Anyone with a Bloomberg terminal able to run how much free cash the top X companies in the fortune 500 generate? The amount of capital OpenAI is describing have to be a material % of all cash generated each year over the next 5 years.
9cb14c1ec0 8 minutes ago [-]
> I suspect we can design a very interesting new kind of financial instrument for finance and compute that the world has not yet figured it out
Hmm, can't figure out why this statement makes me think of Enron. After all, OpenAI certainly isn't trying to do massive infrastructure build outs while struggling with a relatively limited cash flow, or anything like that.
pants2 20 minutes ago [-]
Yes, their capex spending is mind-blowing. Astronomical. But OpenAI has also pretty much lived up to its promises so far. I don't see them straight up lying to investors the same way that Tesla does.
Not only has OpenAI launched multiple viral products a year multiple years in a row, but their mission is to create God, so I think the TAM is pretty large.
macintux 6 minutes ago [-]
I’m on a long, meandering road trip and I decided to start using the conversational feature in ChatGPT. Truly amazing stuff. Discussed some sights I’d want to see along the Natchez Trace (although perhaps unsurprisingly it did not anticipate that this time of year was not ideal for hearing and seeing waterfalls), told me about Meriwether Lewis’s bizarre death. Basically like holding a conversation with Wikipedia, which was perfect.
The only real problem was that in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t have a reliable enough data connection to keep the conversation going, but that’s hardly OpenAI’s fault.
dkasper 3 minutes ago [-]
Starlink roam solves that!
danpalmer 9 minutes ago [-]
Have they? It seems to be getting clearer every month that they are not going to reach AGI, that the products are (good, but) not living up to the promises that were made.
I suspect you're right that Tesla is in a different league here, but I don't think OpenAI are in a good spot.
idiotsecant 32 seconds ago [-]
Progress has reached incremental, and started slowing past that. I'm not sure creating God is in the cards.
danpalmer 4 minutes ago [-]
The bubble is going to burst, if only because the growth in these numbers is obviously unsustainable – we just don't have trillions – and if the growth slows the hype dies. Maybe the current level can be stable, maybe the market will shrink, but the growth cannot continue.
When the bubble bursts who will survive? The existing, profitable, big tech companies will, if not without pain. The startup ecosystem will likely be decimated. But what about the in-betweens, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc? My guess is that Anthropic will sell to (or merge with) another profitable company and live on because they'll be relatively cheap for some excellent technology, but OpenAI might be too big for that, too expensive.
wmf 9 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if cannibal king Sam Altman's secret plan is to force their partners into bankruptcy then buy their assets cheap.
9 minutes ago [-]
deadbabe 14 minutes ago [-]
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
Guess where we’re at.
an0malous 9 minutes ago [-]
No one has ignored or laughed at AI, to the contrary people have been working on it since the 70s. Even the biggest skeptics like Gary Marcus still believe AGI is possible, they just don’t think LLMs are enough and that the current technology is overvalued
Analemma_ 10 minutes ago [-]
"Then they launch competitor products that drive your margins to zero and force you to spend ever-escalating sums on new models forever, because you have no moat." <- I think we're at this one
Rendered at 01:00:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Hmm, can't figure out why this statement makes me think of Enron. After all, OpenAI certainly isn't trying to do massive infrastructure build outs while struggling with a relatively limited cash flow, or anything like that.
Not only has OpenAI launched multiple viral products a year multiple years in a row, but their mission is to create God, so I think the TAM is pretty large.
The only real problem was that in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t have a reliable enough data connection to keep the conversation going, but that’s hardly OpenAI’s fault.
I suspect you're right that Tesla is in a different league here, but I don't think OpenAI are in a good spot.
When the bubble bursts who will survive? The existing, profitable, big tech companies will, if not without pain. The startup ecosystem will likely be decimated. But what about the in-betweens, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc? My guess is that Anthropic will sell to (or merge with) another profitable company and live on because they'll be relatively cheap for some excellent technology, but OpenAI might be too big for that, too expensive.
Guess where we’re at.