The OpenAI Deployment Company(openai.com) |
The OpenAI Deployment Company(openai.com) |
Look at electricity in factories and how long it took to have an impact, as well as the massive, massive lag between Visicalc and economy wide productivity increases.
I personally do believe that the foundation model companies are a terrible business, but that the technology itself is definitely useful (even if it's vastly unlikely to go full Singularity).
As if they are all built around un-intelligence now...
They seemed like an indictment of the technology as a whole. The LLM character proxies all spoke with the LLM-cadence and phrasing. Because we all know it. LLM writing is very uncanny valley. And they didn't even try to deny this. It made LLMs itself look like a joke.
We have a word for this, it's "consultant".
Consultant you pay to come to your company. Forward Deployed Engineers are payed by the other company to push you spending money at their company.
The trouble with dev agencies, "services companies", integration specialists and "forward deployed engineers" is that they scale lineraly with the number of people.
You can't 100x your revenue without at least 80x-ing your headcount.Oh, you might go for that once due to AI - but so can everyone else. After that, it's boring linear growth.
When I say "boring", I don't mean as "capitalism requires exponential growth" critique. I mean OpenAI valuation is not priced for that. They're priced for singularity. If the bulk of their revenue turns out to be bodyshop, that's...quite a different math.
The way to charge big with this kind of work is to do what big consultancies (MBB, IBM, etc) do: brand equity and (supposed) expertise in solving domain problems. OpenAI has ... interesting tech.
It's going to be interesting seeing if they can pull this off. If I were a betting man, my money would be on "no".
If you’re SAP, you build SAP once and you sell it. If you’re an author, you write the book once.
With consulting, you have to keep doing the same work every year just to stand still. You don’t own an actual product.
Many of these companies do build up internal know-how.
In case of big consulting companies, they have huge internal knowledge bases, decks, cases etc from previous engagements. In case of product companies with FDEs, the feedback from customers ideally trickles down to product improvements. In case of OpenAI, they can improve their models.
Whether that's actually valuable enough to turn a blind eye to the downsides of consulting, I don't know.
> Investors also include leading consulting and systems integration firms, including Bain & Company, Capgemini, and McKinsey & Company.
All of these companies are invested in Palantir too right? Why does this “deployment company” sound like more Palantir?
But so is Anthropic and all of Big Tech, so there's that.
or smth
For OpenAI having more companies using OpenAI and buying tokens etc. helps them and they do have a typical issue: they can move as fast as they want, if no one else is moving with them...