OpenAI is blowing through money faster than it can boil lakes, is crowded by well-funded and cutting-edge competitors, and has yet to shape its AI tech into the revolutionary products implied by boss Sam Altman's ambitious prognostications. But big institutional investors are all in, pouring $6.6bn into the latest round. Ed Zitron warns of classic signs of shaky ground and delusory thinking, such as incoming "dumb money" from big banks.
This round is a farce — a group delusion, one borne of one man's uncanny ability to convince clueless idiots that he has some unique insight, despite the fact that all signs point to him knowing about as much as they do, allowing him to prop up an unsustainable, unprofitable and directionless blob of a company as a means of getting billions of dollars of equity in the company — and no, I don't care what he says to the contrary.
… the company says that it expects to make $11.6 billion in 2025 and $100 billion by 2029, a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud. For some context, Microsoft makes about $250 billion a year, Google about $300 billion a year, and Apple about $400 billion a year. To be abundantly clear, as it stands, OpenAI currently spends $2.35 to make $1.
ChatGPT is useful for generating code that solves specific problems, but broadening the scope still invites damaging assumptions. It (and all the other ones) work well at that fundamental level of the paragraph, the utility function, the object. And the productivity improvements within that context are really astonishing. What would have taken an hour now takes moments. But I can't do anything with it I could not have done without it given time. Each field has different fundamentals, but art seems to make the shared dynamics clearest: the slop churned out by prompt engineers, bros and wannabes obscures careful use by skilled users in relevant contexts. But that's not a world-changing product. It's just a subscription rentier selling convenience to professionals and corporations and creating more exclusionary pressure within their trades and markets.
