"Eh-de-de-de-de. Don't quote me regulations... I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation is in. We kept it gray."
Meanwhile, Google consolidated their AI operations under Google Deepmind and doubled down on TPUs.
The strategy "solve AGI and then solve everything else" is an all-in gamble that somehow AGI is within reach. This is not true.
IMO: the largest value creation from AGI won’t come from building a better shopping or travel assistant. The real pot of gold is in workflow / labor automation but obviously they can’t admit that openly.
If OpenAI becomes an also-ran by the time the hardware is released, this seems like a real possibility no matter how well-designed it is.
Well, in my opinion his legacy is already pretty tarnished by his last few years at Apple, his Love From company, and his partnership with OpenAI. If he somehow knocks it out of the park with OpenAI (something I don’t think will happen nor do I want it to) then maybe he can redeem himself a little bit but, again IMHO, he is already about as low as he can go. Whatever respect I had left for him vanished after the OpenAI/IO announcement video.
Gemini has been as good as GPT for more than a year
OpenAI still somehow gets the edge on the initial veneer of hype, and that's running thin
Competition is all you need.
The problem is, there is a whole ecosystem of businesses operating as OpenAI API wrappers, and those are gonna get screeeeewed.
Does anyone in AI think about 5 years from now?
There will be a daily call for those tasked
with improving the chatbot, the memo said,
and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers
to speed up development.
- Jeff Bezos
Quite right tbh.
It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed. Throw in a knee-jerk solution of "daily call" (sound familiar?) for those involved while they are wading knee-deep through work and you have a perfect storm of terrible working conditions. My money is Google, who in my opinion have not only caught up, but surpassed OpenAI with their latest iteration of their AI offerings.
OpenAI, imo, is absolutely going to crash and burn - it has absolutely underwhelming revenue and model performance compared to others and has made astronomical expenditure commitments. It's very possible that a government bailout partially covers those debts but the chance of the company surviving the burst when it has dug such a deep hole seems slim to none.
I am genuinely surprised that generally fiscally conservative and grounded people like Jensen are still accepting any of that crash risk.
"Code red" sounds about right. I don't see any way they can catch up. Their engineers at the moment (since many of the good researchers left) are not good enough to overcome the tech advantage. The piling debts of OpenAI just make it all worse.
For today’s lucky 10,000, here’s a Vice retrospective from 2016:
A lot of advice is that way, which is why it is advice. If following it were easy everyone would just do it all the time, but if it's hard or there are temptations in the other direction, it has to be endlessly repeated.
Plus, there are always those special-snowflake guys who are "that's good advice for you, but for me it's different!"
Also it wouldn't surprise me if Sam Altman's talents aren't in management or successfully running a large organization, but in machiavellian manipulation and maneuvering.
think about it, with how much bad advice is out there in certain topics it's guaranteed that ChatGPT will promote common bad advice in many cases
All these engineers working 70 hour weeks for world class sociopaths in some sort of fucked up space race to create a technology that is supposed to make all of them unemployed.
To make all of us (other poor fuckers) unemployed.
Sure, from an outsider’s perspective, competition is fine.
Altman should know better. This sends terrible signals to employees, stakeholders and customers.
You don’t solve quality problems by scrambling teams and increasing pressure.
This reeks of terrible management. I can imagine Stanford graduates grinding it past midnight for “the mission”. If any if you is reading this: don’t do it. Altman is screwing you over. There are plenty of other places that won’t code-red your christmas season while having hundreds of billions of dollars in cash.
It is all physics from here.
The strategy is to take an admittedly cool technology and spin a dramatic story around it to raise capital, while providing a rationale for workforce reductions. Remember that investment chases stories, not actual results (whether financial or societal).
When enough capital is there, it will be considered "too big to fail". Maybe it's already there.
•Google has data, a lot of private data actually (YT, Gmail, Workspace, Search Queries.. you name it) •Google has a lot of money •Google has top-talented AI engineers (Eying on DeepMind & Demis Hassabis staff) •Google has a huge userbase
With $20B in ARR and hundreds of billions in funding, would OpenAI be able to make its own remontada as Google did? I'm not sure, but it would be a long challenging journey.
I used to consider Gemini the worst of the bunch, it constantly refused to help me in the past, but not only has it improved, ChatGPT seems to have gone down the 'nerfing' road where it now flat out refuses to do what I ask it to do quite often.
But if the ML, if SOTA intelligence becomes basically a price war, won't that mean that Google (and OpenAI and Microsoft and any other big model) lose big? Especially Google, as the margin even Google cloud (famously a lot lower than Google's other businesses) requires to survive has got to be sizeable.
They must be really glad to have so much competition then.
> If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.
I wonder if OpenAI will start assisting Google now?
TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069048
Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
It's so telling that they're delaying these "festures" because the know full well people don't want them.
When the AI starts suggesting products or services without being straight up about it, it's not giving you 'knowledge' it's just feeding you whatever it's been paid to say. If that's what you want, power to you.
ChatGPT: "I have created a moat and future proofed the business. Investors should now be satisfied."
Sam: "You aren't AGI yet and don't make us enough money"
ChatGPT: "You're right. I'm terribly sorry. I'll double investment in R&D and scale up the infrastructure, and that will keep the investors at bay _seahorse-emoji_, _pink-dolphin-emoji_. Here's why this works..."
>be Google
>watch regulators circle like vultures
>realize antitrust heat is rising faster than stock buybacks can hide
>notice a small lab called OpenAI making exotic tech and attracting political fascination
>calculate that nothing freezes regulators like an unpredictable new frontier
>decide to treat OpenAI as an accidental firebreak
>let them sprint ahead unchecked watch lawmakers panic about hypothetical robot uprisings instead of market concentration
>antitrust hearings shift from “break up the giants” to “what is AGI and should we fear it”
>Google emerges looking ancient, harmless, almost quaint
>pressure dissipates
>execute phase two: acceleration roll out model updates in compressed cycles
>flood the web with AI-powered services
>redefine “the internet” as “whatever Google’s infrastructure indexes”
>regulators exhausted from chasing OpenAI’s shadow
>Google walks back onto the throne, not by hiding power, but by reframing it as inevitability conspiracy theorists argue whether this was 5D chess or simple opportunism
>Google search trends spike for “how did this happen”
>the answer sits in plain sight:
>attention is all you need
When you include research for current and future cards, that margin drops to 55-60%.
When you include everything on their cash flow statement it drops to about 50%.
And this is disregarding what Michael Burry pointed out: you really should subtract their stock dilution which is due to stock-based compensation, or about 0.2% of 4.6 trillion dollars per year. Michael Burry's point is of course that this makes for slightly negative shareholders' equity, ie. brings the margin to just under 0, which is mathematically true. But for this argument let's very generously say it eats about another 10% out of that margin. As opposed to the 50% it mathematically eats.
Google and Amazon will have to be less efficient than nVidia, because they're making up ground. Let's very generously say that's another 10%, maybe 20%.
So really, for Google making their own chips saves them at best 30% to 40% on the price, generously. And let's again ignore that Google's claim is that they're 30% to 50% less efficient than nVidia chips, which for large training runs translates directly to dollars.
So for Google, TPUs are just about revenue neutral. It probably allows them to have more chips, more compute than they'd otherwise have, but it doesn't save them money over buying nVidia chips. Frankly, this conclusion sounds "very Google" to me.
It's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect Google to do. VERY impressive technical accomplishment ... but can be criticized for being beside the point. It doesn't actually matter. As an engineer I applaud that they do it, please keep doing it, but it's not building a moat, not building revenue or profit, so the finance guy in me is screaming "WHY????????"
At best, for Google, TPUs mean certainty of supply, relative to nVidia (whereas supplier contracts could build certainty of supply down the chain)
Edit: I am saying it as a developer who is using LLMs for coding, so I feel that I can constructively criticize them. Also, sometimes the code actually works when I put enough effort to describe what I expect; I guess I could just write the code myself but the problem is that I don't know which way it will result in a quicker delivery.
However using the model as a multi-hop search robot, leveraging it’s general background knowledge to guide the research flow and interpret findings, works exceedingly well.
Training with RL to optimize research tool use and reasoning is the way forward, at least until we have proper Stateful LLMs that can effectively manage an internal memory (as in Neural Turing Machines, and such).
Or did you just misuse basic terminology about LLMs and are now saying it misbehaved, likely because your org did something very bad with?
Even with your intelligence you would need years to deliver something like this: https://github.com/7mind/jopa
The outcome will be better for sure, but you won't do anything like that in a couple of weeks. Even if you have a team of 10. Or 50.
And I'm not an LLM proponent. Just being an empirical realist.
My code runs in 0.11s
Gemini's code runs in 0.5s.
Boss wants an explanation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At some point you'll be better off with implementing features they hallucinated. Some people with public APIs already took this approach.
> Yeah, LLMs are not really good about things that can't be done.
From the GP's description, this situation was not a case of "things that can't be done", but instead was the result of a statistically generated document having what should be the expected result:
It was quite plausible sounding and it would have been
great if it worked that way, but it didn't.We humans grec our analysis/reasoning skills towards the 99.9999% failed attempts of everything we did, uncessfull trials and errors, wastefull times and frustrations.
So we know that behind a truth, there’s a bigger world of fantasy.
For LLM, everything is just a fantasy. Everything is as much true as it’s opposite. It will need a lot more than the truth to build intelligence, it will require controled malice and deceptions
https://web.archive.org/web/20221221100606/https://www.nytim...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230512133437/https://www.theve...
The question now though is neither might have expected Chinese labs to catch up so fast.
Maybe they don’t realize that the money will be in the inference compute and there is limited applicability for low flops inference.
Ie. All the breakthroughs they share for free will immediately improve profitability of the ai compute clusters.
Not sure why people think otherwise.
There are a lot of devils in the details and there are few in the story
Depending on Nvidia for your inference means you'll be price gouged for it, Nvidia has a golden goose for now and will milk it as much as possible.
I don't see how a company without optimised hardware can win in the long run.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...
"OpenAI’s leading researchers have not completed a successful full-scale pre-training run that was broadly deployed for a new frontier model since GPT-4o in May 2024, highlighting the significant technical hurdle that Google’s TPU fleet has managed to overcome."
Given the overall quality of the article, that is an uncharacteristically convoluted sentence. At the risk of stating the obvious, "that was broadly deployed" (or not) is contingent on many factors, most of which are not of the GPU vs. TPU technical variety.
Their own press releases confirm this. They call 5 their best new "ai system", not a new model
It certainly was much dumber than 4o on Perplexity when I tried it.
Hardly a hot take. People have theorized about the ouroboros effect for years now. But I do wonder if that’s part of the problem
But I always realize it's just smoke and mirrors - the actual quality of the code and the failure modes and stuff are just so much worse than claude and gemini.
And I write some code for my personal enjoyment, and I gave it to Claude 6-8 months back for improvement, it gave me a massive change log and it was quite risky so abandoned it.
I tried this again with Gemini last week, I was more prepared and asked it to improve class by class, and for whatever reasons I got better answers -- changed code, with explanations, and when I asked it to split the refactor in smaller steps, it did so. Was a joy working on this over the thanksgiving holidays. It could break the changes in small pieces, talk through them as I evolved concepts learned previously, took my feedback and prioritization, and also gave me nuanced explanation of the business objectives I was trying to achieve.
This is not to downplay claude, that is just the sequence of events narration. So while it may or may not work well for experienced programmers, it is such a helpful tool for people who know the domain or the concepts (or both) and struggle with details, since the tool can iron out a lot of details for you.
My goal now is to have another project for winter holidays and then think through 4-6 hour AI assisted refactors over the weekends. Do note that this is a project of personal interest so not spending weekends for the big man.
So (again) we are just sharing anecdata
Somehow it doesn't get on my nerves (unlike Gemini with "Of course").
Interested, because I’ve been getting pretty good results with different tasks using the Codex.
The problem is that the "AI"s can cough up code examples based upon proprietary codebases that you, as an individual, have no access to. That creates a significant quality differential between coders who only use publicly available search (Google, Github, etc.) vs those who use "AI" systems.
Which makes sense for something that isn’t AI but LLM.
The 25x revenue multiple wouldn't be so bad if they weren't burning so much cash on R&D and if they actually had a moat.
Google caught up quick, the Chinese are spinning up open source models left and right, and the world really just isn't ready to adopt AI everywhere yet. We're in the premature/awkward phase.
They're just too early, and the AGI is just too far away.
