That's literally the premise of venture capital. This is a scenario where we're assuming ALL our bets will go to zero, except one which will be worth trillions. In that case you should bet on everything.

It's only in the opposite scenario (where every bet pays off with varying ROI) that it makes sense to go all-in on whichever bet seems most promising.

Your 2001 essay isn't a good parallel to OpenAI's situation.

OpenAI wasn't "publicly funded" i.e. with public donations or government grants.

The non-profit was started and privately funded by a small group of billionaires and other wealthy people (Elon Musk donates $44 million, Reid Hoffman, etc collectively pledging $1 billion of their own money).

They miscalculated in thinking their charity donations would be enough to recruit the PhD machine learning researchers and pay the high GPU costs to create the AI alternative to Google DeepMind, etc. Their 2015 assumptions about future AI development costs were massively underestimated and now they look like bad for trying to convert it to a for-profit enterprise. Instead of a big conversion to for-profit, they now will settle with keeping a subsidiary that's for-profit. Somewhat like other entities structured as a non-profit that owns for-profit subsidiaries such as Mozilla, Girl Scouts, Novo Nordisk, etc.

Obviously with hindsight... if they had to do it all over, they would just create the reverse structure of creating the OpenAI for-profit company as the "parent entity" that pledges to donate money to charities. E.g. Amazon Inc is the for-profit that donates to Housing Equity Fund for affordable housing.

This has some baked assumptions about cycle time and improvement per cycle and whether there's a ceiling.

The most advanced tools are (and will continue to be) at a higher level of the stack, combining the leading models for different purposes to achieve results that no single provider can match using only their own models.

I see no reason to think this won't hold post-AGI (if that happens). AGI doesn't mean capabilities are uniform.

I wonder, do you have a hypothesis as to what would be a measurement that would differentiate AGI vs Not-AGI?

EDIT: There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI".

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

Here is a mainstream opinion about why AGI is already here. Written by one of the authors the most widely read AI textbook: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...

"Instead of our current complex non-competing structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal competing structure where ..." is all it takes

Well Trump is interested in tariffing movies and South Korea took DeepSeek off mobile app stores, so they certainly may try. But for high-end tasks, DeepSeek R1 671B is available for download, so any company with a VPN to download it and the necessary GPUs or cloud credits can run it. And for consumers, DeepSeek V3's distilled models are available for download, so anyone with a (~4 year old or newer) Mac or gaming PC can run them.

If the only thing keeping these companies valuations so high is banning the competition, that's not a good sign for their long-term value. If you have to ban the competition, you can't be feeling good about what you're making.

For what it's worth, I think GPT o3 and o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet are good enough to compete. DeepSeek R1 is often the best option (due to cost) for tasks that it can handle, but there are times where one of the other models can achieve a task that it can't.

But if the US is looking to ban Chinese models, then that could suggest that maybe these models aren't good enough to raise the funding required for newer, significantly better (and more expensive) models. That, or they just want to stop as much money as possible from going to China. Banning the competition actually makes the problem worse though, as now these domestic companies have fewer competitors. But I somewhat doubt there's any coherent strategy as to what they ban, tariff, etc.

OpenAI loses billions and is at the mercy of getting new investors to fund the losses. It has many plausible competitors.

What do you consider an "LLM provider"? Is it a website where you interact with a language model by uploading text or images? That definition might become too broad too quickly. Hard to ban.

Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend with e.g. Anthropic? No chance.

MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides image generation), people are going to start pressing them. And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.

Switching from ChatGPT to the many competitors is neither expensive nor painful.

There's a lot of literature on this, and if you've been in the industry for any amount of time since the 1950s, you have seen at least one AI winter.

probably true but this statement would be true if when is 2308 which would defeat the purpose of the statement. when first cars started rolling around some mates around the campfire we saying “not if but when” we’ll have flying cars everywhere and 100 years later (with amazing progress in car manufacturing) we are nowhere near… I think saying “when, not if” is one of those statements that while probably indisputable in theory is easily disputable in practice. give me “when” here and I’ll put up $1,000 to a charity of your choice if you are right and agree to do the same thing if wrong

It has taken tens to hundred of billions of dollars without equivalent economic justification(yet) before to reach here. I am not saying economic justification doesn't exist or wont come in the future, just that the upfront investment and risk is already in order of magnitude of what the largest tech companies can expend.

