I think that MIT study of 95% of internal AI projects failing has scared off a lot of corporations from risking time in it. I think they also see they are hitting a limit of profitable intelligence from their services. (with the growth in inelegance the past 6–8 months being more realistic, not the unbelievable like in the past few years)

I think everyone is starting to see this as a middle man problem to solve, look at ERP systems for instance when they popped up it had some growing pains as an industry. (or even early windows/microsoft 'developers, developers, developers' target audience)

I OpenAI see it will take a lot of third party devs to take what OpenAI has and run with it. So they want to build a good developer and start up network to make sure that there are a good, solid ecosystem of options corporations and people can use AI wise.

I think it’s more like Open AI has the name to throw around and a lot of credibility but not products that are profitable. They are burning cash and need to show a curve that they can reach profitability. Getting 15 people with 15 ideas they can throw their weight behind is worth a lot

Without putting my weight behind them, here's some counterarguments:

- OpenAI needs talent, and it's generally hard to find. Money will buy you smart PhDs who want to be on the conveyer belt, but not people who want to be a centre of a project of their own. This at least puts them in the orbit of OpenAI - some will fly away, some will set up something to be aquihired, some will just give up and try to join OpenAI anyway

- the amount of cash they will put into this is likely minuscule compared to their mammoth raises. It doesn't fundamentally change their funding needs

- OpenAI's biggest danger is that someone out there finds a better way to do AI. Right now they have a moat made of cash - to replicate them, you generally need a lot of hardware and cash for the electricity bill. Remember the blind panic when DeepSeek came out? So, anything they can do to stop that sprouting elsewhere is worth the money. Sprouting within OpenAI would be a nice-to-have.

I don't think it's about money, they don't invest anything. They gather data about "technical talent" working on AI related ideas. They will connect with 15 of these people to see if they can build it together.

It's possible that a single senior employee just wanted to do this and it doesn't cost that much and their manager was like "sure"

Softbank or Microsoft can’t be happy or sad. CEOs only care about the share price going up while they’re holding the wheel. If Sam wants to start the idea incubator, why would they want to shut it down?

> I can't imagine Softbank or Microsoft is happy about their money being funneled into something like this

Imagining one negative spin doesn’t an imagination make. Imagine harder.

OpenAI definitely doesn’t have more money than it can invest. They burn cash like crazy that’s why they keep raising money every 6 months.

Sama liked YC some much that he wanted a mini-YC in OpenAI, maybe.

> OpenAI has more money than it can invest productively

I don't think there is any money given, except travel costs for first and last week.

I mean, how much money are they throwing at this? I doubt it approaches anything close to a percent of the cash they have on hand.

People remember things and consistently behaving like an asshole gets you treated like an asshole.

OpenAI had a lot of goodwill and the leadership set fire to it in exchange for money. That's how we got to this state of affairs.

> Why is there such an anti-OpenAI bias on a forum run by YCombinator, basically the pseudo-parent of OpenAI?

Isnt that a good thing? The comments here are not sponsored, nor endorsed by YC.

When dealing with organizations that hold a disproportionate amount of power over your life, it's essential to view them in a somewhat cynical light.

This is true for governments, corporations, unions, and even non-profits. Large organizations, even well-intentioned ones, are "slow AI"[1]. They don't care about you as an individual, and if you don't treat everything they do and say with a healthy amount of skepticism and mistrust, they will trample all over you.

It's not that being openly hostile towards OpenAI on a message board will change their behavior. Only Slow AI can defeat other Slow AI. But it's our collective duty to at least voice our disapproval when a company behaves unethically or builds problematic technology.

I personally enjoy using LLMs. I'm a pretty heavy user of both ChatGPT and Claude, especially for augmenting web search and writing code. But I also believe building these tools was an act of enclosure of the commons at an unprecedented scale, for which LLM vendors must be punished. I believe LLMs are a risk to people who are not properly trained in how to make the best use of them.

It's possible to hold both these ideas in your head at the same time: LLMs are useful, but the organizations building them must be reined in before they cause irreparable damage to society.

[1]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

When you call yourself "Open"AI and then turn around and backstab the entire open community, its pretty hard to recover from that.

Why do you assume that a forum run by X needs to or should support X? And why is it unwise - from what metrics do you measure wisdom?