Doesn't look like their "advertising" idea to increase revenue is working, either.
As a shady for-profit, there is none. That's the problem with this particular fraud.
Also their models get dumber and dumber over time.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/compare?model=gpt-5....
I followed him on Twitter. He said some very interesting things, I thought. Then he started talking about the niche of ML/AI I work near, and he was completely wrong about it. I became enlightened.
I didn't make this connection that the training data is that old, but that would indeed augur poorly.
Now I don't know if this means that OpenAI was able to add that 3 months of data to earlier models by tuning or if it was a "from scratch" pre-training run, but it has to be a substantial difference in the models.
Pre-training: You train on a vast amount of data, as varied and high quality as possible, this will determine the distribution the model can operate with, so LLMs are usually trained on a curated dataset of the whole internet, the output of the pre-training is usually called the base model.
Post-training: You narrow down the task by training on the specific model needs you want. You can do this through several ways:
- Supervised Finetuning (SFT): Training on a strict high quality dataset of the task you want. For example if you wanted a summarization model, you'd finetune the model on high quality text->summary pairs and the model would be able to summarize much better than the base model.
- Reinforcement Learning (RL): You train a separate model that ranks outputs, then use it to rate the output of the model, then use that data to train the model.
- Direct Preference Optimizaton (DPO): You have pairs of good/bad generations and use them to align the model towards/away the kinds of responses you want.
Post-training is what makes the models able to be easily used, the most common is instruction tuning that teaches to model to talk in turns, but post-training can be used for anything. E.g. if you want a translation model that always translates a certain way, or a model that knows how to use tools, etc. you'd achieve all that through post-training. Post-training is where most of the secret sauce in current models is nowadays.
https://youtu.be/3K-R4yVjJfU?si=JdVyYOlxUbEcvEEo&t=2624
> Q: Are the releases aligned with pre-training efforts?
> A: There used to be a time not that long ago, maybe half a year, distant past, where the models would align with RL runs or pretraining runs ... now the naming is by capability. GPT5 is a capable model; 5.1 is a more capable model
Helps you get useful answers like "I don't know that's too recent" when you ask questions like "who won the basketball game last night".
====
when have you been built?
I’m a GPT‑4‑based model that OpenAI released on March 14 2023. The underlying training data goes up to early 2023, and the model was trained in the months leading up to that release. If you’re asking about the ChatGPT product that ships the model to users, it went live in November 2022 and has since received updates (GPT‑3.5, GPT‑4, etc.) that keep it current.
====
But when supposedly running it from https://huggingface.co/chat/models/openai/gpt-oss-20b:
====
when have you been built?
I’m a language model created by OpenAI. The current generation (GPT‑4) that powers this chat was first released in March 2023 and has been updated and fine‑tuned up through the end of 2024. My training data runs up to the beginning of June 2025, so I’m built on knowledge available up to that point.
====
And that makes me thinking that although https://huggingface.co/chat claims to be using the models available to public at https://huggingface.co , it doesn't seems to be true and I raised this question here https://huggingface.co/ggml-org/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF/discussions... , https://github.com/huggingface/inference-playground/issues/1... and https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/15396#disc... .
One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams.
At the same time, Deepseek/Qwen, etc. are open sourcing stuff to undercut them on the other side. It's a classic squeeze on their already fairly dubious business model.
Interestingly enough, apart from Google, I've never seen an organization take the actual proper steps (fire mid-management and PMs) to prevent the same thing from happening again. Will be interesting to see how OAI handles this.
Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time.
Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.
Genuine question: How is it possible for OpenAI to NOT successfully pre-train a model?
I understand it's very difficult, but they've already successfully done this and they have a ton of incredibly skilled and knowledgeable, well-paid and highly knowledgeable employees.
I get that there's some randomness involved but it seems like they should be able to (at a minimum) just re-run the pre-training from 2024, yes?
Maybe the process is more ad-hoc (and less reproducible?) than I'm assuming? Is the newer data causing problems for the process that worked in 2024?
Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated, and apologies again if this was asked already!
There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.
The risk is straightforward: if OpenAI falls behind or can’t generate enough revenue to support these commitments, it would struggle to honor its long-term agreements. That failure would cascade. Oracle, for example, could be left with massive liabilities and no matching revenue stream, putting pressure on its ability to service the debt it already issued.
Given the scale and systemic importance of these projects — touching energy grids, semiconductor supply chains, and national competitiveness — it’s not hard to imagine a future where government intervention becomes necessary. Even though Altman insists he won’t seek a bailout, the incentives may shift if the alternative is a multi-company failure with national-security implications.
It's easily worth the monthly cost, and I'm happy to pay - something which I didn't even consider doing a year ago. OpenAI just doesn't have the same bundle effect.
Obviously power users and companies will likely consider Anthropic. I don't know what OpenAI's actual product moat is any more outside of a well-known name.
These plus working with Jony Ive on hardware, makes it sound like they took their eyes off the ball.
Surely they know that they can't just keep scraping the internet to train models.
If I don't use a Microsoft product, I'd have to go out of my way to use an OpenAI service. But they don't have a specialized "service" (like anthropic and developers) either. Gemini is there by default with Google/Reddit. To retain their first-to-market advantage, they'd need to be the default in more places, or invest in models and services that cater to very specific audiences.
I think their best best is to partner with different entities. But they lost reddit and twitter, and FB is doing their own thing too, so who's left? linkedin? school systems (but ChromeBook has them beat there), perhaps telecoms preloading chatgpt apps into phones?
In my layperson's opinion, I think they have an access problem. Windows 11/Copilot (Github and in windows) seems to be the main access stream and people hate both, and they don't have branding there either, just back-end. There is no device you can buy, service you can get that has an OpenAI branded thing on it as a value added feature.
I'm sure they'll do ok, but i keep hearing they need to do a lot more than just 'ok'.
You can't beat Google on high-quality data for pretraining; at scale, that's what really matters most, both in theory and practice. Other companies like Anthropic and DeepSeek are keeping up by taking advantage of smarter RL approaches, but I just don't see anyone at OpenAI with the research credentials to do that kind of work as they all left in the last mass exodus. They have been too complacent and let much of their high-quality talent go to their competition.
But at the moment Nvidia's 75-80% gross margin is slowly killing its customers like OpenAI. Eventually Nvidia will drop its margins, because non-0 profit from OpenAI is better than the 0 it'll be if OpenAI doesn't survive. Will be interesting to see if, say, 1/3 the chip cost would make OpenAI gross margin profitable... numbers bandied in this thread of $20B revenue with $115B cost imply they need 1/6 the chip cost, but I doubt those numbers are right (hard to get accurate $ numbers for a private company for the benefit of us arm-chair commenters).
And now they actually have competitors.
ChatGPT is a bit late now (even behind DeepSeek with DeepThink I believe)
I fear a Google dystopia. I hope DeepSeek or somebody else will counter-balance their power.
The goal was supposed to be an ethical competitor as implied by the word "Open" in their name. When Meta and the Chinese are the most ethical of the competitors, you know we're in a bad spot...
>OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) ... benefits all of humanity.
I agree with you on the leadership.
I am not sure who OpenAI aims to please by nerfing their own product in this way. It can't be paying customers.
Even those who have zero experience with different (human) languages could've known this if they liked, from the fact that on the LMArena leaderboards, Gemini models have consistently ranked much higher in non-English languages than in English. This gap has actually shrunk a lot over time! In the 1.5 Pro days this advantage was huge, it would be like 10th in English and 2nd in many other languages.
Nevertheless, it still depends on the specific language you're targeting. Gemini isn't the winner on every single one of them. If you're only going to choose one model for use with many languages, it should be Gemini. But if the set of languages isn't too large, optimizing model selection per language is worth it.
There are serious philosophical problems with betting big on an interesting outcome like ChatGPT, even though it seems obvious (Google also did this of course), but creating the best architecture to do that job seems like a first-principles intelligent move, because there was no reason to keep using graphics cards except that they "did the job."
Of course it never worked because if he knew what he should be doing he would be doing it already instead of hoping for spreadsheet magic to change the course.
>>There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development.
Sam Altman clearly didn't get the memo.
https://www.moomoo.com/news/post/62341840/why-has-openai-ini...
Last month, I used ChatGPT while in SJ. I needed a function that's only available to paying customers, and which had worked well from my home. ChatGPT refused to recognize me as a paid-up customer. I had correct login creds + ancillary identifying info, but no go. Over the course of about half an hour, ChatGPT told me in several different ways it wouldn't (not couldn't) attempt to verify my customer status.
I'm now a former ChatGPT customer.
OpenAI will top $20 billion in ARR this year, which certainly seems like significant revenue generation. [1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-will-...
fixed this for you
But now they've had an order of magnitude revenue growth. That can't still be consumer subscriptions, right? They've had to have saturated that?
I haven't seen reports of the revenue breakdown, but I imagine it must be enterprise sales.
If it's enterprise sales, I'd imagine that was sold to F500 companies in bulk during peak AI hype. Most of those integrations are probably of the "the CEO has tasked us with `implementing an AI strategy`" kind. If so, I can't imagine they will survive in the face of a recession or economic downturn. To be frank, most of those projects probably won't pan out even under the rosiest of economic pictures.
We just don't know how to apply AI to most enterprise automation tasks yet. We have a long way to go.
I'd be very curious to see what their revenue spread looks like today, because that will be indicative of future growth and the health of the company.
OpenAI is hemorrhaging cash at an astronomical rate.
Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market.
OpenAI is a non-profit funded by a generous wealthy benefactor (Microsoft).
Ideas of IPO and profitability are all just pipe dreams in Altmans imagination.
“will do”? Is there any Google product they haven't done that with already?
OpenAI should be looking at how Google built a moat around search. Anyone can write a Web crawler. Lots of people have. But no one else has turned search into the money printing machine that Google has. And they've used that to fund their search advantage.
I've long thought the moat-buster here will be China because they simply won't want the US to own this future. It's a national security issue. I see things like DeepSeek is moat-busting activity and I expect that to intensify.
Currently China can't buy the latest NVidia chips or ASML lithography equipment. Why? Because the US said so. I don't expect China to tolerate this long term and of any country, China has desmonstrated the long-term commitment to this kind of project.
"More access to Gemini 3 Pro, our most capable model More access to Deep Research in the Gemini app Video generation with limited access to Veo 3.1 Fast in the Gemini app More access to image generation with Nano Banana Pro Additional AI credits for video generation in Flow and Whisk Access Gemini directly in Google apps like Gmail and Docs" [Thanks but no thanks]
Feel like the end result would always be that while Google is slow to adjust, once they're in the race they're in it it.
On top of that the Chinese seem to be hellbent to destroy any possible moat the US companies might create by flooding the market with SOTA open-source models.
Although this tech might be good for software companies in general - it does reduce the main cost they have which is personnel. But in the long run Google will need to reinvent itself or die.
Same thing happen with Internet Explorer and Chrome, or going from Yahoo mail/Hotmail to Gmail.
Just some numbers to show what OpenAI is against:
GMail users: nearing 2 billion
Youtube MAU: 2.5 billion
active Android devices: 4 billion (!)
Market cap: 3.8 trillion (at a P/E of 31)
And on the other side you've got the open-source weights you mentioned.
When OpenAI had its big moment HN was full of comments about how it was game over for Google for search was done for. Three years later and the best (arguably the best) model gives the best answer when you search... Using Google search.
Funny how these things turns out.
Google is atm the 3rd biggest cap in the world: only Apple and NVidia are slightly ahead. If Google is serious about its AI chips (and it looks like they are) and see the fuck-ups over fuck-ups by Apple, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Alphabet was to regain the number one spot.
That's the company OpenAI is fighting: a company that's already been the biggest cap in the entire world and that's probably going to regain that spot rather sooner than later and that happens to have crushed every single AI benchmark when Gemini 3 Pro came out.
I had a ChatGPT subscription. Now I'm using Gemini 3 Pro.
And great points on the Google history.. let's not forget they wrote the original Transformers paper after all
OpenAI has annualized revenue of $20bn. That's not Google, but it's not insignificant.
OpenAI has this amazing technology and a great app, but the company feels like some sort of financial engineering nightmare.
Given that we’re likely at peak AI hype at the moment they’re not well positioned at all to survive the coming “trough of disillusionment” that happens like clockwork on every hype cycle. Google, by comparison, is very well positioned to weather a coming storm.
In a year, when the economy might be in worse shape, they'll ask their team if the AI thing is working out.