If the the next generation requires hundreds of billions or trillions [2] upfront and a very long time to make returns, no one company (or even country) could allocate that kind of resources.

Many cases of such economically limited innovations[1], nuclear fusion is the classic always 20 years away example. Another close one is anything space related, we cannot replicate in next 5 years what we already achieved from 50 years ago of say landing on the moon and so on.

From a just a economic perspective it is a definitely a "If", without even going into the technology challenges.

[1]Innovations in cost of key components can reshape economics equation, it does happen (as with spaceX) but it also not guaranteed like in fusion.

[2] The next gen may not be close enough to AGI. AGI could require 2-3 more generations ( and equivalent orders of magnitude of resources), which is something the world is unlikely to expend resources on even if it had them.

LLMs destroying any sort of capacity (and incentive) for the population to think pushes this further and further out each day

Most HN people are probably too young to remember that the nanotech post-scarcity singularity was right around the corner - just some research and engineering way - which was the widespread opinion in 1986 (yes, 1986). It was _just as dramatic_ as today's AGI.

That took 4-5 years to fall apart, and maybe a bit longer for the broader "nanotech is going to change everything" to fade. Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will we have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a hundred more years or more, but it's not happening any time soon.

There are a ton of similarities between nanotech-nanotech singularity and the moderns LLM-AGI situation. People point(ed) to "all the stuff happening" surely the singularity is on the horizon! Similarly, there was the apocalytpic scenario that got a ton of attention and people latching onto "nanotech safety" - instead of runaway AI or paperclip engines, it was Grey Goo (also coined in 1986).

The dynamics of the situation, the prognostications, and aggressive (delusional) timelines, etc. are all almost identical in a 1:1 way with the nanotech era.

I think we will have both AGI and general purpose universal constructors, but they are both no less than 50 years away, and probably more.

So many of the themes are identical that I'm wondering if it's a recurring kind of mass hysteria. Before nanotech, we were on the verge of genetic engineering (not _quite_ the same level of hype, but close, and pretty much the same failure to deliver on the hype as nanotech) and before that the crazy atomic age of nuclear everything.

Yes, yes, I know that this time is different and that AI is different and it won't be another round of "oops, this turned out to be very hard to make progress on and we're going to be in a very slow, multi-decade slow-improvement regime, but that has been the outcome of every example of this that I can think of.

We have zero evidence for this. (Folks said the same shit in the 80s.)

I want to believe, man.

So, since we've used the exact same reasoning to prove two opposite conclusions, it logically follows that this reasoning is faulty.

I think the chance they're going to create a "superintelligence" is extremely small. That said I'm sure we're going to have a lot of useful intelligence. But nothing general or self-conscious or powerful enough to be threatening for many decades or even ever.

> Predicting the future is famously difficult

That's very true, but that fact unfortunately can never be used to motivate any particular action, because you can always say "what if the real threat comes from a different direction?"

We can come up with hundreds of doomsday scenarios, most don't involve AI. Acting to minimize the risk of every doomsday scenario (no matter how implausible) is doomsday scenario no. 153.

I think you realise this is the weak point. You can't rule out the current AI approach leading to superintelligence. You also can't rule out a rotting banana skin in your bin spontaneously gaining sentience either. Does that mean you shouldn't risk throwing away that skin? It's so outrageous that you need at least some reason to rule it in. So it goes with current AI approaches.

This extreme risk aversion and focus on negative outcomes is just the result of certain personality types, no amount of rationalizing will change your mind as you fundamentally fear the unknown.

How do you get out of bed everyday knowing there’s a chance you could get hit by a bus?

If your tribe invented fire you’d be the one arguing how we can’t use it for fear it might engulf the world. Yes, humans do risk starting wildfires, but it’s near impossible to argue the discovery of fire wasn’t a net good.

I disagree at least on this one. I don't see any scenario where superintelligence comes into existence, but is for some reason limited to a mediocrity that puts it in contention with humans. That equilibrium is very narrow, and there's no good reason to believe machine-intelligence would settle there. It's a vanishingly low chance event. It considerably changes the later 1-in-n part of your comment.

You have cooked up a straw man that will believe anything as long as it contains a doomsday prediction. You are more than 99.9% confident about doomsday predictions, even if you claim you aren't.

> If one exclusive group gets the benefit of developing AI with a 20% productivity boost compared to others, and they develop a 2.0 that grants them a 25% boost, then a 3.0 with a 30% boost, etc...

