> Best case scenario: Target or Walmart. But there is a reason that OpenAI announced deals with Etsy and Shopify rather than those.

I'm confused at that statement. Walmart and Target are exactly who OpenAI announced deals with recently:

https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2025/10/14/walmart-partne...

https://openai.com/index/target-partnership/

> Amazon will fight for its life to stop this.

Why? Amazon advertises heavily on Google search, why wouldn't they do the same with OAI?

I'm not sure. Amazon isn't usually hugely price competitive nor does it have stuff I can't find elsewhere.

What it does have is very high convenience (I'm signed in already, and I know the checkout process by muscle memory). To be fair it also has excellent customer support, but I'm not sure I would go out of my way just for that (I return a handful of purchases a year out of 100+).

These go away with 'agentic commerce', at least in theory, because the agent/MCP/API does this for the user.

The other advantage it has is excellent logistics, but that's more of a benefit for Amazon than the user IMO. Lots of small ecommerce sites can have 'excellent' logistics, because they are much smaller. The only unique thing Amazon has in the UK at least is same day delivery, but I believe they lose a fortune on that and really try and push you away from it. This may vary where you are but in general next day delivery works great in the UK from most sites (DPD/RM Tracked 24). Gets a bit hairy with 'economy' delivery from Evri or Yodel tho.

> But Amazon will fight for its life to stop this

have you seen Amazon's "Rufus"? It's hilariously useless.

What do you see the problems that prevented Amazon as being?

I don't know much about this, but I'd have thought it was the lack of display or ability to critique the choices Alexa makes. But ChatGPT doesn't have that problem because you can see and "discuss" the buying decisions.

Yes but this is incredibly competitive and undifferentiated.

It's a huge market but who will it be a profitable business for?

Likely a company or multiple who own some sort of platform that people are already on, so not OpenAI.

What they have right now is the strong ChatGPT brand and that does mean a lot. But how long will it last?

They're not the technology leader anymore, and that spells a lot of trouble.

They are at a stage where they need to dominate the market and then leverage the data that gives them, plus the brand, plus the tech advantage to establish a durable near monopoly, but it looks like it's not working.

It's a bit as if in 1999 3 equally strong Google competitors had popped up, with some pulling ahead.

I use it for gift suggestions. So they could easily add affiliate links on the page.

Same as any other ad supported services- the service is useful or entertaining.

Favored placement is never going to work but I would use Alexa for repeat purchases: “hey Alexa I bought some Crocs shoes a year ago. Can you reorder it?”.

Or purchases where I know exactly what I want but don’t want to search and add to cart manually: “buy a new 3 foot USB-C braided cable from Anker”.

Eh I definitely agree this archetype is real but I disagree that it’s the one that constitutes the average consumer. My dad is a carpenter and my mom is a nurse. My wife is a hairstylist. None are particularly tech savvy. All three use ChatGPT quite a bit. Stuff they would previously google. How do I make an apple pie? Should I see a doctor? Stuff like that.

As another commenter stated, ChatGPT has over 700 million WAU. There are only 4.4 million SWEs in the US. I think it’s caught on

But they have 700million WAUs?

>If OpenAI hits jackpot with a "simple" product, it could be easily replicated by a bigger company in the way Meta quickly copied Stories from Snapchat or TikTok to make Reels. It's already happened with Chat; the LLM is hard to compete against but the actual product, a web/app chat interface, was quickly copied by other companies with LLMs.

IG reels never became as popular as Tiktok and did basically nothing nothing to peel users away from Tiktok. For a long time, it was a meme that IG reels were just copy pasted tiktok content. Similarly, Meta's LLMs are used so little they honestly don't even register, despite being stuffed into everything they own, apps with billions and billions of users. Gemini is doing well but it's still a very very distant 2nd, despite being automatically downloaded and nudged in android phones, a platform with billions of users. Microsoft is by far the biggest player in consumer laptops, with edge and bing being the default options. So why can't they come even close to chrome and google ?