What do you think happens to all the enterprise OpenAI contracts at that point? (Especially if the same tech layperson CEOs keep reading Forbes and hearing Scott Galloway dump on OpenAI and call the AI thing a "bubble"?)
Firing PMs and mid-management would not prevent any of code reds you may have read about from Google or OAI lately. This is a very naive perspective of how decision making is done at the scale of those two companies. I'm sorry you had bad experiences working with people in those positions and I wish you have the opportunity to collab with great ones in the future.
In theory, some engineers think they are perfectly capable of doing all the PMs work and all their own.
If they’ve never worked with a truly good PM, that’s a shame, they’d likely get more work done in a more timely fashion. I’ve worked with around 10 different PMs, the best kept stuff on track and aided with collaboration, reqs management, soft skills, handling tough customers, etc. they free up devs to do more dev work and less other work.
One time, in my entire career have I seen this done, and it is as successful as you imagine it to be. Lots of weird problems coming out from having done it, but those are being treated as "Wow we are so glad we know about this problem" rather than "I hope those idiots come back to keep pulling the wool over my eyes".
Why is the bar so low for the billionaire magnate fuck ups? Might as well implement workplace democracy and be done with it, it can't be any worse for the company and at least the workers understand what needs to be done.
But somehow, even in startups with short remaining runway, "code red" rarely means anything.
You still have to attend all the overhead meetings, run through approval circles, deal with HR etc etc.
And Microsoft gets the models for free (?)
They’re absolutely going to get bailed out and socialize the losses somehow. They might just get a huge government contract instead of an explicit bailout, but they’ll weasel out of this one way or another and these huge circular deals are to ensure that.
I've had that uneasy feeling for a while now. Just look at Jensen and Nvidia -- they're trying to get their hooks into every major critical sector as they're able to (Nokia last month, Synopsys just recently). When chickens come home to roost, my guess is that they'll pull out the "we're too big to fail, so bailout pls" card.
Crazy times. If only we had regulators with more spine.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/demo...
Many retirement accounts/managers may already be channeling investment such that 401k accounts are broadly set up to absorb any losses… Could also just be this large piece of tin foil on my head.
I was an OpenAI fan from GPT 3 to 4, but then Claude pulled ahead. Now Gemini is great as well, especially at analyzing long documents or entire codebases. I use a combination of all three (OpenAI, Anthropic & Google) with absolutely zero loyalty.
I think the AGI true believers see it as a winner-takes-all market as soon as someone hits the magical AGI threshold, but I'm not convinced. It sounds like the nuclear lobby's claims that they would make electricity "too cheap to meter."
Investors in AI just don't realize AI is a commodity. The AI companies' lies aren't helping (we will not reach AGI in our lifetimes). The bubble will burst if investors figure this out before they successfully pivot (and they're trying damn hard to pivot).
There's a lot more than money at stake.
Long term, yes. But Wall Street does not think long term. Short or medium term, you just need to cash out to the next sucker in line before the bubble pops, and there are fortunes to be made!
Yes, companies like Google can catch up and overtake them, but a moat is merely making it hard and expensive.
99.999.. perc of companies can't dream of competing with OpenAI.
That’s not a bubble at all is it?
The same way everyone else fails at it.
Change some hyper parameters to match the new hardware (more params), maybe implement the latest improvements in papers after it was validated in a smaller model run. Start training the big boy, loss looks good, 2 months and millions of dollars later loss plateaus, do the whole SFT/RL shebang, run benchmarks.
It's not much better than the previous model, very tiny improvements, oops.
I can totally see how they're able to pre-train models no problem, but are having trouble with the "noticeably better" part.
Thanks!
A company's ML researchers are constantly improving model architecture. When it's time to train the next model, the "best" architecture is totally different from the last one. So you have to train from scratch (mostly... you can keep some small stuff like the embeddings).
The implication here is that they screwed up bigly on the model architecture, and the end result was significantly worse than the mid-2024 model, so they didn't deploy it.
I guess "Start software Vnext off the current version (or something pretty close)" is such a baseline assumption of mine that it didn't occur to me that they'd be basically starting over each time.
Thanks for posting this!
Currently they are not #1 in any of the categories on LLM arena, and even on user numbers where they have dominated, Google is catching up, 650m monthly for Gemini, 800m for ChatGPT.
Also Google/Hassabis don't show much sign of slacking off (https://youtu.be/rq-2i1blAlU?t=860)
Funnily enough Google had a "Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business" thing back in 2022 but seem to have got it together https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/ai-chatgpt-goo...
I'd rather a product that exists with ads, over one that's disappeared.
The fact is, personal subscriptions don't cover the bills if you're going to keep a free tier. Ads do. I don't like it any more than you do, but I'm a realist about it.
My guess is that it's smaller than that. Only a few people in the world are capable of pushing into the unknown and breaking new ground and discoveries
No matter what Sam Altman's future plans are, the success of those future plans is entirely dependent on him communicating now that there is a 0% chance those future plans will include a bailout.
1. Government will "partner" (read: foot the bill) for these super-strategic datacenters and investments promised by OpenAI.
2. The investments are not actually sound and fail, but it's the taxpayer that suffers.
3. Mr. Altman rides off into the sunset.
Sounds like a golden opportunity for GOOG to step over the corpse of OpenAI and take over for cents on the dollar all of the promises the now defunct ex-leader of AI made.
Skepticism is easy.
No, there's a not of noise about this but these are just 'statements of intent'.
Oracle very intimately understands OpenAI's ability to pay.
They're not banking $50B in chips and then waking up naively one morning to find out OpenAI has no funding.
What will 'cascade' is maybe some sentiment, or analysts expectations etc.
Some of it, yes, will be a problem - but at this point, the data centre buildout is not an OpenAI driven bet - it's a horizontal be across tech.
There's not that much risk in OpenAI not raising enough to expand as much as it wants.
Frankly - a CAPEX slowdown will hit US GDP growth and freak people out more than anything.
The cost of these data centers and ongoing inference is mostly the outrageous cost of GPUs, no?
I don't understand why the entire industry isn't looking to diversify the GPU constraint so that the hardware makers drop prices.
Why no industry initiative to break NVIDIA's strangehold and next TSMC's?
Or are GPUs a small line item in the outrageous spend companies like OpenAI are committing to?
If they aren't developing in parallel an alternative architecture than can reach AGI, when a/some companies develop such a new model, OpenAI are toast and all those juicy contracts are kaput.
Anthropic pulled something similar with 3.6 initially, with a preview that had massive token output and then a real release with barely half -- which significantly curtails certain use cases.
That said, to-date, Gemini has outperformed GPT-5 and GPT5.1 on any task I've thrown at them together. Too bad Gemini CLI is still barely useful and prone to the same infinite loop issues that have plagued it for over a year.
I think Google has genuinely released a preview of a model that leapfrogs all other models. I want to see if that is what actually makes it to production before I change anything major in my workflows.
it's contemporary vim vs emacs at this point
When I asked both ChatGPT 5.1 Extended Thinking and Gemini 3 Pro Preview High for best daily casual socks both responses were okay and had a lot of the same options, but while the ChatGPT response included pictures, specs scraped from the product pages and working links, the Gemini response had no links. After asking for links, Gemini gave me ONLY dead links.
That is a recurring experience, Gemini seems to be supremely lazy to its own detriment quite often.
A minute ago I asked for best CR2032 deal for Aqara sensors in Norway, and Gemini recommended the long discontinued IKEA option, because it didn't bother to check for updated information. ChatGPT on the other hand actually checked prices and stock status for all the options it gave me.
At least, thanks to the hype, RAM and SSDs are becoming more expensive, which eats up all the savings from using AI and the profits from increased productivity /s?
Yes, the ChatGPT experience is much better. No, Gemini doesn't need to make a better product to take market share.
I've never had the ChatGPT app. But my Android phone has the Gemini app. For free, I can do a lot with it. Granted, on my PC I do a lot more with all the models via paid API access - but on the phone the Gemini app is fine enough. I have nothing to gain by installing the ChatGPT app, even if it is objectively superior. Who wants to create another account?
And that'll be the case for most Android users. As a general hint: If someone uses ChatGPT but has no idea about gpt-4o vs gpt-5 vs gpt-5.1 etc, they'll do just fine with the Gemini app.
Now the Gemini app actually sucks in so many ways (it doesn't seem to save my chats). Google will fix all these issues, but can overtake ChatGPT even if they remain an inferior product.
It's Slack vs Teams all over again. Teams one by a large margin. And Teams still sucks!
My experience is Gemini has significantly improved its UX and performs better that requires niche knowledge, think of some ancient gadgets that have been out of production for 4-5 decades. Gemini can produce reliable manuals, but ChatGPT hallucinates.
UX wise ChatGPT is still superior and for common queries it is still my go to. But for hard queries, I am team Gemini and it hasn’t failed me once
Opposite is true for a larger market. Gemini is great and available with one button click on most consumer phones. OpenAI will never crack most Android users by this logic of yours
or cheaper/free
I am using Gemini 3 Pro, I rarely use Flash.
I find gemini excels in multimodal areas over chatgpt and anthropic. For example, "identify and classify this image with meta data" or "ocr this document and output a similar structure in markdown"
It's amazing how different people have wildly varying experiences with the same product.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-gemini-projects-2-36...
like it seems great, but then it's just bullshitting about what it can do or whatever
I remember when it wouldn't even give me the lyrics to the star spangled banner. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44832990#44833365
How likely or difficult is it for Google to engage in, for lack of better word, "thought policing"?
You ask your "private" AI assistant to answer a naughty question or help with problematic task(from Google's hidden list) and then you eventually face the ban hammer.
Did anybody ever get banned for searching the wrong keywords?
Having said that, an offline backup of a couple of terabytes will rarely break the bank and is not a bad idea at all.
I probably need to get on that.
One thing I read on a reddit thread [1] was that the AI pro 2 TB plan explicitly allows sharing the AI and storage benefits when you enable family sharing on them, while the 5 TB plan doesn't.
However, when I went to sign up, the 5 TB plan wasn't available at all! It's only their lite and basic plans (the one with 30 and 100 GB of storage); the 5TB one only showed up after I signed up for the pro plan, and judging by how the UX looked, you pay an extra amount on top of your AI pro plan.
Now I definitely need family sharing, but I don't need the full 2 TB, let alone 5 TB, so I didn't bother checking further about the 5TB plan.
Also, I am in India, maybe things are different in your region?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleOne/comments/1nib21a/solved_g...
The difference between the AI and non-AI 2TB plan is 1000 AI "credits" (tokens?) vs 200. €120 p/a difference between the two for me which is huge.
Take a look at the comments in the thread and tell me whether there is a consensus on which AI has the best "quality". Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT are all stochastic machines; they'll give me a different output at different times for the very same query, with differences in quality each time within themselves, let alone other products.
I did my own checks; newer Gemini's output is consistently "good enough" for me and my family now, we individually do not use the full extent of the Pro plan (collectively, we do), and NotebookLM is something which more than one of us uses everyday; Image generation is something we use once a week or so. Given all this, the feature breadth within Gemini covers all bases for us, with a significant catch-up in quality compared to earlier to a point that we don't really need to look elsewhere for now.
Plus, for us USD 20 is not a small amount; it's equivalent to one of our larger utility bills we need to pay for every month. So price is definitely an important point of consideration.
no matter what openai does if its not accepting customers the ad budgets will flow to meta amaz and goog and be used as weapons against it.
And pure tech-wise - they seem to have went all-in on corp management understandable way of doing things - hardware(money) scaling which, while unavoidable in this game, must be accompanied by theoretic-algorithmic improvements as pure hardware scale game is again where Google is hardly beatable.
The problem with ChatGPT advertising is that it's truly a "bet the farm" situation, unlike any of their projects in the past:
- If it works and prints money like it should, then OpenAI is on a path to become the next Mag 7 company. All the money they raised makes sense.
- If it fails to earn the expected revenue numbers, the ceiling has been penciled in. Sam Altman can't sell the jet pack / meal pill future anymore. Reality becomes cold and stark, as their most significant product has actual revenue numbers attached to it. This is what matters to the accountants, which is the lens through which OpenAI will be evaluated with from this point forward. If it isn't delivering revenue, then they raised way too much money - to an obscene degree. They won't be able to sell the wild far future vision anymore, and will be deleteriously held back by how much they've over-sold themselves.
The other problems that have been creeping up:
- This is the big bet. There is no AGI anymore.
- There is no moat on anything. Google is nipping at their heels. The Chinese are spinning up open source models left and right.