My takeaway is actually the opposite, major props to YC for allowing this free speech unfettered - I cant think of any other organization or country on the planet where such a free setup exists

I don't want to be glib - but perhaps it is because our "context window lengths" extend back a bit further than yours?

Big tech (not just AI companies) have been viewed with some degree of suspicion ever since Google's mantra of "Don't be evil" became a meme over a decade ago.

Regardless of where you stand on the concept of copyright law, it is an indisputable fact that in order for these companies to get to where they are today - they deliberately HOOVERED up terabytes of copyrighted materials without the consent or even knowledge of the original authors.

These guys are pursuing what they believe to be the biggest prize ever in the history of capitalism. Given that, viewing their decisions as a cynic, by default, seems like a rational place to start.

because of the repeated rugpulling?

I’ll bite, but not in the way you’re expecting. I’ll turn the question back on you and ask why you think they need defending?

Their messaging is just more drivel in a long line of corporate drivel, puffing themselves up to their investors, because that’s who their customers are first and foremost.

I’d do some self reflection and ask yourself why you need to carry water for them.

I would call it skepticism, not cynicism. And there is a long list of reasons that big tech and big AI companies are met with skepticism when they trot out nice sounding ideas that require everyone to just trust in their sincerity despite prior evidence.

> Why is there such an anti-OpenAI bias on a forum run by YCombinator, basically the pseudo-parent of OpenAI?

Because our views are our own and not reflective of the feelings of the company that hosts the forum?

Because at some point, HN builders mostly left the site and it’s just become /. 3.0.

People here are directly in the line of fire for their jobs. It’s not surprising.

This. I’ve been on HN for a while. I am barely hanging on to this community. It is near constant negativity and the questioning of every potential motive.

Skepticism is healthy. Cynicism is exhausting.

Thank you for posting this.

Sadly, yes, a lot of people want to be entrepreneurs for prestige/wealth. In their imagination they skip ahead to a fantastical ending: being rich and respected.

I find this disturbing. How can someone be useful to others without an idea of what that even means? How can one provide a novel offering without even caring about it? It's an expression of missing craft and bad taste. These aspirations are reactive, not generated by something beautiful (like kindness, or optimism).

Fortunately it is not hopeless; aspiring entrepreneurs can find deeper motivation if they look for it.

(I like to give the following advice: it is easier to first be useful to others and become rich than it is to be rich and then become useful to others. This almost certainly requires sufficient empathy and care to have a hypothesis and be "post-idea".)

YC tried this at some point. Just hire white guys that seem "bright" on paper but can't come up with any idea whatsoever, see where it goes.

Spoiler: it didn't go anywhere. The story on HN is still here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700712

but the link is 404

https://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html

Drop the "Ideas." Just "Guy." It's cleaner.

you can buy ideas the same way you can buy expensive cars and bags. Centuries ago some rich europeans used to do that. Then we discovered 'merit'.

I cannot imagine not having far more ideas than I could possibly ever do. Today I was describing one to my partner and she told me the only reason I shouldn't do it is that I have too many other things to do.

The thing that makes me continually have ideas is the same thing that makes me not want to dedicate my life to implementing just one of them. It would be like picking a favourite child if I were producing offspring like a queen bee.

I think there is value in the effort to develop something and frequently implementing something well is worth as much and sometimes much more than just a simple proof of concept. Someone has to build the things, It should be the people who are good at that and feel rewarded by a job done well more than a job done differently.

I do think that there isn't enough perspective of the lives that other people lead that can cause odd side-effects. Some people keep their ideas secret, or overvalue the idea because it was the one they had. This is a perspective I find hard to relate to. Most of the creative people I know are much happier someone knowing about their creations. They're like grains of sand, each one with their own details and can be evaluated many different ways. A lot of intellectual property feels like watching a man jealously protecting their grain of sand while standing on a beach.

I believe that is why the intent of things like copyright is to not protect ideas themselves. You cannot copyright an idea, and as an ideas person (a rather horrid term) that feels appropriate. The thing that you have built around the idea is the valuable thing you have contributed to the world. I think that is why items that are copyrightable are referred to as work. The value you bring comes from the from the work you did, not the idea you had, ideas just come to you (often at inconvenient times).