That’s a bit of a stretch, generative AI is least capable of helping with novel code such as needed to make AGI.

If anything I’d expect companies working on generative AI to be at a significant disadvantage when trying to make AGI because they’re trying to leverage what they are already working on. That’s fine for incremental improvement, but companies rarely ride one wave of technology to the forefront of the next. Analog > digital photography, ICE > EV, coal mining > oil, etc.

There's so much to do, explore and learn. The prospect of AI stealing my job is only scary because my income depends on this job.

This was the fear when the cotton gin was invented. It was the ear when cars were created. The same complaint happened with the introduction of electronic, automated, telephone switchboards.

Jobs change. Societies change. Unemployment worldwide, is near the lowest it has ever been. Work will change. Society will eventually move to a currency based on energy production, or something equally futuristic.

This doesn't mean that getting there will be without pain.

It might not be a direct US-govt project like the Manhattan Project was, but it doesn't have to. The government has the ties it needs with the heads of all these AI companies, and if it comes to it, the US-govt has the muscle and legal authority to reign control over it.

A good deal for everyone involved really. These companies get to make bank and technology that furthers their market dominance, the US-govt gets potentially "Manhattan project"-level pivotal technology— it's elites helping elites.

We can selectively ban uses without banning the technology wholesale; e.g., nuclear power generation is permitted, while nuclear weapons are strictly controlled.

The primary difference is the observability - with satellites we had some confidence that other nations respected treaties, or that they had enough reaction time for mutual destruction, but with this AI development we lack all that.

Id love to believe there is more to life than the AI future, or that we as humans are destined to be perpetually happy and live meaningful. However I currently dont see how our current levels of extreme prosperity are anything more than an evolutionary blip, even if we could make them last several millennia more.

LLMs are great at making you think they are the other but aren't.

Sounds like payola for the enterprising and experienced mercenary.

These models being expensive leads me to think they will look at all methods of monetization possible when seeking profitability. Rather than ads being off the table, it could feasibly make ads be on the table sooner.

It's also why totalitarian regimes love it, they can simply train it to regurgitate a modified version of reality.

Also the current crop of AI agents are just utter crap. But that's a skill issue of the people coding them, expect actual advances here soon.

replace LLMs with TV, or smartphones, or maybe even mcdonald's, and you've got the same idea. through TV, corporations got to control a lot of the social world and people's behavior.

We should champion the good people who did the good things and managed to resist the temptations of the poisoned apple, but we shouldn’t hold an entire city on a pedestal because of nostalgia alone. Nobody, and no entity, is that deserving.

Google screamed against service revenue and advertising while building the world's largest advertising empire. Facebook screamed against misinformation and surveillance while enabling it on a global scale. Netflix screamed against the overpriced cable TV industry while turning streaming into modern overpriced cable television. Uber screamed against the entrenched taxi industry harming workers and passengers while creating an unregulated monster that harmed workers and passengers.

Altman and OpenAI are no different in this regard, loudly screaming against AI harming humanity while doing everything in their capacity to create AI tools that will knowingly harm humanity while enriching themselves.

If people trust the performance instead of the actions and their outcomes, then we can't convince them otherwise.

Condoning "honest liars" enables a whole other level of open and unrestricted criminality.

It’s just that their biases have much more capacity to cause damage as their wealth gives them so much power.

Tim Apple did it too, and we don’t assume he’s an authoritarian now too, do we? I imagine they would probably have done similarly regardless of who won the election.

It sure seems like an endorsement, but I think it’s simply modern corporate strategy in the American regulatory environment, same as when foreign dignitaries stay in overpriced suites in the Trump hotel in DC.

Those who don’t kiss the ring are clearly and obviously punished. It’s not in the interest of your shareholders (or your launch partners) to be the tall poppy.

>Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Regardless of intent, it was most definitely sold to the American public on that premise.

Why? I paid for Claude for a while, but with Deepseek, Gemini and the free hits on Mistral, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity I'm not sure why I would now. This is anecdotal of course, but I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour. I think the best the subscription companies can hope for is that their subscribers don't realize that Deepseek and Gemini can basically do all you need for free.

If every major player had an AI option, i'm just not understanding how because OpenAi moved first or got big first, the hugely massively successful companies that did the same thing for multiple decades don't have the same advantage?