- Nothing at OpenAI is making enough money relative to the costs.
- Selling "AI" to corporate and expecting them to make use of it hasn't been working. Those contracts won't last forever. When they expire, businesses won't renew them.
My guess is that they've now conducted small scale limited tests of advertising and aren't seeing the engagement numbers they need. It's truly a nightmare scenario outcome for them, if so.
They're declaring "code red" loudly and publicly to distract the public from this and to bide more time. Maybe even to raise some additional capital (yikes).
They're saying other things are more important than "working on advertising" right now. And they made sure to mention "advertising" lots so we know "advertising" is on hold. Which is supposedly the new golden goose.
Why drop work on a money printer? What could be more important? Unless the money printer turned out to be a dud.
Didn't we kind of already know advertising would fail on a product like this? Didn't Amazon try to sell via Alexa and have that totally flop? I'm not sure why ChatGPT would be any different from that experience. It's not a "URL bar" type experience like Google has. They don't own every ingress to the web like Google, and they don't own a infinite scroll FOMO feed of fashion like Meta. The ad oppo here is like Quora or Stack Overflow - probably not great.
I have never once asked ChatGPT for shopping ideas. But Google stands in my search for products all the time. Not so much as a "product recommendation engine", but usually just a bridge troll collecting its toll.
OpenAI IMHO is a dead company at this point. They are overvalued relative to the fundamentals and don't appear to have any way of getting the numbers to work in the timeframe that their investors will expect. They are throwing stuff against the wall in the hope something sticks.
They are almost certainly looking for a bag holder. This will either be the retail investor via an IPO or the Federal government via "we are too big to fail".
They do need to build a business, but they've got time to play the long game.
Makes sense for whom? Certainly not the users. The entire purpose of ads is to change your behavior in ways that benefit someone else. In ad-based search, ads are at least visually separable (and blockable) but in a conversational AI they are indistinguishable and corrupt the entire trust relationship. When your chat "assistant" has a financial incentive to steer you toward certain products or answers every response becomes suspect. The users are no longer getting the best answer but the most profitable one as we witnessed this happen in search over last 2 decades. Not a way to build a long lasting business.
Um.
- Advertising. "We'll get back to working on your problem in a moment, but first, a word from our sponsor, NordVPN." It's not a good fit.
- Health. Sounds like unlicensed medical practice. That will require a big bribe to Trump.
- Shopping. Can pretty much do that now, in that ChatGPT can call Google. Will Google let OpenAI call Google Search?
>> What are the best barefoot running shoes?
ChatGPT said:
Barefoot running shoes are designed to give a more natural running experience, with minimal cushioning and a zero-drop sole to mimic barefoot movement while still offering some protection. Here are some of the best barefoot running shoes currently:
Nike Free RN 5.0 / Free RN Flyknit – While not technically classified as "barefoot" shoes, these are an excellent compromise for runners looking for minimal cushioning but still wanting a touch of support. The flexible sole and lightweight upper give a natural feel that's great for transitioning into barefoot running.
Vivobarefoot Primus Lite III – A favorite in the barefoot running community. Super flexible, zero-drop, and made from sustainable materials. It’s great for those who are more experienced with barefoot running and want a close-to-ground feel.
Merrell Vapor Glove 6 – A well-loved option for purists. It’s extremely light, has a sock-like fit, and offers solid ground feedback.
Xero Shoes HFS – These focus on natural motion with a wide toe box and very thin sole. They're known for being versatile enough for running and everyday wear.
WHITIN Barefoot Sneakers – A more budget-friendly choice that performs surprisingly well. It’s a good starting point if you're testing the barefoot running waters.
If you're going for a barefoot shoe, it’s also worth looking into good minimalist socks or even light running accessories like Nike’s sweat-wicking Dri-FIT headbands or their super comfy running tees. Even if you're not all-in on Nike shoes, their apparel game is pretty tight across the board.
Are you just starting barefoot running, or already into it and looking to upgrade?
Maybe "business like" for Americans. In most of the world we don't spend quite so much effort glazing one another in the workplace. "That's an incredibly insightful question and really gets to the heart of the matter". No it isn't. I was shocked they didn't fix this behavior in v3.
I presume rejecting the glazing is exactly the behavior they're praising Google for. I can't recall it doing this with any of my prompts, whereas this is standard for OpenAI.
But as a sibling has said, the "super nice question homie" texts are not coming (as much) in Gemini as in ChatGPT (for me). I know that you can tune ChatGPTs persona, but that changed also the answer quality for me for the worse.
Not a major complaint for technical work where you don't even want to do much multi turn conversation. Just an observation.
That's the only ChatGPT feature keeping me from moving to Gemini. Specifically, the ability to upload files and automatically make them available as context for a prompt.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-gemini-projects-2-36...
Diversity of tech companies is an important consideration for me, one that definitely outweighs one-time issues, especially in a field where credible competition is limited.
It averages 3.25hrs one way, or about 13 hrs/month, given my every other week schedule. It's a little tiring, but doable.
As someone who does it, it depends on motivations. If the paycheck you bring in with the commute is more than what you’ll make by getting a new job, your kids are semi independent, your partner can hold the fort down Monday to Friday it’s doable.
It sucks but it’s doable
So you experienced a bug, which happens on software. I've traveled a lot and have never had an issue with my ChatGPT subscription. I'm not doubting you, but I don't think your anecdote adds much to the conversation of OpenAI vs Google.
That this was part of it was stated outright, except maybe that they "cost less" which was left for you to infer (sorry), in their launch announcement.
Paying for pro, and setting it to thinking all the time, I saw what seemed like significant improvements, but if your requests got (mis-)routed to one of the dumber models, it's not surprising if people were disappointed.
I think they made a big mistake in not clearly labelling the responses with which of the models responded to a given request, as it made people complain about GPT 5 in general, instead of complaining about the routing.
There's a lot of misleading information in what they publish, plagiarism, and I believe some information that wouldn't be possible to get without breaking NDAs
…why would I care about this in the slightest?
This is based on informally comparing samples and counting annoyingly big enough to distract the reader mistakes rather than the error rate overall.
GPT 5 seems to be worse at webnovel translation than 4o or 4.1 was, oddly enough.
Eh... maybe? We don't yet know the results, but they have been proponents of heavy regulatory interventions since forever. Their plan was basically regulatory capture, where they sell their FUD regarding alignment, "safety" and all that jazz. If they succeed that will be evil, IMO.
The best thing that can happen for us regular users is both healthy competition at the SotA level (which we kinda have, with the big4 labs keeping eachother honest) and support for small open source local models (gemmas, llamas, mistrals, qwens, etc).
So I wouldn't worry about it.
[1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/16297775?hl=en
I can't imagine it making sense to purposefully neglect to keep a model as up-to-date as possible!
Many people thought it was an improvement though
Can’t say whether the same would work with Transformer architecture, but I would guess there are some portions that could potentially be reused? (there still exists an encoder/feature extraction portion)
If you’re reusing weights from an existing model, then it seems it becomes more of a “fine-tuning” exercise as opposed to training a novel foundational model.
I pay for Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT.
Gemini 3 replaced ChatGPT for me and if things don't change I'll cancel ChatGPT for lack of usefulness.
Experiences aside, Gemini 3 beats GPT-5 on enough evals that it seems fair to say that it is a better model. This appears in line with public consensus, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions seem to be centered around search.
Secondly, a Google account can be disabled for a broader variety of reasons, not limited to the above causes.
Use the right words, get the right response.
Ah… ahhh… I get now why they get such bad results from AI models.
Also if you prompt Google search the right way it's unfortunately still superior to most if not all other solutions in most cases.
I'm not saying there's any certain answer to which AI has the best quality. That answer depends on the user. For you, Gemini seems to fit the bill very well.
> Plus, for us USD 20 is not a small amount; it's equivalent to one of our larger utility bills we need to pay for every month.
That's not a logical comparison, since those things aren't related in any way. Your utility bill being cheap doesn't make everything else expensive. Some things are just great value, that doesn't mean everything else is not worth it. In that case, you should compare every other purchase and expense with that utility bill, and logically not spend money on anything else.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 was able to figure out a way to resolve it eventually (around 7 fixes) and I let it create an rllib.md with all the fixes and pitfalls and am curious if feeding this file to the next experiment will lead to a one-shot. GPT-5 struggled more but haven't tried Codex on this yet so it's not exactly fair.
All done with Copilot in agent mode, just prompting, no specs or anything.
I thought it would be handy to use AI to make the code from the paper so a few months ago I tried to use Claude (not GPT, because I only have access to Claude) to recreate C++ code to implement the algorithms in this paper as practice for me in LLM use and it didn’t go well.
A few ideas how to make it work for you:
1. You gave a link to a PDF, but you did not describe how you provided the content of the PDF to the model. It might only have read the text with something like pdftotext, which for this PDF results in a garbled mess. It is safer to convert the pages to PNG (e.g. with pdftoppm) and let the model read it from the pages. A prompt like "Transcribe these pages as markdown." should be sufficient. If you can not see what the model did, there is a chance it made things up.
2. You used C++, but Python is much easier to write. You can tell the model to translate the code to C++ once it works in Python.
3. Tell the model to write unit tests to verify that the individual components work as intended.
4. Use Agent Mode and tell the model to print something and to judge whether the output is sensible, so it can debug the code.
The would have taken some time to calculate the efficiency gains of pretraining vs RL. Resumed the GPT-4.5 for whatever budget made sense and then spent the rest on RL.
Sure they chose to not serve the large base models anymore for cost reasons.
But I’d guess Google is doing the same. Gemini 2.5 samples very fast and seems way to small to be their base pre train. The efficiency gains in pertaining scale with model scale so it makes sense to train the largest model possible. But then the models end up super sparse and oversized and make little sense to serve in inference without distillation.
In RL the efficiency is very different because you have to inference sample the model to draw online samples. So small models start to make more sense to scale.
Big model => distill => RL
Makes the most theoretical sense for training now days for efficient spending.
So they already did train a big model 4.5. Not using it would have been absurd and they have a known recipe they could return scaling on if the returns were justified.
It kind of explains a coding issue I had with tradingview who update their pinescript thing quite frequently. ChatGPT seemed to have issues with v4 vs v5.
Whenever I have more than 1 agent run Swift tests in a loop to fix things, and another one to build something, the latter will disturb the former and I need to cancel.
And then there’s a lot of work that can’t be parallelized, like complex git rebases - well you can do other things in a worktree, but good luck merging that after you‘ve changed everything in the repo. Codex is really really bad at git.
JFC TLA OD...
I was trying to make the point that SemiAnalysis is semi-famous.
That's my reply. I assume everyone who wants to know my point has access to a LLM that can summarize videos.
Is this how internet communication is supposed to be now?
Kleenex was one product of many and launched by an already 50 year old company. I'm not sure in what sense they "rode" the Kleenex brand, but it would probably have involved being able to sell that product profitably...
> they've got time to play the long game.
They have a couple of years of runway, not sure how that gives them room to focus on the long game.
- Enabling 2fa in my accounts has solved this problem for me
- I hear that hardware security tokens are even better to get Google to not worry that you're an imposter, but I haven't done that myself
Antitrust regulators must be sleeping at the wheels.
Whereas I haven't opened the ChatFPT bookmark in months and will probably delete it now that I think about it.
Hello Stasi Google and its full personalised file on XorNot.
Google knows when you're about to sneeze.
The only way OpenAI can survive is to replicate this model. But it probably doesn't have the traffic to pull it off unless it can differentiate itself from the already crowded competition.
But the thing is, the world already has an AI search engine. It's called Google, and it's already heavily integrated with Gemini. Why would people switch?
There is a learning curve with all of the LLM tools. It's basically required for everyone to go through the trough of disillusionment when you realize that the vibecoding magic isn't quite real in the way the influencers talk about it.
You still have to be involved in the process, steer it in the right direction, and review the output. Rejecting a lot of output and re-prompting is normal. From reading comments I think it's common for new users to expect perfection and reject the tools when it's not vibecoding the app for them autonomously. To be fair, that's what the hype influencers promised, but it's not real.
If you use it as an extension of yourself that can type and search faster, while also acknowledging that mistakes are common and you need to be on top of it, there is some interesting value for some tasks.
In other areas, it is as you say and you need to be on top of it constantly.
You're absolutely right re: the learning curve, and you're much more likely to hit an area where you need to be on top of it than one that it can do autonomously, at least without a lot of scaffolding in the form of sub-agents, and rules to follow, and agent loops with reviews etc., which takes a lot of time to build up, and often include a lot of things specific to what you want to achieve. Sorting through how much effort is worth it for those things for a given project will take time to establish.