Mass media causes a bit of an aberration because of this. The thing that makes someone wealthy from a popular work is not proportional to the work done to produce it or even the quality of the work. Works that can be easily reproduced and distributed receive a disproportionate reward to their quality. A median quality work in many fields can receive next to no reward. The most popular works receive a masssive reward. The mechanism allowing a control of supply to provide reward for work ends up influencing a supply demand curve that gives massive rewards to a very few and very little to the majority. There is still an element of merit to the successes, the popular things are popular for a reason, some of those things really are the best. The question is would they have still been the best if everyone who worked to create stuff were rewarded more linearly to quality, would that support enough development of ability and opportunity that the pool from which the best can be selected becomes much larger.

[this might have gone off topic, but obviously my brain has things that have to come out]

Yeah, my thoughts where along the same line. Seems like they want to be another Ycombinator but more focused on AI. (Although TBF, I guess AI would also get the most traction at Ycombinator these days, given the hype wave).

Did we ever find out why it is he doesn’t work there anymore?

I randomly saw him being announced as a big deal here on this forum years ago and I remember thinking what has this guy done to deserve this.

Indeed.

Exactly what I read between the lines on this.

In 10 years, people will apply for jobs for their children before conception, and wisely not have kids if they can’t line one up (at least as a backup.)

Right, this corporate linkedin-lingo is getting worse by the day.

Sell your first born to Scam Altman now!

"Pre-idea stage" support is wild to me

Feels like the next logical move to me: they need to build and grow the demand for their product and API.

What better than companies whose central purpose is putting their API to use creatively? Rather than just waiting and hoping every F500 can implement AI improvements that aren't cut during budget crunches.

This feels like a program to see what sticks.

Isn't that how we got (and eventually lost) most Google products?

I ask questions like that in my head all the time. My metric is once their AI is smart enough to make their website not throw up an error half the time, I'll have to more deeply consider any AGI claims

Same

Same issue

Just, Devil's Advocate..

but what, exactly, makes you believe this internship program is not an idea generated by the big bag of words?

Talented individual(s) who want to do a startup.

Yeah, clicking "Submit" doesn't do anything obvious, aside from post some arcane errors to the JavaScript Console.

Do a hard refresh while console is open; that'd fix it!

Move over "idea guys", it's the era of the "guy who hypothetically might have an idea at some point".

I think pre-idea people should just go do a PhD.

I think I had ideas when I started. Naïve ideas, but still ideas, but I think having no idea yet is fine.

I caught that too. What's a "pre-idea" individual? Someone who... wants the vague _idea_ of a company?

I mean, I get it.

I'm highly capable of building some great things, but at my dayjob I'm filled to brim with things to do and a non-ending list of tasks in front of me.

I've built cool stuff before, and if given a little push and some support could probably come up with something useful - and I can implement much of it myself.

Put me in the room with cool people, throw out some conversation starters, shake it up and I'll come up with something.

South Park Commons -1 to 0 program seems conceptually similar

The country selection menu seems to include countries from around the world. It sounds like only the first and last weeks are actually on-site, the rest in async/remote.

> act more like a platform

As of 19 hours into the post, this is the only comment that explains what's actually behind this sort of program.

Precursor thinking from Altman (mentions YC): https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-openai-ceo-sa...

This is how it begins. You make sure you're under the hood of everything. Everyone is "building on" you. You see all the action.

While this can be how it ends: https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/19/twitter-officially-bans-th...

But not always. For an example that ended differently, Amazon opened to third party sellers, on the side, earlier than people might remember, 1999: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazoncom-in-a-bazaar-move/

And how that went: https://theconversation.com/amazon-is-no-longer-a-retail-sit...

This is how you put Multivac to work, and profit.

It's clearly a talent grab. Where talent = creativity.

Most will submit the app with a dime a dozen ideas. (Or, at internet scale, a dime a few hundred thousand I guess?) No need to even consider those guys.

But it will be a pyramid. There will likely be 20-30 submissions that are at once, truly novel, and "why didn't I think of that!"-type ideas.

Finally, a handful of the submissions will be groundbreaking.

Et voilá. Right there you've identified the guys and gals thinking outside the LLM box about LLMs. Or even AI in general.

If capitalists can't solve problems, who do you suggest can?