Time and time again, we've been shown. You can copy all you want, you can even shove it into the faces of your billions of users and find use for it. Doesn't mean you'll beat the market leader. You'll rarely beat market leaders just by copying them.

ChatGPT is the 5th most visited site on the planet. No other Consumer LLM service is remotely close, regardless of how many billions of users the entrenched players are shoving their copies into.

> OpenAI's AI service helps discover drug candidates

This has never been the difficult/expensive part of drug development.

Do Oracle, SAP or Walmart invest in their own models or they build integrations? There are lots of companies which don’t have other options but to work with 3rd party LLM vendors. OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral are better positioned for this than others.

https://openai.com/charter/

> OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

Note that it doesn't say: "Our mission is to maximize shareholder value, and we develop AI systems to do that".

The opening lines of their mission statement is direct about this:

"OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."

and

"We are building safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome."

https://openai.com/about/

I don't know what the moneyed insiders think OpenAI is about, but Sam Altman's public facing thoughts (which I consider to be marketing) are definitely oriented toward making it look like they are all-in on AGI:

See:

(1) https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity (June, 2025) - "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be."

- " It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year."

(2) https://blog.samaltman.com/three-observations (Feb, 2025) - "Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity."

- "In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today."

(3) https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections (Jan, 2025) - "We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible, and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history"

- "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it."

(4) https://ia.samaltman.com/ (Sep, 2024) - "This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there."

(5) https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge (Dec, 2017) - "A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075."

(I omitted about as many essays. The hype is strong in this one.)

The AWS moat is a web of bespoke product lock-in and exorbitant egress fees. Switching cloud providers can be a huge hassle if you didn't architect your whole system to be as vendor-agnostic as possible.

If OpenAI eliminated their free tier today, how many customers would actually stick around instead is going to Google's free AI? It's way easier to swap out a model. I use multiple models every day until the free frontier tokens run out, then I switch.

That said, idk why Claude seems to be the only one that does decent agents, but that's not exactly a moat; it's just product superiority. Google and OAI offer the same exact product (albeit at a slightly lower level of quality) and switching is effortless.

Selling tokens at a massive loss, burning billions a quarter isn't the win you think it is. They don't have a moat bc they literally just lost the lead, you only can have a moat when you are the dominant market leader which they never were in the first place.

I think you're measuring the moat of developing the first LLMs but the moat to care about is what it'll take to clone the final profit generating product. Sometimes the OG tech leader is also the long term winner, many times they are not. Until you know what the actual giant profit generator is (e.g. for Google it was ads) then it's not really possible to say how much of a moat will be kept around it. Right now, the giant profit generator is not seeming to be the number of tokens generated itself - that is really coming at a massive loss.

I mean, on your Cloud point I think AWS' moat might arguably be a set of deep integrations between services, and friendly API's that allow developers to quickly integrate and iterate.

If AWS' was still just EC2, and S3 then I would argue they had very little moat indeed.

Now, when it comes to Generative AI models, we will need to see where the dust settles. But open-weight alternatives have shown that you can get a decent level of performance on consumer grade hardware.

Training AI is absolutely a task that needs deep pockets, and heavy scale. If we settle into a world where improvements are iterative, the tooling is largely interoperable... Then OpenAI are going to have to start finding ways of making money that are not providing API access to a model. They will have to build a moat. And that moat may well be a deep set of integrations, and an ecosystem that makes moving away hard, as it arguably is with the cloud.

"Needs cash" is not a moat.

What's more -- how long can they keep the lid on AGI? If anyone actually cracks it... surely competitors are only a couple months behind. At least that seems to be the case with every new model thus far.

Yes, as is implied by the word "improvements"

Why would AGI not be possible?

It might be hard, it might be difficult, but it is definitely possible. Us humans are the evidence for that.

yeah but your argument is true for every llm provider. so i don't see how it's a moat since everyone who can raise money to offer an llm can do the same thing. and google and microsoft doesn't need to find llm revenue it can always offer it at a loss if it chooses unless it's other revenue streams suddenly evaporate. and tbh i kind of doubt personalization is as deep of a moat as you think it is.

