Comment by ryanSrich a day ago
I think there are two things that happened
1. OpenAI bet largely on consumer. Consumers have mostly rejected AI. And in a lot of cases even hate it (can't go on TikTok or Reddit without people calling something slop, or hating on AI generated content). Anthropic on the other hand went all in on B2B and coding. That seems to be the much better market to be in.
2. Sam Altman is profoundly unlikable.
We’ve seen many times that platforms can be popular and widely disliked at the same time. Facebook is a clear example.
The difference there is it became hated after it was established and financially successful. If you need to turn free visitors in to paying customers, that general mood of “AI is bad and going to make me lose my job/fuck up society” is yet another hurdle OpenAI will have to overcome.
Yeah, every single big website is totally free. People have complex emotions toward Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, but they don't have to pull out their wallet. That's a bridge too far for many people.
It’s incorrect to point out that consumers have rejected AI.
The strategy here is more valid in my opinion. The value in AI is much more legible when the consumer uses it directly from their chat UI than whatever enterprises can come up with.
I can suggest many ways that consumers can use it directly from chat window. Value from enterprise use is actually not that clear. I can see coding but that’s about it. Can you tell me ways in which enterprises can use AI in ways that is not just providing their employees with chaggpt access?
Was the golden boy for a while? What shifted? I don't even remember what he did "first" to get the status. Is it maybe just a case of familiarity breeding contempt?
It is starting to become clear to more and more people that Sam is a dyed in the wool True Believer in AGI. While it's obvious in hindsight that OpenAI would never have gotten anywhere if he wasn't, seeing it so starkly is really rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.
it's even worse than that and i hope people recognize that it's not that he's a True Believer (though the TBs are often hilarious)
it's that he has no ethics to speak of at all. it's not that he's out of touch, it's that he simply does not care.
Well, in the world where AGI is created and it goes suboptimally, everybody gets turned into computronium and goes extinct, which is a prospect some are miffed about. And, in the world where it goes well, no decision of any consequence is made by a human being ever again, since the computer has planned every significant life event since before their birth. Free will in a very literal sense will have been erased. Sam being a true believer means he is not going to stop working until one of these worlds comes true. People who understand the stakes are understandably irked by him.
Well, he made mistake many billionaires do, he opened his mouth with his own thoughts, instead of just reading what PR department told him to read
He is a pretty interesting case. According to the book "Empire of AI" about OpenAI, he lies constantly, even about things that are too trivial to matter. So it may be part of some compulsive behavior.
And when two people want different things from him, he "resolves" the conflict by agreeing with each of them separately, and then each assumes they got what they wanted, until they talk to the other person and find out that nothing was resolved.
Really not a person who is qualified to run a company, except the constant lying is good for fundraising and PR.
Scariest part is it probably won't, and he'll be back in five year with something else.
Instead of anecdotes about “what you saw on TikTok and Reddit”, it’s really not that hard to lookup how many paid users ChatGPT has.
Besides OpenAI was never going to recoup the billions of dollars based on advertising or $20/month subscriptions
good point.
I don't think it is at all
The CEO just has to have followership: the people who work there have to think that this is a good person to follow. Even they don't have to "like" him
Those who is publicly hating LLMs still use them though, even for the stuff the claim to hate, like writing fanfic.
HN is such a bubble. ChatGPT is wildly successful, and about to be an order of magnitude more so, once they add ads. And I have never heard a non-technical person mention Altman. I highly doubt they have any idea who he is, or care. They’re all still using ChatGPT.
> and about to be an order of magnitude more so, once they add ads.
How do you figure?
You have to give credit to Sam, he’s charismatic enough to the right people to climb man made corporate structures. He was also smart enough to be at the right place at the right time to enrich himself (Silicon Valley). He seems to be pretty good at cutting deals. Unfortunately all of the above seems to be at odds with having any sort of moral core.
Ermmm what?
He and his personality caused people like Ilya to leave. At that point the failure risk of OAI jumped tremendously. The reality he will have to face is, he has caused OAIs demise.
Perhaps hes ok with that as long as OAI goes down with him. Would expect nothing less from him.
All this drama is mostly irrelevant outside a very narrow and very online community.
The demise of OpenAI is rooted in the bad product market fit, since many people like using ChatGPT for free, but fewer are ready to pay for it. And that’s pretty much all there is to it. OpenAI bet on consumers, made a slopstagram that unsurprisingly didn’t revolutionise content, and doesn’t sell as many licenses as they would like.
Imo they'll soon make a lot of money with advertisement. Whenever chatgpt brings you to some website to buy a product they will get some share.
Ilya took a swing at the king and missed. It would have been awkward to hang around after that debacle.
