<story><title>How Does OpenAI Survive?</title><url>https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sweettea</author><text>A well reasoned article that fundamentally downplays both the pace of innovation and the exponential increase in capabilities per dollar happening over time. AI is rapidly accelerating its improvement rate, and I do believe its capabilities will continue growing exponentially.&lt;p&gt;In particular, GPT-2 to GPT-4 spans an increase from &amp;#x27;well read toddler&amp;#x27; to &amp;#x27;average high school student&amp;#x27; in just a few years, while simultaneously the computational cost of training less capable models goes down similarly.&lt;p&gt;Also worth noting: the article claims Stripe, another huge money raiser, had an obviously useful product. gdb, sometime-CTO of stripe and its fourth employee, is now president of OpenAI. And, most of all, the author doesn&amp;#x27;t remember how nonobvious Stripe&amp;#x27;s utility was in its early days, even in the tech scene: there were established ways to take people&amp;#x27;s money and it wasn&amp;#x27;t clear why Stripe had an offering worth switching to.&lt;p&gt;For an alternate take, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;situational-awareness.ai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;situational-awareness.ai&lt;/a&gt; provides a well reasoned argument for the current status of AI innovation and growth rate, and addresses all of the points here on a general (though not OpenAI specific) way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lolinder</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s too early to say for sure if LLM capabilities are on an exponential growth function or a sigmoid, but my money is on sigmoid, and my suspicion is that we&amp;#x27;re plateauing already.&lt;p&gt;GPT-4 was released 16+ months ago. In that time OpenAI made a cheaper model (which it teased extensively and the media was sure was GPT-5) and its competitors caught up but have not yet exceeded them. OpenAI&amp;#x27;s now saying that GPT-5 is in progress, but we don&amp;#x27;t know what it looks like yet and they&amp;#x27;re not making any promises.&lt;p&gt;What I&amp;#x27;m seeing right now suggests that we&amp;#x27;re in the optimization stage of the tech as it is currently architected. I expect it to get cheaper and to be used more widely, but barring another breakthrough on the same order as transformers I don&amp;#x27;t expect it to see the kind of substantial gains in abilities we&amp;#x27;ve hitherto been seeing. If I&amp;#x27;m right, OpenAI will quickly be just one of many dealers in commodity tech.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Does OpenAI Survive?</title><url>https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sweettea</author><text>A well reasoned article that fundamentally downplays both the pace of innovation and the exponential increase in capabilities per dollar happening over time. AI is rapidly accelerating its improvement rate, and I do believe its capabilities will continue growing exponentially.&lt;p&gt;In particular, GPT-2 to GPT-4 spans an increase from &amp;#x27;well read toddler&amp;#x27; to &amp;#x27;average high school student&amp;#x27; in just a few years, while simultaneously the computational cost of training less capable models goes down similarly.&lt;p&gt;Also worth noting: the article claims Stripe, another huge money raiser, had an obviously useful product. gdb, sometime-CTO of stripe and its fourth employee, is now president of OpenAI. And, most of all, the author doesn&amp;#x27;t remember how nonobvious Stripe&amp;#x27;s utility was in its early days, even in the tech scene: there were established ways to take people&amp;#x27;s money and it wasn&amp;#x27;t clear why Stripe had an offering worth switching to.&lt;p&gt;For an alternate take, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;situational-awareness.ai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;situational-awareness.ai&lt;/a&gt; provides a well reasoned argument for the current status of AI innovation and growth rate, and addresses all of the points here on a general (though not OpenAI specific) way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ashconnor</author><text>OpenAI is depending on a *breakthrough* in order to produce a product that will provide a return on investment.&lt;p&gt;This &amp;quot;breakthrough&amp;quot; is often touted as AGI or something similar to it which to me is even more risky than a nuclear fusion startup as:&lt;p&gt;1. Fusion has had some recent breakthroughs that could result in a commercially viable reactor eventually.&lt;p&gt;2. Fusion has a fundamentally sound theoretical basis unlike producing AGI (or something like it).</text></comment>