There's no worship here on my part (in fact I got out of the AI space because was increasingly less about tech/solving problems, and more about pure hype), but my experience in this industry has been that the most dystopian path tends to be the most likely. I would prefer if Google search, Reddit and YouTube were closer to what they were 15 years ago, but I do recognize how they got here.

I mean, look at all this "alignment" research. I think the people working in this space sincerely believe they are protecting humanity of a "misaligned" AGI, but I also strongly believe the people paying for this research want to figure out how to make sure we can keep LLMs aligned with the interests of advertisers.

Meta put so much money into the Metaverse because they were looking for the next space that would be like the iPhone ecosystem: one of total control (but ideally better). Already people are using LLMs for more and more mundane tasks, I can easily imagine a world where an LLM is the interface for interacting online world rather than a web browser (isn't that what we want with all these "agents"?) People already have AI lovers, have AI telling them that they are gods, having people connecting with them on a deeper level than they should. You believe Sam Altman doesn't realize the potential for exploitation here is unbounded?

What AI represents is where a single company control every piece of information fed to you and has also established deep trust with you. All the benefits of running a social media company (unlimited free content creation, social trust) with none of the draw backs (having to manage and pay content creators).

I work on rec systems.

The ideal here will be a multi tiered approach where the LLM first identifies that a book should be recommended, a traditional recommendation system chooses the best book for the user (from a bank of books that are part of an ads campaign), and then finally the LLM weaving that into the final response by prompt suggestion. All of this is individually well tested for efficacy within the social media industry.

I'll probably get comments calling this dystopian but I'm just addressing the claim that LLMs don't do good recommendations right now, which is not fundamental to the chatbot system.

At least the description is not at all about building an adtech platform inside OpenAI, it's about optimizing their marketing spend (which being a big brand, makes sense).

There are a bunch of people from FB at OpenAI, so they could staff an adtech team internally I think, but I also think they might not be looking at ads yet, with having "higher" ambitions (at least not the typical ads machine ala FB/Google). Also if they really needed to monetize, I bet they could wire up Meta ads platform to buy on ChatGPT, saving themselves a decade of building a solid buying platform for marketers.

Actually yes (I did mean to check again but I hadn't seen evidence of this before).

I do think that this seems odd, looks like they're hiring an IC to build some of this stuff, which seems odd as I would have expected them to be hiring multiple teams.

That being said, the earliest they could start making decent money from this is 2028, and if we don't see them hire a real sales team by next March then it's more likely to be 2030 or so.

That's a marketing role, not a product role.

no. this role is for running ads campaigns at scale (on google, meta, etc) to grow openai users. its at a large enough scale it's called "platform" but it would be internal use only.

> Your role will include projects such as developing campaign management tools, integrating with major ad platforms, building real-time attribution and reporting pipelines, and enabling experimentation frameworks to optimize our objectives.

I have indeed being paying attention, thanks. One executive does not an ads product make, though.

I think that ads are definitely a plausible way to make money, but it's legally required that they be clearly marked as such, and inline ads in the responses are at least 1-2 versions away.

The other option is either top ads or bottom ads. It's not clear to me if this will actually work (the precedents in messaging apps are not encouraging) but LLM chat boxes may be perceived differently.

And just because you have a good ad product doesn't mean you'll get loads of budget. You also need targeting options, brand safety, attribution and a massive sales team. It's a lot of work and I still maintain it will take till 2030 at least.

Advertising is in many market like a tax or tariff - something all businesses needs to pay. Think of selling consumer goods online - you need ads on social media to bring in customers. Spending 10% on ads as COGS is a no brainer. 20% too. Maybe it could go as high as 50% - if the companies do not really have an alternative, and all the competitors ard doing it too? They are just going to pass the bill to the consumer anyway...

