I think this is a disconnect between people who think that large companies are static entities with established products vs. large companies that still operate like a startup and are trying to grow. When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you don't know what will work! You try different things, you [launch over and over again](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-a...)...all in hopes of something that works, sticks, and starts to grow.

In every example here, I see OpenAI trying something new, hoping it will grow, and shutting it down after it doesn't. Sora is the pre-eminent example of this. They make news, but you don't talk about the things they launch that successfully grow!

OpenAI isn't shutting down Codex or ChatGPT, because those were launches that they did that actually worked! When you go look at the tweets and communication from OpenAI employees when ChatGPT launched, nobody was sure that it would work. But it did. And if they hadn't launched, we would have never known how valuable it was.

All that is to say...you don't know what will work until you launch. Most things fail, and it's correct to shut them down. But focusing on the products that haven't worked instead of the products that have gets you more clicks, but actually depresses innovation by making future launches less likely.

Why is this on the list? Like... what? How about including GPT 3.5 and GPT 2 here too?

They have clearly been lacking focus and now finally they seem to be working towards a narrower direction, which is usually highly valued by investors.

This article doesn't explore the depth of the decisions and only regurgitate what you may find your neighbor complaining about on X but with a better stylesheet.

The AI industry increasingly looks in scramble mode to keep the hype going as those storm clouds of financial and business reality get darker and darker on the horizon.

He seems to be trying to take almost a "venture studio" approach by throwing shit at the wall, but the problem with these things is always that the "internal startups" are "founded" by people who don't have enough incentive or control over their product to perform as well as an actual startup, and are distracted by internal politics. And frankly, it may also be that the really good founders will just do their own startup vs working on a quasi-startup inside a large org so there's some selection bias as well.

WTF is that supposed to mean? I'm sorry, maybe I'm being dense. I can't figure out what "look around corners" is supposed to mean. "Think outside the box," I guess? Why "look around corners?"

I mean, maybe I do get it. Altman has a weird face that looks like you can't predict where his eyes are based on where his head is. "Shifty," one might say. But I doubt that's what Iger meant.

It's dumb. It's dumb corporate speak. I'm so sick of this kind of stuff getting a pass. We used to bully people over using the word "synergy." Let's make america anti-corporate-weasel again.

I mean, even Andresson-Horowitz was taking NFT's seriously as though they weren't a scam only a few years ago (https://a16z.com/the-nft-starter-pack-tools-for-anyone-to-an...).

These people are also looking (and funding) quantum computing companies as though quantum computing is right around the corner after AGI.

They need to cool their jets. AI is certainly a worthwhile and super important development, but it's still possible to go overboard with it.

“Yes” I said, slightly impressed. It then asked me to clarify the subheadings, which were correct.

“Cool, this seems neat” I mused.

It generated the PowerPoint. There was not a single word on it from the docx, the header slide was devoid of words, and the 6 following content sliders were identical, and empty of words.

I suppose it’s cool that it used the correct template.

I did the work manually in 10 minutes after waiting around and responding to an LLM for 15.

What a fucking joke. “AI” is a term that we really need to stop fucking using.

Now imagine an entire economy working like that. Like say, LLM's are good enough to run entire companies but you don't get to run a company because you are good at it. LLM's can perfectly manage employee schedules but the real job is more like marriage counseling or group therapy. Somewhere along the road we forgot which jobs make the economy go. They are probably the ones with the lowest salaries as those lack the effort of conjuring the job into existence.

Humanity needs obvious things cloths, food, housing, transportation etc but that isn't where the money is. The people cooking the books have the money and they are looking for something like a book cooking book. The market for openAI will be in lying convincingly for the benefit of the investor. Reality must be auctioned off like domain names or search engine placements. Altman is really the perfect guy for the job no one wants. ha-ha

Alternatively we could humble ourselves, ask the Chinese how reality works and attempt to steal their fu. It's just a thought.