can't be paying customers.

Of course it never worked because if he knew what he should be doing he would be doing it already instead of hoping for spreadsheet magic to change the course.

>>There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development.

Sam Altman clearly didn't get the memo.

https://www.moomoo.com/news/post/62341840/why-has-openai-ini...

Last month, I used ChatGPT while in SJ. I needed a function that's only available to paying customers, and which had worked well from my home. ChatGPT refused to recognize me as a paid-up customer. I had correct login creds + ancillary identifying info, but no go. Over the course of about half an hour, ChatGPT told me in several different ways it wouldn't (not couldn't) attempt to verify my customer status.

I'm now a former ChatGPT customer.

Altman should know better. This sends terrible signals to employees, stakeholders and customers.

You don’t solve quality problems by scrambling teams and increasing pressure.

This reeks of terrible management. I can imagine Stanford graduates grinding it past midnight for “the mission”. If any if you is reading this: don’t do it. Altman is screwing you over. There are plenty of other places that won’t code-red your christmas season while having hundreds of billions of dollars in cash.

It is all physics from here.

•Google has data, a lot of private data actually (YT, Gmail, Workspace, Search Queries.. you name it) •Google has a lot of money •Google has top-talented AI engineers (Eying on DeepMind & Demis Hassabis staff) •Google has a huge userbase

With $20B in ARR and hundreds of billions in funding, would OpenAI be able to make its own remontada as Google did? I'm not sure, but it would be a long challenging journey.

I used to consider Gemini the worst of the bunch, it constantly refused to help me in the past, but not only has it improved, ChatGPT seems to have gone down the 'nerfing' road where it now flat out refuses to do what I ask it to do quite often.

They must be really glad to have so much competition then.

> If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.

I wonder if OpenAI will start assisting Google now?

But if the ML, if SOTA intelligence becomes basically a price war, won't that mean that Google (and OpenAI and Microsoft and any other big model) lose big? Especially Google, as the margin even Google cloud (famously a lot lower than Google's other businesses) requires to survive has got to be sizeable.

TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069048

Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108437

It's so telling that they're delaying these "festures" because the know full well people don't want them.

>be Google

>watch regulators circle like vultures

>realize antitrust heat is rising faster than stock buybacks can hide

>notice a small lab called OpenAI making exotic tech and attracting political fascination

>calculate that nothing freezes regulators like an unpredictable new frontier

>decide to treat OpenAI as an accidental firebreak

>let them sprint ahead unchecked watch lawmakers panic about hypothetical robot uprisings instead of market concentration

>antitrust hearings shift from “break up the giants” to “what is AGI and should we fear it”

>Google emerges looking ancient, harmless, almost quaint

>pressure dissipates

>execute phase two: acceleration roll out model updates in compressed cycles

>flood the web with AI-powered services

>redefine “the internet” as “whatever Google’s infrastructure indexes”

>regulators exhausted from chasing OpenAI’s shadow

>Google walks back onto the throne, not by hiding power, but by reframing it as inevitability conspiracy theorists argue whether this was 5D chess or simple opportunism

>Google search trends spike for “how did this happen”

>the answer sits in plain sight:

>attention is all you need

Meanwhile, Google consolidated their AI operations under Google Deepmind and doubled down on TPUs.

The strategy "solve AGI and then solve everything else" is an all-in gamble that somehow AGI is within reach. This is not true.

IMO: the largest value creation from AGI won’t come from building a better shopping or travel assistant. The real pot of gold is in workflow / labor automation but obviously they can’t admit that openly.

If OpenAI becomes an also-ran by the time the hardware is released, this seems like a real possibility no matter how well-designed it is.

Gemini has been as good as GPT for more than a year

OpenAI still somehow gets the edge on the initial veneer of hype, and that's running thin

Competition is all you need.

The problem is, there is a whole ecosystem of businesses operating as OpenAI API wrappers, and those are gonna get screeeeewed.

    There will be a daily call for those tasked
    with improving the chatbot, the memo said,
    and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers
    to speed up development.

It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed. Throw in a knee-jerk solution of "daily call" (sound familiar?) for those involved while they are wading knee-deep through work and you have a perfect storm of terrible working conditions. My money is Google, who in my opinion have not only caught up, but surpassed OpenAI with their latest iteration of their AI offerings.

OpenAI, imo, is absolutely going to crash and burn - it has absolutely underwhelming revenue and model performance compared to others and has made astronomical expenditure commitments. It's very possible that a government bailout partially covers those debts but the chance of the company surviving the burst when it has dug such a deep hole seems slim to none.

I am genuinely surprised that generally fiscally conservative and grounded people like Jensen are still accepting any of that crash risk.