It might take Microsoft's Bing share, but Google and Meta pioneered the application of slot machine variable-reward mechanics to Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, so it would take a lot more than competing on demand to challenge them.

I'm traveling like this all the time already, I don't understand why it's hard for people to understand that ad placement is actually easier for chat than search

How to speedrun massive penalties and disgorgement from FTC.

I guess we'll just put that in the "Cost of Goods Sold" bucket.

Let's put an analogy to Google ads - the ads that appear at search results do not make up even 5% of their ad revenue. Even smaller for Meta. They earn their big ad revenues from their network, not from their main apps.

bribe the artificial idiot to con the user, brilliant !

That seems a bit risky for when the car isn't waiting for you at the terminal.

At least with an ad it's obvious a separate company is involved. If you do all the payment through OpenAI it seems to leave them open to liability.

I expect all hosted model providers will serve ads (regular, marked advertisements, no need for them to pretend not to, people don't care) once the first provider takes the lid off on the whole thing and it proves to be making money. There's no point in differentiating as the one hosted model with no ads because it only attracts a few people, the same way existing Google search and YouTube alternatives that respect the user are niche. Only offline, self hosted models will be ad free (in my estimation).

Assuming you know it's an ad. Ads in answers will generate a ton of revenue and you'll never know if that Hilton really is the best hotel or if they just paid the most.

The OpenAI pitch for “publishing partnerships” (basically buying bias and placement) leaked last year.

They're all already trained on ads, and it would be silly to think advertisers aren't going to optimize for this.

Do you think it would show ads, or just prioritize content based on who has paid for ad placement?

So I don't necessarily disagree with your suggestions, but that is just not a $1T company you're describing. That's basically a X/Twitter size company, and most agree that $44B was overpaying.

It's not that OpenAI hasn't created something impressive, it just came at to high a price. We're talking space program money, but without all the neat technologies that came along as a result. OpenAI more or less develop ONE technology, no related product or technologies are spun out of the program. To top it all off, the thing they built, apparently not that hard to replicate.

Well, for one, the model doesn't take into account various factors, assumes a fixed cost per token, and doesn't allow for the people in charge of buying and selling the compute to make decisions that make financial sense. Some of OpenAI research commitments and compute is going toward research, with no contracted need for profit or even revenue.

If you account for the current trajectory of model capabilities, bare-minimum competence and good faith on behalf of OpenAI and cloud compute providers, then it's nowhere near a money pit or shenanigan, it's typical VC medium to high risk investment plays.

At some point they'll pull back the free stuff and the compute they're burning to attract and retain free users, they'll also dial in costs and tweak their profit per token figure. A whole lot of money is being spent right now as marketing by providing free or subsidized access to ChatGPT.

If they wanted to maximize exposure, then dial in costs, they could be profitable with no funding shortfalls by 2030 if they pivot, dial back available free access, aggressively promote paid tiers and product integrations.

This doesn't even take into account the shopping assistant/adtech deals, just ongoing research trajectories, assumed improved efficiencies, and some pegged performance level presumed to be "good enough" at the baseline.

They're in maximum overdrive expansion mode, staying relatively nimble, and they've got the overall lead in AI, for now. I don't much care for Sam Altman on a personal level, but he is a very savvy and ruthless player of the VC game, with some of the best ever players of those games as his mentors and allies. I have a default presumption of competence and skillful maneuvering when it comes to OpenAI.

When an article like this FT piece comes out and makes assumptions of negligence and incompetence and projects the current state of affairs out 5 years in order to paint a negative picture, then I have to take FT and their biases and motivations into account.

The FT article is painting a worst case scenario based on the premise "what if everyone involved behaved like irresponsible morons and didn't do anything well or correctly!" Turns out, things would go very badly in that case.

ChatGPT was released less than 3 years ago. I think predicting what's going to happen in even 1 year is way beyond the capabilities of FT prognosticators, let alone 5 years. We're not in a regime where Bryce Elder, finance and markets journalist, is capable or qualified to make predictions that will be sensible over any significant period of time. Even the CEOs of the big labs aren't in a position to say where we'll be in 5 years. I'd start getting really skeptical when people start going past 2 years, across the board, for almost anything at this point.