I actually think Sam is “better” than say Elon or Dario because he seems like a typical SF/SV tech bro. You probably know the type (not talking about some 600k TC fang worker, I mean entrepreneurs).
He says a lot of fluff, doesn’t try to be very extreme, and focuses on selling. I don’t know him personally but he comes across like an average person if that makes sense (in this environment that is).
I think I personally prefer that over Elon’s self induced mental illnesses and Dario being a doomer promoting the “end” of (insert a profession here) in 12 months every 6 months. It’s hard for me to trust a megalomaniac or a total nerd. So Sam is kinda in the middle there.
I hope OpenAI continues to dominate even if the margins of winning tighten.
Elon is one of the most unlikable people on the planet, so I wouldn't consider him much of a bar.
It’s kind of sad. I can’t believe I used to like him back in the iron man days. Back then I thought he was cool for the various ideas and projects he was working on. I still think many of those are great but he as a person let me down.
Now I have him muted on X.
Back then he had a PR firm working for him, getting him cameos and good press. But in 2020 he fired them deciding that his own "radically awesome" personality doesn't need any filtering.
Personally I don't think Elon is the worst billionaire, he's just the one dumb enough to not have any PR (since 2020). They're all pretty reprehensible creatures.
I understand what GP is saying in the sense that, yes, on an objective scale, what Sam is saying is absolutely and completely nuts... but on a relative scale he's just hyping his startup. Relative to the scale he's at, it’s no worse than the average support tool startup founder claiming they will defeat Salesforce, for example.
He's definitely not. If Altman. Is a "typical" SF/SV tech bro then that's an indication the valley has turned full d-bag. Altman's past is gross. So, if he's the norm then I will vehemently avoid any dollars of mine going to OAI. I paid for an account for a while, but just like Musk I lose nothing over actively avoiding his Ponzi scheme of a company.
Altman is a consummate liar and manipulator with no moral scruples. I think this LLM business is ethically compromised from the start, but Dario is easily the least worst of the three.
Darío unsettles me the most, he kinda reminds me of SBF, I wouldn’t be surprised if, well they’re all bad its to stack rank them.
He and SBF are both big into effective altruism, and SBF gave Anthropic their seed funding, so yeah, that checks out.
Pfft. Dario has been making nonsense fear mongering that never comes true.
> I actually think Sam is “better” than say Elon or even Dario because he seems like a typical SF/SV tech bro.
If you nail the bar to the floor, then sure, you can pass over it.
> He says a lot of fluff, doesn’t try to be very extreme, and focuses on selling.
I don't now what your definition of extreme is but by mine he's pretty extreme.
> I think I personally prefer that over Elon’s self induced mental illnesses and Dario being a doomer promoting the “end” of (insert a profession here) in 12 months every 6 months.
All of them suffer from thinking their money makes them somehow better.
> I hope OpenAI continues to dominate even if the margins of winning tighten.
I couldn't care less. I'm on the whole impressed with AI, less than happy about all of the slop and the societal problems it brings and wished it had been a more robust world that this had been brought in to because I'm not convinced the current one needed another issue of that magnitude to deal with.
> All of them suffer from thinking their money makes them somehow better.
Let's assume they think they're better than others.
What makes you think that they think it's because of their money, as opposed to, say, because of their success at growing their products and businesses to the top of their field?
Even if it's success rather than money, you still have survivorship bias to contend with, so it's not really much of a helpful distinction.
Because they wouldn't talk about money as much or try to convert a non-profit into a for profit company.
That’s ok, but AI is useful in particular use cases for many people. I use it a lot and I prefer the Codex 5.2 extra high reasoning model. The AI slop and dumb shit on IG/YT is like the LCD of humans though. They’ve always been there and always will be there to be annoying af. Before AI slop we had brain rot made by humans.
I think over time it (LLM based) will become like an augmenter, not something like what they’re selling as some doomsday thing. It can help people be more efficient at their jobs by quickly learning something new or helping do some tasks.
I find it makes me a lot more productive because I can have it follow my architecture and other docs to pump out changes across 10 files that I can then review. In the old way, it would have taken me quite a while longer to just draft those 10 files (I work on a fairly complex system), and I had some crazy code gen scripts and shit I’d built over the years. So I’d say it gives me about 50% more efficiency which I think is good.
Of course, everyone’s mileage may vary. Kinda reminds me of when everyone was shitting on GUIs, or scripting languages or opinionated frameworks. Except over time those things made productivity increase and led to a lot more solutions. We can nitpick but I think the broader positive implication remains.
> Consumers have mostly rejected AI.
People like to complain about things, but consumers are heavily using AI.
ChatGPT.com is now up to the 4th most visited website in the world: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users