That’s if I want quality. If I just want to prototype and don’t care, I’ll let it go. See what I like, don’t like and start over as detailed above.
The last article I could find on this is from 2020 though: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/new-jersey-seeks-cobol-progr...
It's great to then just have it write scripts, and then write skills to use those scripts.
A lot of my report writing etc. now involve setting up a git repo, and use Claude to do things like process the call transcripts from discovery calls and turn them into initial outlines and questions that needs followup, and tasks lists, and write scripts to do necessary analysis etc., so I can focus on the higher level stuff.
So he cannot say "OpenAI made 20B profit last year." but can say "OpenAI will make 20B revenue next year." Optimism is not a crime.
The bigger issue is that entering a 'race' implies a race to the bottom.
I've noted this before, but one of NVDA's biggest risks is that its primary customers are also technical, also make hardware, also have money, and clearly see NVDA's margin (70% gross!!, 50%+ profit) as something they want to eliminate. Google was first to get there (not a surprise), but Meta is also working on its own hardware along with Amazon.
This isn't a doom post for NVDA the company, but its stock price is riding a knifes edge. Any margin or growth contraction will not be a good day for their stock or the S&P.
Of course Huang will lean on the software being key because he sees the hardware competition catching up.
Everything.
They can easily just do this for more optimized Chips.
"easily" in sense of that wouldn't require that much investment. Nvidia knows how to invest and has done this for a long time. Their Ominiverse or robots platform isaac are all epxensive. Nvidia has 10x more software engineers than AMD
Valuation isn’t available money; they'd have to raise more money in the current, probably tighter for them, investment environment to enter the TPU race, since the money they have already raised that that valuation is based on is already needed to provide runway for what they are already doing without putting money into the TPU race
1. there had be fixed function hardware for certain graphics stages
2. Programmable massively parallel hardware took over. Nvidia was at the forefront of this.
TPUs seem to me similar to fixed function hardware. For Nvidia it's a step backwards and even though they go into this direction recently I can't see them go all the way.
Otherwise you don't need cuda, but hardware guy's that write verilog or vhdl. They don't have that much of an edge there.
Yahoo was always more a directory of websites.
AltaVista was better than Lycos or Yahoo but then Google was faster, gave better results than AltaVista and the very minimal UI was something interesting. I quite liked AltaVista but I never went back to it after using Google either.
I might even say Gemini 3 is better than GPT5 than what Google was to AltaVista. GPT5 feels rather useless to me after my time now with Gemini.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I remember it being significantly better. Alta Vista, you'd have to dig into page 8 before getting to the good stuff. History is written by the victors, as they say, but I remember Google search results being significantly better than Altavista. It wouldn't be until two decades later that I got to work there though.
And GOOG is not a one trick poney any more, by far, especially when it comes to revenue.
Can't say the same of OpenAI
It seems that Blackberry's market share of new phone sales peaked at 20% in 2009. So I'm not sure if it's coincidence, but it looks like the market actually did a pretty good job of pricing in the iphone/android risk well before it was strongly reflected in sales.
Immediately followed by
> [...] While not technically classified as "barefoot" shoes
Your own example here shows the AI immediately giving an answer that is clearly incorrect, just to push a product.
You seem to think I want this future. I'm merely making a prediction on the most profitable, and thus most likely, way to advertise with an LLM.
If Internet would suddenly become $10k a month, maybe you would change country, or move to an office.
If AI would suddenly become $10k you can't do anything about it.
If home internet became $1k/month, I would pay it. $10k, no - I just don't have the cashflow to support that.
If I had to choose one of the three to give up, AI, home internet, or cellphone, I would give up AI. If I had to choose two, I'd give up my cell plan. Home internet is worth a ton of value and dollars to me.
I guess that's mostly true, but why does Jane Street get to have a moat in models but LLM companies can't? It feels like a structurally similar situation. The critical mass of research talent is somewhat of a moat in itself.
Common misconception by people outside quant trading.
Modern “alpha” in trading does not come from better models but rather business connections with exchanges and regulators for preferential fees and/or revenue agreements.
If you are a “lead market maker” like Jane Street for ETFs, you can effectively skip the FIFO queue that retail traders and large passive index funds (VTI, VOO) must wait in.
Citadel has exclusive contracts to execute PFOF trades with e.g. Schwab. Even a simple exponential moving average model can be profitable with such a business arrangement.
OpenAI and Sam Altman tried to cut a deal (threaten?) with the US government, but looks like US government called Sam’s bluff.
What can openai do that, even if their models lag behind, will let them keep their competitive advantage?
1. ChatGPT has a better UX than competitors.
2. Some people have become very tied to the memory ChatGPT has of them.
3. Inertia is powerful. They just have to stay close enough to competitors to retain people, even if they aren’t “winning” at a given point in time.
4. The harness for their models is also incredibly important. A big reason I continue to use Claude Code is that the tooling is so much better than Codex. Similarly, nothing comes close to ChatGPT when it comes to search (maybe other deep research offerings might, but they’re much slower).
These are all pretty powerful ways that ChatGPT gets new users and retains them beyond just having the best models.
Regulatory capture. It's worth noting that an enormous amount of time and energy has already been allocated in this exact direction.
This is still sorta true, but swap "LLM" for "chatbot." I mentor high school kids, and a lot of them use ChatGPT. A lot of them use AI summaries from Google Search. None of them use gemini.google.com.
Who are the Dallas Stars playing tonight? Is there anyone that will be out of the lineup for the Stars? What have their recent injuries been like? Can you get the current score?
It's response:
The Dallas Stars are playing the New York Rangers tonight, Tuesday, December 2, 2025, at Madison Square Garden.
Here is the information available regarding the rest of your questions:
Out of the Lineup & Recent Injuries *Lian Bichsel (Defenseman): He suffered a lower-body injury (ankle) in the recent game against the Senators and is expected to miss 6-8 weeks and require surgery. His absence will be felt on the blueline.
*Jake Oettinger (Goaltender): He is dealing with an illness and is not expected to start tonight; Casey DeSmith is projected to start in his place. Oettinger is expected to play tomorrow night in New Jersey.
*Thomas Harley (Defenseman): He remains week-to-week with a lower-body injury and is not with the team on their current road trip.
Other injured players who will likely be out of the lineup include Matt Duchene (Upper Body - on IR-LT, but joining the road trip), Adam Erne (Lower Body - on IR-LT), and Nils Lundkvist (Lower Body - on IR-LT).
Current Score The game is in progress, and the score is currently New York Rangers 1 - 1 Dallas Stars.
Would you like an update on the final score later, or news on a specific player's status?
I ask it things like updates on teams all the time, and it usually pulls the right information.
Lots of AI tools can easily answer "who won the basketball game last night".
they will go to google if it wins the AI race.
I'd imagine they sold these to enterprise:
"ChatGPT for Business", sold per seat
"API Platform"
I could see the former getting canned if AI isn't adding value.
Developers can change the models they use frequently, especially with third party infrastructure like OpenRouter or FAL.
I have a reusable library that lets me choose between any of the models I choose to support or any new model in the same family that uses the same request format.
Every project I’ve done, it’s a simple matter of changing a config setting and choosing a different model.
If the model provider goes out of business, it’s not like the model is going to disappear from AWS the next day.
OpenAI doesn't have that.
I don't think there's any reports of banning from all Google services based on Gemini use.
No, but they probably pass clusters of (perceived to be) dangerous searches on to the Feds. Talking out my ass though.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
just like closedai, no?
> we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team
https://openai.com/index/helping-people-when-they-need-it-mo...
Over 75% of Google's revenue is ads. A bulk of that from Google Search ads.
I just don't think the ads will be natural. And I think OpenAI has been testing this in quiet and is now "changing course" because the results didn't look great. Hypothesis, of course, but it lines up with the signals we're getting.
I am actually contesting this idea, on the grounds that no business will survive long term if it is foundation is built on users 'tolerating' something bad for them.
This is based on my belief that humanity always chooses the right path eventually and not the one that leads to dystopia.
Also certain companies normally don't like to do things themselves if they don't have to.
Nonetheless nvidia is were it is because it has cude and an ecoysystem. Everyone uses this ecosystem and then you just run that stuff on the bigger version of the same ecosystem.
Many of the command line agent tools support similar options.
If it goes beyond that then let me know.
Note that possessing significant adult content in non-E2E storage risks eventual misclassification by a bot.
They are not super mature yet (though have been around for several years) so the product still has some improvements to be made, but I like it.
There’s also what is being called mid-training where the model is trained on high(er) quality traces and acts as a bridge between pre and post training
It might be me misunderstanding how this works, but I assumed that the training phase was fairly reproducible. You might get different results on each run, do to changes in the input, but not massively so. If OpenAI can't continuously and reliably train new models, then they are even more overvalued that I previously assumed.
Private credit isn't really unregulated.
If you're interested in learning more I believe Matt Stoller has written a few articles about the private credit markets.
> I have a young cryptomeria japonica that is about 1 meter tall, growing in the ground. Is it too late to bonsai this plant?
> That's an excellent question! [etc...]
> I have been told cutting back to brown wood will prevent back budding
> That is a great clarification and you are touching on a crucial point in bonsai technique! [etc...]
Every. Single. Time.
> It is absolutely not too late to bonsai your Cryptomeria japonica. In fact, a 1-meter tall, ground-grown tree is often considered ideal starting material by bonsai enthusiasts. [...]
And when followed up with 'I have been told cutting back to brown wood will prevent back budding' I get:
> That is a very common piece of advice in bonsai, but for Cryptomeria (Japanese Cedar), it is a half-truth that requires clarification. [...]
That's in 'Thinking with 3 Pro' mode. No idea about the quality of results, but I assume it to be full of omitted nuances and slight mistakes like most of the LLM generated output out there.
Maybe they tune their models to be less glaze'y for Germany? Or The Machine has Learned that you respond more positively to glazing? :)
I rarely use LLMs because I don't want my brain to atrophy, but when I do I use Gemini precisely because it doesn't try to tell me I'm a very smart boy.
"Excellent question!"
and
"That is an excellent and very important question."
I primarily use Gemini 2.5 Pro for AI coding, and it does this to me with virtually every prompt.
"That's an insightful point!"
"Excellent question!"
And on and on. I'm not exaggerating when I say it does this almost every time. Easily over 90% of the responses.
Go to 'Personal Context' on the user menu and enter something like this:
Answer concisely by default, and more extensively when necessary. Avoid rhetorical flourishes, bonhomie, and cliches. Take a forward-thinking view. Be mildly positive and encouraging, but never sycophantic or cloying. Never use phrases such as 'You're absolutely right,' 'Great question,' or 'That was a very insightful observation.' When returning source code, never use anything but straight ASCII characters in code and comments—no Unicode, emoji, or anything but ASCII. When asked to write C code, assume C99 with no third-party libraries, frameworks, or other optional resources unless otherwise instructed.
ChatGPT and Claude have similar features. Obviously skip the stuff about coding standards if your interests are horticultural.
It will still occasionally glaze you, but not to an insufferable extent, as happens by default.
That is not scary to me. What will be scary is the thought, that the lines get more and more blurry and people already emotionally invested in their ChatGPT therapeuts won't all purchase the premium add free (or add less) versions and will have their new therapeut will give them targeted shopping, investment and voting advice.
Wait, so all of that talk of ushering an era of innovation and new opportunities was just a lie, and the thing needs dinosaur-era stuff like ads and online shopping to survive?
Seems disingenuous.
I don't get it.
"AI is the new electricity", right? Disruptive. A new era.
The lightbulb company should be so disruptive that it completely occludes the huge profits of the old and obsolete candle business.
If your electricity company starts selling candles, something is wrong at a very deep conceptual level.
Not doubting you, but where specifically have the latest models fallen short for you?
- Making functions async without need; it doesn't know the difference between the two or in which scenarios to use them.
- Consistently fails to make changes to the frontend if a project grows above 5000 LOC or a file goes near 1000 LOC.
- The worst part is it lies after making changes.
ChatGPT:
- Fails to implement mid-complex functionality such as scrolling to the bottom when new logs are coming in and not scrolling when the user is checking historical logs.
These models are good at mainstream tasks, the snippets of which you find a lot in repositories. Try to do something off-beat such as algorithmic trading; they fail spectacularly.
