I agree with you overall and would even concede the trend, but everyone I know who was born into money is not a good person. (Of course, Trump was too.) They tend to treat people as fungible resources that output work.

>fungible resources that output work

Which they are.

It's tempting to look at trends and assume there must be a rule behind them, but it's also intellectually lazy. Please do the hard work of justifying your stance like GGP did.

it is a simple stance - if you have a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people ad monetization strategy will be found cause there are people a lot smarter than you and me that will get it done. here’s intellectual challenge - find a business with comparable number of users to openai which is not swimming in ad revenue - one will do

A counterpoint is that there are many products with significant usage that fail or never attempt advertising monetization. They just increase the cost of the product.

Such as?

I apologize, but I thought it was self-evident. The majority of enterprise professional software.

I would argue that comparing OpenAI to social media companies is an awful comparison. A much better comparison would be to Microsoft Office.

I thought we were talking about search or social media companies failing to capitalize on advertising which I haven't seen. OpenAI is much closer to Google than it is to Office.

I could see that argument, but the economics of the two are so different. I just don't see how using an LLM can be sustainable for search, but could see it as an enterprise model.

What do you mean not sustainable for search? OpenAI is eating Google's lunch forcing them to put in LLMs on Google. I personally don't use traditional search anymore, it's all through LLMs. Meanwhile everyone hates Microsoft Office LLMs.

Snapchat

Total Quarterly Revenue (Q4 2024): $1.55 billion in total revenue, with $1.41 billion coming from advertising

Basically all their revenue is ad revenue and not too bad

Yes, most of their top talent has left, except for Jakub. The top researchers I know have no interest in the company.

Yeah, and Jakub didn't seem to have much background in AI research. I'm sure he's a great coder and did a PhD on fast algorithms but it's a different area to pushing forward AI really.

Google has already surpassed them both in all areas except coding. People on HN only look at benchmarks, but Gemini's multimodal understanding, things like identifying what a plant is, normal user use cases (other than chatting), integration with other tools, is much better.

It's believable that Meta, ByteDance, etc. can catch up too. It is not certain that scaling will meaningfully increase performance indefinitely, and if it stops soon, they surely will. Furthermore, other market conditions (US political instability) can enable even more labs, like Mistral, to serve as compelling alternatives.

Uber, TSMC, etc. have strong moats in the form of physical goods and factories. LLMs have nothing even remotely comparable. The main moat is in knowledge, which is easy to transfer between labs. Do you think all the money that goes into training a model goes into the actual final training run? No, it is mostly experiments and failed ideas, which do not have to be repeated by future labs and offshoots.

> It is not certain that scaling will meaningfully increase performance indefinitely

It's certain that it won't. We've already hit diminishing returns.

So YC values the company at $1.8 million. I don't think that's so different.

Absolutely not. Windsurf also just stole an open source model, there’s almost zero chance Google is using that under the hood.

I prescribe literally zero truth value to what Sam says. He will say whatever he needs to get ahead. It is honestly irritating to me that you and many others here seem to implicitly assume his messages are correlated with truth, doing his social engineering work for him, as if his word should adjust your priors even slightly.

I don't necessarily think he's lying, but there's so much obvious incentive for him to lie here (if only because his employees can save face).

Your comment reminded me that a blog post. It’s by the same guy that wrote “programming sucks”. I’ve been sharing it a lot recently lol

https://www.stilldrinking.org/stop-talking-to-technology-exe...

> I don't necessarily think he's lying

He doesn't even need to be lying, the comment is vague and contains enough loopholes that it could be true yet meaningless. I explained some that I noticed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190163

I'm not sure if I'd go down to zero, but he did get fired from OpenAI for lying.

And fired from YC for lying. And lied to investors about how many Loopt employees he had. And lied about having 100x the actual number of users when he sold it. And lied to employees about the Microsoft deal. And lied to his safety team.

I don't trust Sam to be telling the truth. It would be to his benefit to lie about this and make Anthropic look bad, so he of course would, even if it's not actually the case.

Hell, I would have thought it likely that anthropic was doing the same thing. Of course that was proven wrong, but for OAI I wouldn't even be guessing. This has always been what sama does.

I think it's all he knows. His "oh, shucks" good-boy routine is what he's been doing for 15 years now, it's gotten him far, it's never been genuine, but it feels especially out of place now with much attention on him and his lies being so obvious.

Am I right in thinking these numbers look awful for OpenAI? They're down by 22% from last month while Gemini is up 50% again. Their supposed user moat doesn't look very sturdy...