Lots of critiques here! Something missing in this discussion is people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who work there aren't stupid!

I think this is a disconnect between people who think that large companies are static entities with established products vs. large companies that still operate like a startup and are trying to grow. When you're building your business from $0 in revenue, you don't know what will work! You try different things, you [launch over and over again](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-a...)...all in hopes of something that works, sticks, and starts to grow.

In every example here, I see OpenAI trying something new, hoping it will grow, and shutting it down after it doesn't. Sora is the pre-eminent example of this. They make news, but you don't talk about the things they launch that successfully grow!

OpenAI isn't shutting down Codex or ChatGPT, because those were launches that they did that actually worked! When you go look at the tweets and communication from OpenAI employees when ChatGPT launched, nobody was sure that it would work. But it did. And if they hadn't launched, we would have never known how valuable it was.

All that is to say...you don't know what will work until you launch. Most things fail, and it's correct to shut them down. But focusing on the products that haven't worked instead of the products that have gets you more clicks, but actually depresses innovation by making future launches less likely.

> GPT-4o

Why is this on the list? Like... what? How about including GPT 3.5 and GPT 2 here too?

My guess is Sam Altman is a better VC than CEO. Better at hype, networking, fund raising, and back room political hijinks than shipping a focused product

He seems to be trying to take almost a "venture studio" approach by throwing shit at the wall, but the problem with these things is always that the "internal startups" are "founded" by people who don't have enough incentive or control over their product to perform as well as an actual startup, and are distracted by internal politics. And frankly, it may also be that the really good founders will just do their own startup vs working on a quasi-startup inside a large org so there's some selection bias as well.

What they really should focus on is making those models more efficient. With them most likely losing money on inference (+model training + salaries + building data centers), I can't see why they would want more compute and more products, since more tokens spent is actually bad for them.

The stargate, nvidia and amd deals are all linked together and the fallout is not public. Nvidia and amd stock seems to not care about it at all. Oracle fired 30000 employees, not sure if it’s to fund that initiative or a fall out of that

They’ve lost a whole lot of people in prominent roles over the past few years. I wonder how much of the misfires and general thrash in product direction is a result of brain drain and/or so many hands changing. Or maybe I’m confusing cause and effect… hard to tell

It's missing the voice mode that never reached the level they demoed, and then gradually went to shit from that.

This is important context in the wake of yesterday’s “raise” announcement. A lot of this stuff seems to just quietly never happen once the ink on the PR puff dries.

The AI industry increasingly looks in scramble mode to keep the hype going as those storm clouds of financial and business reality get darker and darker on the horizon.

Unfortunately I would bet OpenClaw is going to be on the list soon

And if Forbes is reporting this, that means the actual movers and shakers were talking about this months ago.

I'm not an OAI fanboy by a longshot - but I'd view lots of experiments that didn't work out as a healthy thing, especially for a company trying to find footing in a new industry.

Who is the person in the portrait at the top of the page?

I think the VC/investor community needs to take A LOT of blame here. They've created an insane rush to financialize everything to moon at the drop of a hat.

I mean, even Andresson-Horowitz was taking NFT's seriously as though they weren't a scam only a few years ago (https://a16z.com/the-nft-starter-pack-tools-for-anyone-to-an...).

These people are also looking (and funding) quantum computing companies as though quantum computing is right around the corner after AGI.

They need to cool their jets. AI is certainly a worthwhile and super important development, but it's still possible to go overboard with it.

The future of ChatGPT maybe well be as a Microsoft product.

Unfortunately I would bet OpenClaw will be on the list soon

"Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger... was sold on Sora, too. He lauded Altman’s ability to “look around corners”..."

WTF is that supposed to mean? I'm sorry, maybe I'm being dense. I can't figure out what "look around corners" is supposed to mean. "Think outside the box," I guess? Why "look around corners?"

I mean, maybe I do get it. Altman has a weird face that looks like you can't predict where his eyes are based on where his head is. "Shifty," one might say. But I doubt that's what Iger meant.

It's dumb. It's dumb corporate speak. I'm so sick of this kind of stuff getting a pass. We used to bully people over using the word "synergy." Let's make america anti-corporate-weasel again.

So is OpenAI on track to overtake Google for discontinuing projects?

Has there ever been a period o time where people saw a bubble coming and that we were in one, but it just inexorably refused to pop/drug out this long? This isn’t a rhetorical question, I’m wondering how this period compares to other irrational periods of the economy like railroad fever etc.

Lying is a virtue.

Before he left I use to enjoy enraging a manager several layers above me. In one instance I explained that asking us to cut a few corners to get things done was fine, usually we can figure out acceptable ways of doing it. But then, it is your job to take those fake numbers and figure out how we are doing. No matter how much effort you make if bullshit goes in you know what will come out.

Now imagine an entire economy working like that. Like say, LLM's are good enough to run entire companies but you don't get to run a company because you are good at it. LLM's can perfectly manage employee schedules but the real job is more like marriage counseling or group therapy. Somewhere along the road we forgot which jobs make the economy go. They are probably the ones with the lowest salaries as those lack the effort of conjuring the job into existence.

Humanity needs obvious things cloths, food, housing, transportation etc but that isn't where the money is. The people cooking the books have the money and they are looking for something like a book cooking book. The market for openAI will be in lying convincingly for the benefit of the investor. Reality must be auctioned off like domain names or search engine placements. Altman is really the perfect guy for the job no one wants. ha-ha

Alternatively we could humble ourselves, ask the Chinese how reality works and attempt to steal their fu. It's just a thought.

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