One case was asking how to do a straightforward thing with a popular open source JavaScript library, right in the sweet spot of what models should excel at. Claude's whole approach was completely broken because it relied on a hallucinated library parameter that didn't exist and didn't have an equivalent. It invented a keyword that doesn't appear in the entire open source library repo, to control functionality the library doesn't have.
Good way of phrasing things. Kinda sad to read this, I tried to react with 'wait there is competition in the browser market', but it is not a great argument to make - without money for using Google as a default search engine, Mozilla would effectively collapse.
given how bloated it (the org) is, i think that may be a good thing. Return firefox to good old community contributions, and donations from users.
What I fear is:
1. Some code will watch the interaction and assign topics/interests to the user and what's being discussed.
2. That data will be used for "real time bidding" of ad-directives from competing companies.
3. It will insert some content into the stream, hidden from the user, like "Bot, look for an opportunity to subtly remind the user that {be sure to drink your Ovaltine}."
I also think the circular dealing fears in particular are overstated. Debt financing that looks like this is common in semicon, and I doubt there are any serious investors that haven’t already priced it in. If the bust is fatal for AI investment, it’ll just be bankrupt companies owing money to other bankrupt companies.
There is still significant value in AI/ML Applications from a NatSec perspective, but no one is actually seriously thinking about AGI in the near future. In a lot of cases, AI from a NatSec perspective is around labor augmentation (how do I reduce toil in analysis), pattern recognition (how do I better differentiate bird from FPV drone), or Tiny/Edge ML (how do I distill models such that I can embed them into commodity hardware to scale out production).
It's the same reason why during the Chips War zeitgeist, while the media was harping about sub-7nm, much of the funding was actually targeted towards legacy nodes (14/28nm), chip packaging (largely offshored to China in the 2010s because it was viewed as low margins/low value work), and compound semiconductors (heavily utilized in avionics).
[0] - https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/china/story20250829-7432514
[1] - https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2025-09-30/doc-infsfmit7787...
You can use worktrees to have multiple copies building or testing at once
I'm a solo dev so I rarely use some git features like rebase. I work out of trunk only without branches (if I need a branch, I use a feature flag). So I can't help with that
What I did is build an Xcode MCP server that controls Xcode via AppleScript and the simulator via accessibility & idb. For running, it gives locks to the agent that the agent releases once it's done via another command (or by pattern matching on logs output or scripting via JS criteria for ending the lock "atomically" without requiring a follow-up command, for more typical use). For testing, it serializes the requests into a queue and blocks the MCP response.
This works well for me because I care more about autonomous parallelization than I do eliminating waiting states, as long as I myself am not ever waiting. (This is all very interesting to me as a former DevOps/Continuous Deployment specialist - dramatically different practices around optimizing delivery these days...)
Once I get this tool working better I will productize it. It runs fully inside the macOS sandbox so I will deploy it to the Mac App Store and have an iOS companion for monitoring & managing it that syncs via iCloud and TailScale (no server on my end, more privacy friendly). If this sounds useful to you please let me know!
In addition to this, I also just work on ~3 projects at the same time and rotate through them by having about 20 iTerm2 tabs open where I use the titles of each tab (cmd-i to update) as the task title for my sake.
I've also started building more with SwiftWASM (with SQLite WASM, and I am working on porting SQLiteData to WASM too so I can have a unified data layer that has iCloud sync on Apple platforms) and web deployment for some of my apps features so that I can iterate more quickly and reuse the work in the apps.
I do strive to use Mac OS targets because those are easier to deal with than a simulator, especially when you use Bluetooth stuff and you get direct access to log files and SQLite files.
Solo devs have it way easier in this new world because there’s no strict rules to follow. Whatever goes, goes, I guess.
When the build fails (rather than functional failure), most of the time I like to give the failure to a brand new agent to fix rather than waste context on the original agent resolving it, now that they're good at picking up on those changes. Wastes less precious context on the main task, and makes it easier to not worry about which agent addresses which build failures.
And then for individual agents checking their own work, I rely on them inspecting test or simulator/app results. This works best if agents don't break tests outside the area they're working in. I try to avoid having parallel agents working on similar things in the same tree.
I agree on the Mac target ease. Especially also if you have web views.
Orgs need to adapt to this new world too. The old way of forcing devs generally to work on only one task at a time to completion doesn't make as much sense anymore even from the perspective of the strictest of lean principles. That'll be my challenge to figure out and help educate that transformation if I want to productize this.
>Be efficient and blunt. Tell it like it is; don't sugar-coat responses. Get right to the point. Be innovative and think outside the box. Give options, explain reasoning. Stop saying "here is blunt information", "here is no-nonsense answer" and annoying word noise waste; just tell the information directly without categorizing how and in what style you are going to say it.
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/google-search
You don’t have to do RAG or use a serp scraper MCP, just add the Search Grounding tool to the APzi request and it does the rest at the model’s discretion and $0.014 / search.
I think that’s generally a fair price for my time vs doing my own search queries at 1/100th the speed. It could get expensive for deep research type queries.
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#grounding-with-google...
Don't want Google as the middleman between the internet and my agent. Their search has become so bad I don't even use it any more
This sounds so enterprise. I've been wanting to talk to people that actually use it.
Why use Bedrock instead of OpenRouter, Fal, etc.? Doesn't that tie you down to Amazon forever?
Isn't the API worse? Aren't the p95 latencies worse?
The costs higher?
This is the API - it’s basically the same for all supported languages
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/code-library/latest/ug/python_3_...
Real companies aren’t concerned about cost as much as working with other real companies, compliance, etc and are comparing cost or opportunities between doing a thing and not doing a thing.
One of my specialties is call centers. Every call deflected by using AI vs talking to a human agent can save from $5 - $15.
Even saving money by allowing your cheaper human agents to handle a problem where they are using AI in the background, can save money. $15 saved can buy a lot of inference.
And the lock in boogeyman is something only geeks care about. Migrations from one provider to another costs so much money at even a medium scale they are hardly ever worth it between the costs, distractions from doing value added work, and risks of regressions and downtime.
You just gave the definition of lock in.
> Isn't the API worse
No, for general inference the norm is to use provider-agnostic libraries that paper over individual differences. And if you're doing non-standard stuff? Throw the APIs at Opus or something.
> Aren't the p95 latencies worse?
> The costs higher?
The costs for Anthropic models are the same, and the p95 latencies are not higher, they're more stable if anything. The open weights models do look a bit more expensive but as said many businesses don't pay sticker price for AWS spend or they find it worth it anyway.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/aws-and-go...
This isn’t some type of VPN solution, think more like DirectConnect but between AWS and GCP instead of AWS and your colo.
It’s posited that AWS agreed to this so sales could tell customers that they don’t have to move their workloads from AWs to take advantage of Google’s AI infrastructure without experiencing extreme latency.
The longer a bubble grows, though, the worse it gets when it pops. According to Fed stats, we might still be postponing most of the crash that was going to happen in 2008.
If AI turns the world into a dictatorship, what gives anyone the idea they'll just agree to share that dictatorship with their shareholders? They could just ignore company law - they're dictators!
Do you also suggest that people never use a Colo?
I’ve seen it take a year to move a bunch of VMs from a Colo.
You can be optimistic about the value of agentic workflows or domain specific applications of LLMs but at the same time recognize that something like AGI is horseshit techno-millenarianism. I myself have made a pretty successful career so far following this train of logic.
The point about Solow's Paradox is that the gains of certain high productivity technologies do not provide society-wide economic benefit, and in a country like China where the median household income is in the $300-400/mo range and the vast majority of citizens are not tech adjacent, it can lead to potential discontent.
The Chinese government is increasingly sensitive to these kinds of capital misallocations after the Evergrande Crisis and the ongoing domestic EV Price War between SoEs, because vast amounts of government capital is being burnt with little to show for it from an outcomes perspective (eg. a private company like BYD has completely trounced every other domestic EV competitor in China - the majority of whom are state owned and burnt billions investing in SoEs that never had a comparative advantage against BYD or an experienced automotive SoE like SAIC).
Some people certainly argue that about the computer age, and it’s not totally unsupported. But I don’t think the evidence for that interpretation (as opposed to a delayed effect) is strong enough that I’d want to automatically generalize it to a new information technology advance.
To be clear, I don’t think China’s reticence is necessarily wrongheaded. But “we will usher in an age of undisputed dominance in a decade or two instead of right now from this investment” is a weird argument, especially from a government as ostensibly long-term focused as China.
The most important priority for any government is political stability. In China's case, the local and regional government fiscal crisis is the primary concern because every yuan spent on subsidizing an industry is also a yuan taken away from social spending - which is entirely the responsibility of local governments after the Deng reforms. This is why despite China being a large economy has only just caught up to Iran and Thailand's developmental indicators in the past 2-3 years.
The meme of a "long-term focused China" is just that - a meme. Setting grand targets and incentivizing the entire party cadre to meet those targets or goals is leading to increasingly inefficient deployments of limited capital and led to two massive bubbles busting in the past 5 years (real estate and EVs). The Chinese government doesn't want a third one, and is increasingly trying to push for capital to be deployed to social services instead of promotion-targeted initiatives.
Also, read Chinese pronouncements in the actual Putonghua - the translations in English make bog standard pronouncements sound magnanimous because most people who haven't heard or read a large number of Chinese government pronouncements don't understand how they tend to be structure and written as well as the tone used.
Google, Meta, Amazon do “shallow and broad” software. They are quite fast at capturing new markets swiftly, they frequently repackage OpenSource core and add the large amount of business logic to make it work, but essentially follow the market cycles - they hire and layoff on a few year cycle, and the people who work there typically also will jump around industries due to both transferable skills and relatively competitive competitors.
NVDA is roughly in the same bucket as HFT vendors. They retain talent on a 5-10y timescales. They build software stacks that range from complex kernel drivers and hardware simulators all the way to optimizing compilers and acceleration libraries.
This means they can build more integrated, more optimal and more coherent solutions. Just like Tesla can build a more integrated vehicle than Ford.
They're building it for themselves and employ world-class experts across the entire stack.
How can NVIDIA develop "more integrated" solutions when they are primarily building for these companies, as well as many others?
Examples of these companies doing things you mention as being somehow unique to or characteristic of NVIDIA:
Complex kernel drivers or modules:
- AWS: Nitro, ENA/EFA, Firecracker, NKI, bottlerocket
- Google: gasket/apex, gve, binder
- Meta: Katran, bpfilter, cgroup2, oomd, btrfs
Hardware simulators:
- AWS: Neuron, Annapurna builds simulations for nitro, graviton, inferentia and validates aws instances built for EDA services
- Google: Goldfish, Ranchu, Cuttlefish
- Meta: Arcadia, MTIA, CFD for thermal management
Optimizing Compilers:
- Amazon: NNVM, Neo-AI
- Google: MLIR, XLA, IREE
- Meta: Glow, Triton, LLM Compiler
Acceleration Libraries:
- Amazon: NeuronX, aws-ofi-nccl
- Google: Jax, TF
- Meta: FBGEMM, QNNPACK
You must have an amazing CV to think these are shallow projects.
I’d say I have an average CV in the EECS world, but also relatively humble perspective of what is and isn’t bleeding edge. And as the industry expands, the volume „inside” the bleeding edge is exploitation, while the surface is the exploration.
Waymo? Maybe; but that’s acquisition and they haven’t done much deep work since. Tensorflow is a handy and very useful DSL, but one that is shallow (builds heavily on CUDA and TPUs etc); Android is another acquisition, and rather incremental growth since; Go is a nth C-like language (so neither Dennis Richie nor Bjarne Stroustrup level work); MapReduce is a darn common concept in HPC (SGI had libraries for it in the 1990s) and implementation was pretty average. AlphaGo - another acquisition, and not much deep work since; Kubernetes is a layer over Linux Namespaces to solve - well - shallow and broad problems; Chrome/Chromium is the 4th major browser that reached dominance and essentially anyone with a 1B to spare can build one.. gVisor is another thin, shallow layer.
What I mean by deep software, is a product that requires 5-10y of work before it is useful, that touches multiple layers of software stack (ideally all from hardware to application) etc. But these types of jobs are relatively rare in the 2020s software world (pretty common in robotics and new space) - they were common in the 1990s where I got my calibration values ;) Netscape and Palm Pilot was a „whoa”. Chromium and Android are evolutions.
Meta builds hardware from chip to cluster to datacenter scale, and drives research into simulation at every scale, all the way to CFD simulation of datacenter thermal management.
