I feel like they are signing many commitments way beyond that timeline.. some of them possible circular with the possibility to really dent the economy at scale. That’s the part that makes it news.

I don’t think OpenAI could be considered a startup anymore.

Is OpenAI really a “tech startup” at this point?

> ad revenue which is likely going to be huge given their DAU and what you can extrapolate their ARPU to be based on other big tech advertisers.

Ad revenue doesn't come out of thin air. Unless budgets and TAM in the ad space increase (hint: they won't), the spend has to mostly come from cannibalizing META and Google. In that regard, I wish them luck - that will be a long and bloody battle. And both the established players can fight it longer than OAI because they have actually revenue streams and strong cash balances.

>Where is the actual financial modelling? This is pure speculation?

Every doom and gloom article about OpenAI is almost always speculation, with no actual evidence backing the claims. The issue is that people love a good "AI is going to fail" story, so it gets shot up to the front page. Unfortunately, some journalists now know that it can rake in clicks, so they will happily reduce their journalistic integrity to ride the wave.

OpenAI have signed something like $1.5tn worth of future spending deals as of the end of last year whilst making something like $13bn of _revenue_ for the year. There's no way that any of this can add up

One problem with OpenAi advertising is that users are already moving towards Gemeni, which isn't advertising.

Chatgpt is mostly worse than Gemeni too (arguably) and isn't nearly as rate limited. So they're already losing users and making their product a worse experiance than their competition.

Sure OpenAI will make some money from ads but will it be anything close to what it takes to quench the amount of money they're burning? It seems unlikely to me. They really need to be bought out by a sugar-momma who can afford to play this kind of game like MSFT.

How do we know that ad revenue will be huge? 80% of the questions that I ask can't be monetized because they're not about purchase intent. And even if they could, has OpenAI built an auction system to bid on keywords? How exactly will all this work and be streamlined in the next 18 months to the point that it could generate the revenue they need to keep with the ridiculous investment requirements in infrastructure?

As the article pointed out, there is no moat. There’s no reason to think they’ll be more successful with ads than MySpace was versus Facebook.

From what I understand of the advertising market, companies like Google and Facebook make bucketloads of ads primarily because they own so much of the vertical integration of ad markets. Meanwhile, the way OpenAI appears to be integrating ads makes it seem to me that they're positioned only to take the smallest slice of the pie--a place to hoist ads--which means they're revenue-per-user I would estimate to be a lot closer to, say, a newspaper website than the biggest of social media sites, or maybe along the lines of Twitter or Tumblr, which never posted spectacular profits.

Ads will certainly generate revenue but it won't miraculously help OpenAI generate profits.

Altman saying they are going to spend a Trillion+ is (if anything) an anti signal to what the actual financial plan looks like. He is way out front as the hype man and booster. Most of what he says is wishful thinking or an outright lie.

It honestly doesn't matter.

Sometimes these "articles" are sent out as thinly veiled "press releases" prior to an new round of investment. Sometimes someone who thinks they are a "reporter" has what they think is an "exclusive" or a "hot take". Regardless, as someone who has spent all of his career in startups...this is...business as usual. Another round of funding/financing will commence. Open AI will be fine unless investors lose confidence in AI. We won't know how it will play out until it plays out. Media outlets reporting on this are playing off the AI bubble hype for clicks. (Yes, we are in a bubble. No, nobody knows when it will pop, nor how bad it will be, ad driven company just wants more ad revenue, nothing to see here, move along.)

Disagree, no one's going to invite me to their kids birthday party via ChatGPT. It's innovation was in ads knowing so much about the people it targeted, and putting tracking pixels on every webpage with a Like button. Facebook was transformative for online surveillance

IMO LLMs will be equally transformative for online influence campaigns (aka ads + Cambridge analytica on steroids)

| AI is orders of magnitude more useful and transformative than Facebook was in 2005

It better be, it's taken over 40000x the funding.

The question is not whether AI is useful, the question is whether it's useful enough relative to the capital expectations surrounding it. And those expectations are higher than anything the world has ever seen.

"Useful and transformative" doesn't mean "financially successful".

A single LLM provider might have been able to get great margins and capture a significant fraction of the total economic output of (currently e.g. junior grade software engineering), but collectively they're in an all-pay auction for the hardware to train models worth paying for, and at the same on questionable margins because they need to compete with each other on cost.

They can all go bankrupt, and leave behind only trained models that normal people won't be able to run for 5 years while consumer-grade stuff catches up. Or any single one of them might win, which may not be OpenAI. Any or all may get state subsidies (US, Chinese, European, whatever).

All kinds of outcomes are possible.

They're not arguing that AI sucks. Only that OpenAI has no hope of meeting it's financial obligations which seems pretty reasonable. And very on brand for Sam Altman. It seems pretty obvious at this point that model training is extremely expensive and affords very little moat. LLMs will continue to improve and gain adoption, but one or more companies will fall by the wayside regardless of their userbase. Google seems pretty clearly to be in pole position at this point as they have massive revenue, data, expertise and their own chips.

> AI is orders of magnitude more useful and transformative than Facebook was in 2005

This makes sense because Facebook was one year old in 2005 and OpenAI is 11 years old now. Eleven is just two ones so it’s basically the same thing as one so it is sensible to make that comparison

Facebook hooked me up with 4 beautiful girlfriends. I don't think Chatgpt is going to do that any time soon.

That wasn't the conclusion of the article (I'm assuming you're reacting to the headline and haven't read the article).

The author's prediction is that OpenAI will get bought.

I know it sounds kind of crazy, but there actually is precedent for that: Reid Hoffman sold his AI startup after he realized there was no possible way for an AI startup to compete with the Googles of the world with $100B in cash and giant free cash flow machines given how capital intensive it is to build AI.[1]

To me, it's not that outlandish to think that if OpenAI really does need to spend a ton of money to survive, they will probably have to either raise or get bought (or find that magic money tree by monetizing their business). Because right now, they don't have the cash flow to compete with Google.

Could obviously change, but I think that's where the author is coming from.

[1]https://www.eesel.ai/blog/inflection-ai

Advertising doesn’t mean free money. Aggressive advertising will almost certainly drive away users.

4) Sell all of those RAM chips they bought

And it’s just a restatement of the original, which isn’t any good either. Really mediocre.

> 2/ Stop training new models

Google et al won't stop training new models.

> Investors were briefly spooked last July when an M.I.T. study suggested that almost none of this is useful to businesses. Corporations had poured tens of billions of dollars into A.I., yet only one in 20 projects had succeeded, the study reported. But a Wharton study in October delivered the opposite verdict. After interviewing 801 leaders at U.S. companies, Wharton concluded that three-quarters of the businesses were getting a positive return on their A.I. investments.

MIT actually carried out a study. Wharton just asked some execs, who of course parroted the party line. Winter is coming.

Given that OpenAI’s strongest skill seems to be fundraising, I could see them transforming into a financial institution.

Strategies such as this would accelerate said endeavor:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577464

Lower profile and they're not making as many crazy deals but they're also losing incredible amounts of money.

https://old.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1qf6z4v/anthropic_3...

Amazon can buy them when it is time