Things are going to get weird, and the rate at which things get weird will increase even faster than our ability to notice the weirdness.

FT's advertising revenue is under half of their total revenue

You’re betting on OpenAI a company that has literally never sold an online ad against the two kings of online advertising…cool.

> OpenAI has branding power

With consumers right now? Sure, but so does WhatsApp and IG, both Meta properties. Meta and Google also WAY better brand power with advertisers. So there's that.

> I can easily see them with $1 trillion in valuation and raise the a record amount of money in an IPO.

They have agreements of roughly in $1.5T infra spend (and that doesn't include their own S&M and R&D spend) for the next 5 years. They have to have a combined amount of cashflow to cover that $1.5T (mix of income, debt financing, and stock financing) + all their other spending. The CFO admitted that they may need to bail out data centers to cover this to stay solvent in the long run.

> Y Combinator literally teaches their companies that they can beat incumbents using focus and speed.

YC is literally not God when it comes to advice, so this point is moot. Meta and Google didn't come out of YC and yet still beat incumbents.

As devil's advocate, the innovator's dilemma is said to be the cause of incumbent disruption. But in the case of AI, we're seeing incumbents over-correct into rapid AI adoption. It is a mess, but I wouldn't then use history to predict who the winners will be.

> You didn't state reasons why not being a social platform matters here.

There's nothing to pointlessly waste your time on. You open it to do a thing, you either do the thing or get frustrated or leave. Social networks are designed to waste your time even when they outlive their usefulness, therefore they can serve you more ads.

You could argue Google is the same as ChatGPT in that regard, but that's why Google has Adsense in almost any search result you click on.

As for your group chats feature argument, anyone can make a social network, that's the easy part. Getting friend groups to switch is the more difficult part.

> PS. That's why Meta and Google are all in on AI. OpenAI is an existential threat to both in my humble opinion.

They're all in on AI because that's what their investors want them to do to "not be left behind". Meta was all in Metaverse. And on a cryptocurrency before that (Diem). And on Free Basics before that. The fact that none of those succeeded didn't hurt them at all precisely because they had an infinite money glitch known as ads.

They can afford to waste amounts of money equivalent to a yearly budget of a small country, ChatGPT can't.

> You didn't state reasons why not being a social platform matters here.

The network effects matter so much more for a social platform than a chat bot. The switching costs for a user are much lower, so users can move to a different one much easier.

How sticky will chat bots prove to be in the long term? Will OpenAI be able to maintain a lead in the space in the long term, the way Google was over Bing? It's possible, but it's also pretty easy to imagine other providers being competitive and a landscape where users move between different LLMs more fluidly

I think Google is the much bigger threat. I've more or elss stopped using ChatGPT now, it's easier to just type the question directly into Google and get the response from their AI rather than navigating to chatgpt first. Anecdotal but I don't see anything long term keeping people on that site.

OpenAI knows my intent better than Google.

I'm telling it nearly everything from my work problems to health problems to love life problems to product research, traveling plans, etc.

The main problem, I think, is that if your stuff is by robots, for robots, you have no advertising leverage.

I think advertisers are fairly stupid and maybe don't realize that most eyes on their ads aren't eyes at all, and couldn't buy a hair dryer even if they wanted, because they have no hair. How Facebook is still a desirable advertising platform is beyond me.

> they won't even invest in electric trucks with drivers.

Do any of these make sense economically right now? The Tesla one is mainly being piloted hauling potato chips for Pepsico because they are so light weight. Few of the Tesla Semi numbers from the presentation seemed to come true (and the part about having autonomous follower convoys working in ~2017...), and you had the guy from Nikola rolling it down a hill and needing a presidential pardon.

Because AI doesn't mean 'AI' it means massive compute, massive amount of data and machine learning.

All of that pushes everything forward: LLMs and any other architecture to LLMs, GenAI for images, sound and video, movement for robotics, image feature detection.