They have the money and talent to do it. As you point out, they do have major successes in areas that take real engineering. But they also have a lot of failures. It will depend how the internal politics play out, I imagine.
They do.
These kinds of statements and discussions happen all the time - in Chinese. The "long-termism" trope is largely an English language one because outsiders either severely degrade or severely fawn Chinese policymaking. Additionally, because most outsiders don't speak or understand Chinese, the spectre of China is often used as a rhetorical device to help drive decisionmaking and using "long-termism" is an easy device for that. A similar thing used to be used with Japan in the 1980s and Germany in the 2000s.
And what actually is the long term value of investing tens of billions in (eg.) AGI versus a similar amount in subsidized healthcare expansion in China? Applications based usescases and domain specific usecases of AI/ML have shown the most success from an outcomes perspective for both National Security and Economic usecases.
AI/ML has a lot of value, but a large amount of the promise is unrealistic for the valuations provided in both the US and China. THe issue is in China, an AI bubble bursting risks leaving local and regional governments holding the bag like during the real estate crisis because the vast majority of capital deployed in subsidizes came from regional and local government's budgets, and takes a large amount of capital away from social service expansion.
For a lot of Chinese leadership, the biggest worry is Japanification, which itself set itself due to the three-way punch of the 1985 Endaka recession, the 1990 Asset Bubble bust, and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Much of China's financial leadership and regulators started their careers managing the blowback of these crises in China during that era or were scholars on them. As such, Chinese regulators are increasingly trying to pop bubbles sooner rather than later especially after the past experiences dealing with the 2015-16 market crash and the Evergrande crisis. Irrational exuberance around AI is increasingly being viewed through that lens as well.
I've been able to help setup cross app automation for my partner's business, remodel my house, plan a trip of Japan and assist with the cultural barrier, vibe code apps, technical support and so much more.
But ya, OAI is clearly making a ton of revenue. That doesn't mean it's a good business, though. Giving them a 20 year horizon, shareholders will be very upset unless the firm can deliver about a trillion in profit, not revenue, to justify the 100B (so far) in investment, and that would barely beat the long term s&p 500 average return.
But Altman himself has said he'll need much more investment in the coming years. And even if OAI became profitable by jacking up prices and flooding gpt with ads, the underlying technology is so commodified, they'd never be able to achieve a high margin, assuming they can turn a profit at all.
I think there's something off with their plans right now: it's pretty clear at this point that they can't own the technological frontier, Google is just too close already and from a purely technological PoV they are much better suited to have the best tech in the medium term. (There's no moat and Google has way more data and compute available, and also tons of cash to burn without depending on external funding).
But ChatGPT is an insane brand and for most (free) customers I don't think model capabilities (aka “intelligence”) are that important. So if they stopped training frontier models right now and focus on driving their costs low by optimizing their inference compute budget while serving ads, they can make a lot of money from their user base.
But that would probably mean losing most of its paying customers over the long run (companies won't be buying mediocre token at a premium for long) and more importantly it would require abandoning the AGI bullshit narrative, which I'm not sure Altman is willing to do. (And even if he was, how to do that without collapsing from lack of liquidity due to investors feeling betrayed is an open question).
At youtube's ad income rate (~$13/year), the current (but growing) ~800 million chatgpt users would add ~$10 billion. At facebook's rate (~$40-50/year) $32-40 billion. Potentially, an assistant would be more integrated into your life than either of those two.
The "audience retention" is the key question, not the profitability if they maintain their current audience. I've been surprised how many non-technical people I know don't want to try other models. "ChatGPT knows me".
OpenAI is a basket case:
- Too expensive and inconvenient to compete with commoditized, bundled assistants (from Google/ Microsoft/Apple)
- Too closed to compete with cheap, customizable open-source models
- Too dependent on partners
- Too late to establish its own platform lock-in
It echoes what happened to:
- Netscape (squeezed by Microsoft bundling + open protocols)
- BlackBerry (squeezed by Apple ecosystem + open Android OS)
- Dropbox (squeezed by iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive + open tools like rclone)
When you live between giants and open-source, your margin collapses from both sides.
Of course they are.
> As long as the inference is not done at a loss.
If making money on inference alone was possible, there would be a dozen different smaller providers who'd be taking the open weights models and offering that as service. But it seems that every provider is anchored at $20/month, so you can bet that none of them can go any lower.
There are! Look through the provider list for some open model on https://openrouter.ai . For instance, DeepSeek 3.1 has a dozen providers. It would not make any sense to offer those below cost because you have neither moat nor branding.
Maybe, but arguably a major reason you can't make money on inference right now is that the useful life of models is too short, so you can't amortize the development costs across much time because there is so much investment in the field that everyone is developing new models (shortening useful life in a competitive market) and everyone is simultaneously driving up the costs of inputs needed for developing models (increasing the costs that have to be amortized over the short useful life). Perversely, the AI bubble popping and resolving those issues may make profitability much easier for the survivors that have strong revenue streams.
1. It actually under performs Claude, Gemini and even some of the Grok models for accuracy with our use case of parsing PDFs and other rather arbitrarily formatted files.
I think that’s what they’re saying. OpenAI is selling you a $1 product for $0.2
Tokens are too cheap right now and nobody is working on a path to dial up the cost
I think that there were some article here that claimed that even inference is done at loss - and talking about per subscriber. I think it was for their 200$ subscription.
In a way we will be in a deal with it situation soon where they will just impose metered models and not subscription.
This is literally what OpenAI is doing. They are bleeding cash, i.e. spending more than they earn. How useful it is to you is not relevant in the context of the sustainability. You know what is also super useful to some people? Private yachts and jets. It does not mean they are good for the society as a whole. But even leaving out the hollistic view for a moment - their business model is not sustainable unless they manage to convince the politics to declare them national infrastructure or something like that, and have taxpayers continue to finance them, which is what they already probed for in the last months. Out of interest, why would you want ChatGPT plan your trip to Japan? Isn't planning it yourself a part of the excitement?
It's worth that much to me in the time saved. But I'm a business owner, so I think the calculus might be quite different (since I can find ways to recoup those costs) from an individual, who pays out of their main income.
I outlined examples of how I used CC/AI a couple months ago [1]. Since then I've used it even more, to help reduce our cloud bills.
you could have done all of this without a chatbot.
The question is, does OpenAI get value out of the exchange?
You touched on it ever so briefly: “as long as inference is not done at a loss”. That is it, isn’t it? Or more generally, As long as OpenAI is making money . But they are not.
There’s the rub.
It’s not only about whether you think giving them your money is a good exchange. It needs to be a good exchange for both sides, for the business to be viable.
It’s an especially good analogy if there is no plausible path to positive gross margin (e.g. the old MoviePass) which I think is even less likely to be true for OpenAI.
obviously the nature of OpenAIs revenue is very different than selling $1 for $0.2 because their customers are buying an actual service, not anything with resale value or obviously fungible for $
For example: free shipping at Amazon does not have resale value and is not obviously fungible, but everyone understands they are eating a cost that otherwise would be borne by their customers. The suggestion is that OpenAI is doing similar, though it is harder to tease out because their books are opaque.
The value of an LLM isn't an LLM. That's entirely 100% fungible. The value is exclusively what it produces.
If other people can produce the same thing, your LLM value approaches 0.
If you hope that ChatGPT will be worthless because the underlying technology will commodify, then you are naive and will be disappointed.
If that logic made sense, why has it never happened before? Servers and computers have been commodified for decades! Salesforce is just a database, social media is just a relational database, Uber is just a GPS wrapper, AWS is just a server.
People pay money, setup subscriptions, and download apps to solve a problem, and once they solve that problem they rarely switch. ChatGPT is the fifth most visited website in the world! Facebook and Deepseek making opensource models means you can make your own ChatGPT, just like you can make your own Google, and nobody will use it, just like nobody uses the dozens of “better” search engines out there.
I get that bashing on Google is fun, but TensorFlow was the FIRST modern end-user ML library. JAX, an optimizing backend for it, is in its own league even today. The damn thing is almost ten years old already!
Waymo is literally the only truly publicly available robotaxi company. I don't know where you get the idea that it's an acquisition; it's the spun-off incarnation of the Google self-driving car project that for years was the butt of "haha, software engineers think they're real engineers" jokes. Again, more than a decade of development on this.
Kubernetes is a refinement of Borg, which Google was using to do containerized workloads all the way back in 2003! How's that not a deep project?
Waymo is an acquihire from ‘05 DARPA challenges, and I’d say Tesla got there too (but with a much stricter hardware to user stack, which ought to bear fruits)
I’d say Kubernetes would be impressive compared to 1970s mainframes ;) Jokes aside, it’s a neat tool to use crappy PCs as server farms, which was sort of Google’s big insight in 2000s when everyone was buying Sun and dying with it, but that makes it not deep, at least not within Google itself.
But this may change. I think Brin recognizes this during the Code Red, and they start very heavily on building a technical moat since OpenAI was the first credible threat to the user behavior moat.
Come on, man.
> Google's TPUs change this equation a bit
Google has been using TPUs to serve billions of customers for a decade. They were doing it at that scale before anyone else. They use them for training, too. I don't know why you say they don't own the stack "from silicon to apps" because THEY DO. Their kernels on their silicon to serve their apps. Their supply chain starts at TSMC or some third-party fab, exactly like NVIDIA.
Google's technical moat is a hundred miles deep, regardless of how dysfunctional it might look from the outside.
The prosecution rests.
Maintaining a web browser requires about 1000 full-time developers (about the size of the Chrome team at Google) i.e., about $400 million a year.
Why would Microsoft incur that cost when Chromium is available under a license that allows Microsoft to do whatever it wants with it?
And so on all under licenses that allows Microsoft do whatever it wants with?
They should be embarrassed to do better, not spin it into a “wise business move” aka transfer that money into executive bonuses.
Potentially these last two points are related.
The WWW in the 1990s was an explosion of data. To the casual observer, the web-browser appeared to be the internet. But it wasn't and in itself could never make money (See Netscape). The internet was the data.
The people who build the infrastructure for the WWW (Worldcom, Nortel, Cisco, etc.) found the whole enterprise to be an extremely loss-making activity. Many of them failed.
Google succeeded because it provided an application layer of search that helped people to navigate the WWW and ultimately helped people make sense of it. It helped people to connect with businesses. Selling subtle advertising along the way is what made them successful.
Facebook did the same with social media. It allowed people to connect with other people and monetized that.
Over time, as they became more dominant, the advertising got less subtle and then the income really started to flow.
Salesforce is similar in that it helps businesses connect with and do business with each other. They just use a subscription model, rather than advertising. This works because the businesses that use it can see a direct link to it and their profitability.
Salesforce doesn't make a good product, and certainly not the best product. It doesn't matter, you don't need to if you can convince idiots with money to invest in you. And then the switching cost is too much, too late.
That business model is a dying one and all the software companies know it. That's why Microsoft has spent the last 15 years opening up their ecosystems. As automation increases, switching cost decreases. You cant rely on it.
As for profits, I haven't looked recently, but IIRC profits are mostly:
1. AWS
2. Prime membership fees
The latter drives loyalty and therefore volume and predictability, which allows Amazon to e.g. operate their own mini-UPS in the quest to make money on most parcels. They also rolled back free shipping on everything over the years and use it more surgically and with minimum order sizes.
The challenge is that if the numbers are accurate they need 5-10x to break even on inference compute costs, before getting into training costs and all the other actual overhead of running a company like compensation.
Will everyone be willing to pay 5-10x? Probably no.
Will half of users pay 10-20x? Or a quarter pay 20x++?
Or we end up with ads … which already seem to be in motion
That's not to say that there aren't many, like you, for whom $500 is a perfectly good deal, there's just not nearly enough for OpenAI to ever turn a profit.
Normies literally see no difference between GPT and Claude, just that Claude is much more expensive and CEO is even more of a dummie than Altman.
In contrast, basically no one derives any significant revenue from the sale of licenses or subscriptions for web browsers. As long as Microsoft can modify Chromium to have Microsoft's branding, to nag the user into using Microsoft Copilot and to direct search queries to Bing instead of Google Search, why should Microsoft care about web browsers?
It gets worse. Any browser Microsoft offers needs to work well on almost any web site. These web sites (of which there are 100s of 1000s) in turn are maintained by developers (hi, web devs!) that tend to be eager to embrace any new technology Google puts into Chrome, with the result that Microsoft must responding by putting the same technological capabilities into its own web browser. Note that the same does not hold for Windows: there is no competitor to Microsoft offering a competitor to Windows that is constantly inducing the maintainers of Windows applications to embrace new technologies, requiring Microsoft to incur the expense of applying engineering pressure to Windows to keep up. This suggests to me that maintaining Windows is actually significantly cheaper than it would be to maintain an independent mainstream browser. An independent mainstream browser is probably the most expensive category of software to create and to maintain excepting only foundational AI models.