Segment Anything 2 was a breakthrough in image segmentation, for example.

The latest Google Weather model is also a breakthrough.

All progress in robotics is ML driven.

I don't think any investor thinks that OpenAI will achieve AGI with an LLM. Its Data + Compute -> Some Architecture -> AI/ML Model.

if it will become the golden model which will be capable of everything or a thousand expert models or the Model of Expert model, we don't know yet.

I agree. Back in the 90's there was plenty of skepticism, along with some mockery, surrounding the internet. But you never saw headlines like "Lawyer caught using the internet" or "Artist busted using the World Wide Web".

With AI, it's different.

There's a huge vegan market segment but meat industry still plods along

Google are experimenting with different filters that intentionally blur the lines between real and fake video in their shorts. A creator I follow who makes human-in-shot videos suddenly looked fake, like some animation filter was applied. I commented on how bad it looked, and someone said YT are doing it to people's videos as some sort of "trial". The effects were to make the human look more AI generated. The only use for this I can surmise is to make AI content even harder to detect.

It is very obviously there. People are not simply accepting the AI-bro justification that one day they won't notice the difference so it's all fine.

Ordinary people are understandably either exhausted by or angry at AI content, because it is relentless and misleading, and because they know instinctively that the people who want this to succeed also want to destroy employment and concentrate profits in the hands of a few Silicon Valley sociopaths.

As an ex VFX infra guy, I can totally tell.

But to your point, if we take all of TV production world wide I doubt thats going to add up to 100 billion spent on set extension/characters/de-aging/fuckit fix it in post. And thats keeping spend at the same rate. (not to mention the recent peak spend on TV)

For openAI to make money it has to be an order of magnitude cheaper, quicker and quality, and be the lead so that people spend AI bucks with them. Rather than having a VFX company tune an opensource/weights model.

Anecdotally I've seen lots of anti AI posts on instagram from gen-z accounts, and on YouTube ive seen "ai not used to make this music" in the description.

Also anecdotal, but I do think there's gen z anti-ai sentiment, these kids are joining a world where they will never own a house and have bleak prospects and now even art is something they can't do if AI takes off, so the market might not be there

Seems like older people love AI art, people over 50, which is a sizeable market don't get me wrong, but in 10-15 years idk

But whats the USP of that though?

> indistinguishable from what it was before. Just now the margin is much higher.

In both music and TV/film there has been an explosion in productivity. A kid in a bedroom with a mediocre microphone can produce something that sounds 95% as good as something that took a team of ten to do at a big studio. The same with VFX. If you compare "the golden compass" from 2006 to the series in ~2020 the quality of the TV show is much higher, at a higher resolution and has more VFX shots in it.

Both music and TV, the margins have dropped precipitously.

I just cant see how making it easier will bring up margins.

The whole VFX market is something like 10 billion USD a year.

Which is a huge amount, but if they only capture a piece of it, it might not amount to much compared to their spending.

I keep thinking about how, 20 years, 3D printers became accessible for tech/price, and there was a lot of talk about how we'd all just print what we need (pretty much like in Stephenson's book Diamond Age), and you'd get rich selling digital patterns for material goods.

Instead, we got the elevation of the handmade, the verifiably human created, typified by the rise of Etsy. The last 20 years have been a boom time for artists and craftspeople.

I keep seeing AI slop and thinking that all this will do is make verifiably human created content more valuable by comparison, while generative AI content will seem lowbrow and not worth the cost to make it.

> Yeah, I have a hard time believing that there’s a massive demand for AI-generated videos and images. Like, why would the news industry want to generate images and videos with AI? It’s not news. The advertising industry maybe, but even then it’s probably not your top brands that go full in on it. If you see that all of Apple’s adverts are generated with AI, it’ll probably lower your brand perception.

(disclaimer: I don't work in ad and don't know more about it than the next person)

Whether the end product (the ad) is AI-generated or not is almost irrelevant. The whole production chain will likely be AIfied: to produce one ad you need to go through many concepts, gather reference images/videos, make prototypes, iterate on all that, and probably a ton of other things that I don't know about... The final ad is 1 image/video, but there's been dozens/hundreds of other images/videos produced in this process. Whether the final ad is AI-generated or not, AI will almost certainly (for better or worse...) have a major place in the production chain.

The cost of operating television studios and paying related staff, including on-air talent, is probably significant. I can easily see major news networks turning to AI-generated newsreaders. TikTok is already full of AI voiceovers; seems like a short leap, to me.

> We already put more importance on handmade goods vs. factory-made, even if the latter is cheaper and better quality

I guess if 'importance' means sentimentality, however, the "factory-made things" industry certainly makes the vast majority of the money to be made in manufacturing. Handmade is a niche. I think the argument is that whether people prefer it or not, AI-generated content will have a major place in the marketplace for content because of its natural advantages. In other words, a movie heavily generated with AI won't win any Oscars but there is a world where such things would make a lot of money and some of that money would flow to OpenAI.

I have a hard time understanding why I would want to waste my time watching something generated by AI when they clearly didn't value the time spent making it.

I have a limited lifespan, I'm not going to use that to consume slop.

The last time I sold a house, a professional photographer took some beautiful photos, gave the realtor like 60-80 and he picked 40 for the listing. He absorbed the cost of that with his commission. No way in hell did he pay $2800-5600 (I'm also in Canada) for those photos.

Oh that's easy: as soon as China gets good enough to compete at any market seen as vital, "the west" either makes up some nebulous national security threat to cut them off or imposes high enough import taxes to make the home-made versions cheaper in comparison. The same way "the west" has done it with cars, phones, and social media in recent years.

There is no free market competition between "the west" and China, they're two completely separate markets for a reason. You're only allowed to cross that isle in a limited capacity, as soon as you get big enough to be seen as a legit threat, you're getting cut off. Works both ways, Tesla can sell in China, but they can't beat BYD. Apple can sell iPhones, but only because their market share is not big enough to matter.

Probably China is building useful robots, not gimmicky "humanoid" ones. For any given task or set of tasks I'm very sure there are vastly better robot designs than mimicking a human.

Yeah, considering Teslas upload imagery from their cars to datasets their employees have been known to access (and abuse that access as well) there's practically 0% chance I'd ever let a Tesla camera inside my home. Its bad enough they're recording me when my neighbors drive by and when I walk around, I wouldn't want them in my home on a device that's designed to be able to go through my stuff.

> how Elon will ever compete with Chinese humanoid robot pricing and output?

... with said humanoid robots?

While it's true China's manufacturing sector can outproduce the west's right now, ubiquitous autonomous humanoid robots can level the playing field to a meaningful extent.

Why would I want to spend 1-2h researching humidifiers if I can spend that time in any other way, and still end up with a humidifier that fits my needs first try?

This kind of task is perfect for AI in a way that doesn't take away too much from the human experience. I'll keep my art, but shopping can die off.

Fundamentally, is it really that different from being persuaded by an advertisement or trusting what the marketing says on the box?

Compared to what, reading Amazon reviews? Google site:reddit.com?

> Just have AI do it so you save $3 and 4 minutes.

Maybe I am deeply suboptimal, but typically this kind of decision takes me far more than 4 minutes.

It’s better in that I don’t have to waste my time reading Google and Reddit myself, but can let a robot do it.

Project Farm solves the trust problem with methodology + video documentation and the monetization problem with affiliate links for every product tested.

I can Google and read but it takes a lot of time

I still approximately trust (yes, I know it's imperfect, but so is every other source) NYT's Wirecutter, and they do affiliate links.

No, they don't, the value of AI isn't the AI itself, it's purely the output.

If someone else can achieve the same output as OpenAI at a similar price, they are completely toast. There is absolutely nothing tying you to ChatGPT because ChatGPT doesn't matter, only what it produces.