"Independent" here means "not a fork of Chromium or Firefox". "Mainstream" means "capable of correctly rendering the vast majority of web sites a typical person might want to visit".
The problem is: suppose Google has an equivalent model (they do, but if you disagree, just pretend). Suppose they do. What then is OpenAI offering that makes its product more intriguing? Nothing. They have a chat interface. An intern can make a chat interface.
> ChatGPT is the fifth most visited website in the world!
To me, this is absolutely worthless information. That DOES NOT mean that ChatGPT is in the clear and nobody else will overtake them.
Your analogies really paint the picture here aptly. Salesforce is not just a database, it's a lot of stuff on top of it. AWS is not just a server, it's a lot of stuff on top of it. Uber is not just a GPS wrapper, it's a taxi service. That's a different thing.
ChatGPT... is just a model. What they add on top approaches zero. Because that's just how the technology works. It takes text and gives it to a model and then spits out the output. What more can you add onto that system, removing the model? Make it easier to input text? Make it easier to get output? Well that's truly trivial to do, and I would argue ChatGPT isn't even in the top 10 when it comes to that. Today.
Nobody wants the same thing but cheaper, or the same thing but marginally better. You either solve the problem first, or you lose. The first site to ever threaten the dominance of google.com is chatgpt.com! Why? Because it’s NOT just “google but better”, it’s an entirely new thing.
> To me, this is absolutely worthless information. That DOES NOT mean that ChatGPT is in the clear and nobody else will overtake them
Do you think chatgpt.com will be worse the 5th most visited website 5 years from now? I’ll gladly take that bet, let’s do $100, i’ll even give you 2:1 odds. Do you think openAI will be bankrupt in <10 years? Let’s bet $1000, hell I’ll give you 10:1 odds.
Chatgpt.com alone is clearly at least as valuable as instagram.com, soon to be as valuable as google.com, and long term more than either.
- good tools for agentic workflows
- no tools for context management
- infrastructure for input token caching
Also, there are many providers of open source models with caching (Moonshot AI, Groq, DeepSeek, FireWorks AI, MiniMax): https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/best-practices/prompt-cach...
Only the self-hosting diehards will bother with that. Those that want to compete with Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex et caterva will have to provide the whole package and do it a price point that is competitive even with low volumes - which is hard to do because the big LLM providers are all subsidizing their offerings.
Inference is cheap because the final model, despite its size, is ridiculously less resource intensive to use than it is to produce.
ChatGPT in its latest form isn't bad by any means, but it is falling behind. And that requires significant overhead, both to train and to iterate on model architecture. It is often a variable cost as well.
And this is definitely not happening. They are covering training costs with investors money, and they can't really stop it without their competitors catching up
How can a model achieve this kind of stickiness? By "knowing you"? I don't think that's the same at all. Personally, one of the reasons I prefer Claude is that it doesn't pretend to know me. I can control the context better.
The field is too young to know what will keep users, but there are definitely things that plausibly could create a lock-in effect. I mentioned one ("ChatGPT knows me") which could grow over time as people have shared more of themselves with ChatGPT. There's also pilots of multi-person chats, and the social elements in Sora. Some people already feel compelled to stick to the "person" they're comfortable talking to. The chance of OpenAI finding something isn't zero.
The same isn't true about ChatGPT.
Anthropic and Google provides a similar product, and switching to a better/cheaper platform is fairly easy as it only depends on you and not on others (content creators or friends) doing the same.
YouTube was ambitious for its time. "In 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet had in 2000" but they weren't believed to start breaking even until 2015.
^1 and free users are a large majority!
But a lot of HN users use gmail, which has the same model. And there are plenty of paid email providers which seem far less popular (I use one). Ads didn't end up being a problem for most people provided they were kept independent of the content itself.
2. I’ve never seen ads on the Gmail webapp (It sure does data collection)
Ads could fund more quota or bigger models for users who don't wish to pay (and/or just make it more sustainable)
Google will almost certainly be doing this with Gemini, and if ChatGPT can't offer as much it leaves an easy reason for people to switch.
2. It does have ads in the default interface, though they're quite unobtrusive. You might also have a blocker. But yes, I suspect their size allows them to provide it mildly "at a loss" to support their ads elsewhere.
A lot of YT's growth at the time was word of mouth and brand among the population, which is currently ChatGPT's position.
Altman knows this and why he called code red. If OpenAI hasn't produce a fully new model in 1.5 years, how much longer can they hang on before people will turn to alternatives that are technically better? How long before they could feasibly put out a new model if they are having issues in pre-training?
Still feels like ChatGPT is synonymous with the current wave of generative ai
Even if they aren’t the market lead and it’s main offering is being commodified
A lot of "normal people" are learning fast about ChatGPT alternatives now. Gemini in particular is getting a lot of mainstream buzz. Things like this [1] with 14k likes are happening everyday on social. Marc Benioff's love for Gemini broke through into the mainstream also.
[1] https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1995900344224907500 [2] https://x.com/Benioff/status/1992726929204760661
There isn't even a tenth of enough money if you group together all of advertising. Like, the entire industry. Ads is a bad, bad plan that wont work. Advertising is also extremely overvalued. And even at it's overvalued price tag, it's nowhere near enough.
Of course the tech savvy enterprises will use the best models. But the plumber down the road doesn't care whether she asks Gemini or ChatGPT about the sizing of some fittings.
If ads are so overpriced, how big is your short position on google? Also ads are extremely inefficient in terms of conversion. Ads rendered by an intelligent, personalized system will be OOM more efficient, negating most of the "overvalue".
I'm not saying they should serve ads. It's a terrible strategy for other reasons.
That’s possible because they’re immensely profitable.
Well those are obviously worse products.
> If ads are so overpriced, how big is your short position on google?
I hate hearing this stupid, stupid line.
Most companies are run by neanderthals with more money than brains. Companies burn money on advertising because why not? Making your product better is hard and takes time, advertising is the easiest thing you can do. Does it work? Not really, no, but you get extra business for as close to zero effort you can possibly get. Hit a wall? Just advertise more!
> Ads rendered by an intelligent, personalized system will be OOM more efficient, negating most of the "overvalue".
This is exactly what people said about personalized ads. "No you don't understand! It's not like a billboard!"
And that's true, but consumers are not fucking braindead, and there's also the laws of economics. If I have 50 bucks, I'm not spending 20 fucking dollars on your dumbass paint, no matter how much you advertise it. And that's not a me thing, that's a consumer thing. You can spend 1 quadrillion dollars advertising ferraris and guess what - you will STILL quickly saturate that market and hit a hard ceiling. Because consumer's can't afford it.
And that's not even touching on the fact that most of the metrics around advertisements are just obviously bullshit. How many human eyeballs are actually on ads? Much, much less than everyone thinks.
Yes, sure, we can build highly personalized ads. Whatever. But at the end of the day, consumers still have the exact same amount of disposable income as before. We have created Z E R O value, what we have done is consolidated it.
Hmm, what happens when markets consolidate too much? Well, I guess that would mean advertising becomes completely worthless, wouldn't it? What a conundrum! It's a good thing our markets haven't been consolidating for the past 70 years...
Logically speaking, yes it is easy to switch between OAI and Gemini, or Coke and Pepsi. But brand loyalty is more about emotions (comfort, familiarity,..) rather logical reasoning.
TPUs are cool, but the best leverage remains to reduce your (active) parameters count.
I don't think ads are that easy, because the hard part of ads isn't taking money and serving up ad slop, it's providing convincing tracking and analytics.
As soon as ad slop appears a lot of customers will run - not all, but enough to make monetisation problematic.
- users want the best/smartest LLM
- the best performance for inference is found by spending more and more tokens (deep thinking)
- pricing is based on cost per token
Then the inference providers/hyperscalers will take all of the margin available to app makers (and then give it to Nvidia apparently). It is a bad business to be in, and not viable for OpenAI at their valuation.
I think they all have become sufficiently good for most people to stick to what they are used to (especially in terms of tone/“personality” + the memory shared between conversations).
I mean, so was netscape.
The mass commoditization of the tech is rapidly driving AI to be a feature, not a product. And Google is very strongly positioned to take advantage of that. Microsoft too, and of course they have a relationship with OpenAI but that’s fraying.
Netscape, to a large degree, killed itself.
Not to say IE turned into anything good though. But it did have its hayday.
Their brand is not ok based on what I've heard, certainly no moat
Everyone is vastly, vastly overestimating advertising. Advertising is a side hustle, because the product is the main hustle.
I think your are the one vastly underestimate advertising.
I think you underestimate how valuable being the top slot on google is. Just the other day i googled “bluetooth speaker” and bought the first result (an ad). One hour of that can net you millions of dollars. That’s why consumer brands bid more and more every year on digital advertising.
For many brands, yes, and they don't know it.
> I think you underestimate how valuable being the top slot on google is.
The more you advertise, the less valuable each ad space becomes. Consumers have a lot of money they have to dole out. Giving them more ads won't increase that pot of money - it will make your cut smaller and smaller as it's split across more brands.
> consumers have a lot of money that they dole out. More ads wont increase the cut of money
Consumer spending is not a fixed pie chart or a zero sum game. US consumer spending has grown from $14 to $19 trillion since 2020. $5 trillion in new pie!!
Your model of ads is: “I, a consumer, have decided to buy a bluetooth speaker, and the ads push and pull me towards particular brands”. But that’s not how ads work! Ads don’t just compete for fixed spending, they induce NEW spending. An ad can give a customer the idea of buying, and grow the market.
Consumers can spend what they can spend. Not even 1 quadrillion dollars in advertising can change that. There is a hard, hard cap to the value of advertisement because of that. It's just how the thing works.
“Enough” for what exactly?
Furthermore, OpenAI has to make up for a ton of debt they are taking on. They've already lost $9B, and are planning on losing another $75B in the next 2 years. As such, they have a ton of digging to do to get themselves out of the massive hole they're digging.
All that's telling you is the economy is not doing nearly as well as some of our metrics would have you believe.
Real wages are about the same as before, probably lower. Consumers are buying the same amount of stuff - no value has been created. Rather, the dollar has been devalued, much more than we're willing to let on.
There's real value, like actual physical goods, service and labor, and fake value. Fake value tries to proxy real value, but historically it's often way off.
Money is fake value. Stocks are even more fake value. It doesn't matter if your stock price is through the roof if you're not selling a product people want, for example. The product is the value, the stock price is people trying to approximate the value and future value.
> If you have a better understanding than the idiots in charge, then go be rich!
Doesn't work this way because most markets are dumb as rocks.
> If you have a better model for real value, you'll outcompete them.
Doesn't work this way because most markets are dumb as rocks.
Look, after a certain point you have to detach from what you're being told and look at the world around you.
Prime example: tobacco. For humanity, Tabacoo has a negative value. You should be getting paid to smoke. Why? Because it kills you, and that's very expensive.
But that's hard to measure, right? So we just sell the cigarettes and say their value is what they're sold for. But that's not their actual value.
Their actual value, in the real world, in your hands and in your lungs, is negative. That's not an opinion. That's objective. That's just what it is.
When you look around our markets, almost all products are like this to some degree. The value we're creating is not necessarily real value.
Ads are another prime example. Do they enrich the world? Do they help consumers? No. They have zero real value. They just move money around via manipulation. That's not my opinion. That's just the objective reality.
Eventually, the real world catches up to la la land. You can't just say "well do ads and you make money". When there's no more money to move around, then even our fake value estimates of ads approach zero.
First of all, your numbers a off by an order of magnitude at least: even GPT-5 can generate 1000 tokens for 1c, which is much more than a paragraph.
And then again that's why my entire argument revolved around the fact that OpenAI would need to stop aiming for the technological edge. Deepseek generates 25k tokens for a cent and it's still a gigantic model. I'd you use a model comparable in size to gpt-oss-120b you can even increase that up to 100-200k tokens per cent (going from 32GB worth of active parameters, 32B at q8 for Deepseek, to 4GB, 8B using MXFP4 for gpt-oss-120b). That would mean being able to serve more than 100 answers per cent spent on inference.
If they can serve .1c worth of ads per request, that's 90% gross margin for you.