Amazon was in a (similar) situation, but not quite, because they offered a unique experience. But I strongly believe that if Sears just kept their catalogue for another decade, Amazon would not exist.

Something Something every one of those users (even the paying ones!) loses OpenAI money

No, it was unique. Being able to browse such an extensive collection of books and order them from your computer was mind-blowing.

Yes but AI is a far bigger market and more profitable* than taxis.

*If AI is just SaaS/online ads in a different form.

And unlike taxi drivers / companies, these competitors have much deeper pockets.

It is not hard to imagine Google being able to outlast OpenAI for a decade and it is hard to imagine OpenAI being able to survive for more than another couple of years given that.

The sovereign wealth funds and billionaires need something to do with all their available cash. It's no fun just watching the number increase anymore, that got boring quite a while ago.

It just seems hard to imagine that simultaneously running 1,000 instances of claude code will be cheap in the next decade, but maybe running 1,000 instances of claude-like tools is what a corporate LLM subscription will give. And maybe running 1,000,000 or a billion such models is what the government will do once a contract gets awarded.

Just random speculation though.

Users might simply switch to Gemini or Claude but partnered companies might go bankrupt or see their stock tank.

I was thinking the 172 figure was $20/mo times five years but in reality if OpenAI had a bunch of such users they'd value them at about 20x annual revenue and raise on the stock market so they'd only need like 40 or 50 million subscribers.

If OpenAI fails, wouldn't their customers just move to other AI providers? So the total hardware demand by AI companies wouldn't dramatically change over a reasonable time frame?

The thing is, it is not 2007/2008 any more. The US government is holding record amounts of debt and countries around the world are now trying to become independent of it. This includes its bond markets on which the dollar relies upon to give it its reserve currency status, which in turn is what gives it its power to print money and bail industries out. If something happens that requires Big Tech to be bailed out and international bond holders decide the US is no longer reliable, it could very well end up triggering the collapse of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and the downfall of the US as we know it.

Yeah. Look at how the S&P 493 are doing! :/

That's different from saying that boeing is too big to fail for example. The US can't accept to lose its only major commercial aircraft manufacturer. Or Intel for similar reasons.

But what you're describing is about keeping the AI bubble from popping. Can a bubble really be too big too fail?

Define "attracted". I believe porn and gambling both do incredible amounts of damage to society. Ads probably do some damage to society, though I can recognize some benefits in being able to advertise and market products and services. I don't believe there is any benefit to the other two.

44% for OpenAI wouldn't mean 0% for Google, but considering that even Apple only has about 30% of the global smartphone marketshare, OpenAI getting there seems unlikely.

Oh, I agree it's implausible. But GP said

> People crying about the revenue gap constantly forget that OpenAI still hasn't turned on the ads, porn, and gambling

But quite the opposite, HSBC assumed that they will have a virtual global monopoly on AI, and even under those projections they will still need to take on hundreds of billions of debt. I'm sure if they get there getting access to that debt will be easier than I'm assuming currently.

That is exactly the parent's point, that while those things could bring in revenue, the competition in those industries is already incredibly fierce. And that's before potential new entrants into the space on the AI front. Even in the best of cases I don't think anyone is gonna be able to pull anything other than middling margins.

This is absolutely what techbro MBAs raised on case studies of Apple and Toyota are likely to think. Gamblers and porn users do not have any sort of brand loyalty and are likely to be hostile to the idea of "vertical integration" and "360 degree views of the customer".

And what is the conclusion, what will survive?

Yes but you need money to survive until the later stages

Not just the economy. We usually deal with these busts and crisis collectively through the public sector as well.

There's also a hidden opportunity cost in regards to hype cycles. So much energy, attention and money flows into the hype, while other businesses or entire sectors get overlooked and underappreciated.

They are if they happen under capitalist states, which is what the US is.

Queues are not socialism?

"unconstrained socialism" is kind of an oxymoron, isn't it?

Microsoft and Nvidia aren't going down.

Their stock prices might go down but they're not going down.

still capitalism