Why are you still pretending anything is going to come out of this?

> taken it from a toy to genuinely insanely useful.

Really?

GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. I'd say 2020 is significant because that's when people seriously considered the Turing test passed reliably for the first time. But for the sake of this argument, it hardly matters what date years back we choose. There's been enough time since then to see the plateau.

> Most people in society connect AI directly to ChatGPT and hence OpenAI.

I'd double-check that assumption. Many people I've spoken to take a moment to remember that "AI" stands for artificial intelligence. Outside of tongue-in-cheek jokes, OpenAI has about 50% market share in LLMs, but you can't forget that Samsung makes AI washing machines, let alone all the purely fraudulent uses of the "AI" label.

> And there has been a lot of progress in image generation, video generation, ...

These are entirely different architectures from LLM/chat though. But you're right that OpenAI does that, too. When I said that they don't stray much from chat, I was thinking more about AlexNet and the broad applications of ML in general. But you're right, OpenAI also did/does diffusion, GANs, transformer vision.

This doesn't change my views much on chat being "not seeing the forest for the trees" though. In the big picture, I think there aren't many hockey sticks/exponentials left in LLMs to discover. That is not true about other AI/ML.

I don't think there is serious argument that LLMs won't generate tremendous value. The question is who will capture it. PCs generated massive value. But other than a handful of manufacturers and designers (namely, Apple, HP, Lenovo, Dell and ASUS), most PC builders went bankrupt. And out of the value generated by PCs in the world, the vast majority was captured by other businesses and consumers.

When the Internet was developed they didn't imagine the world wide Web.

When cars started to get popular people still thought there would be those who are going to stick with horses.

I think you're right on the AI we're just on the cusp of it and it'll be a hundred times bigger than we can imagine.

Back when oil was discovered and started to be used it was about equal to 500 laborers now automated. One AI computer with some video cards are now worth x number of knowledge workers. That never stop working as long as the electricity keeps flowing.

This makes me want to invest in malpractice lawyers, not OpenAI

Oh we know: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11006786/

AI isn't going to be the world changing, AGI, that was sold to the public. Instead, it will simply be another B2B SaaS product. Useful, for sure. Even profitable for startups.

But "take over the world" good? Unlikely.

The world is changing and that is scary.

OpenAI models are already of the most expensive, they don’t have a lot of levers to pull.

They have the brand recognition and consumer goodwill no other brand in AI has, incredibly so with school students, who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them.

I think better models are enough to dethrone OpenAI in API, B2C and internal enterprise use cases, but OpenAI has consumer mindshare, and they're going to be the king of chatbots forever. Unless somebody else figures out something which is better by orders of magnitude and that Open AI can't copy quickly, it's going to stay that way.

Apple had the opportunity to do something really great here. With Siri's deep device integration on one hand and Apple's willingness to force 3rd-party devs to do the right thing for users on the other, they could have had a compelling product that nobody else could copy, but it seems like they're not willing to go that route, mostly for privacy, antitrust and internal competency reasons, in that order. Google is on the right track and might get something similar (although not as polished as typical Apple) done, but Android's mindshare among tech-savvy consumers isn't great enough for it to get traction.

All dissidents went into Little Wadyia.

When the Dictator himself visited it, he started to fake his name by copying the signs and names he saw on the walls. Everyone knew what he was.

Internet social networks are like that.

Now, this moat thing. That's hilarious.

That name recognition made Coca Cola into a very successful global corporation.

I probably need to clarify what I'm talking about, so that peeps like @JumpCrisscross can get a better grasp of it.

I do not mean the total market share of the category of businesses that could be labeled as "AI companies", like Microsoft or NVIDIA, on your first link.

I will not talk about your second link because it does not seem to make sense within the context of this conversation (zero mentions or references to market share).

What I mean is:

* The main product that OpenAI sells is AI models (GPT-4o, etc...)

* OpenAI does not make hardware. OpenAI is not in the business of cloud infrastructure. OpenAI is not in the business of selling smartphones. A comparison between OpenAI and any of those companies would only make sense for someone with a very casual understanding of this topic. I can think of someone, perhaps, who only used ChatGPT a couple times and inferred it was made by Apple because it was there on its phone. This discussion calls for a deeper understanding of what OpenAI is.

* Other examples of companies that sell their own AI models, and thus compete directly with OpenAI in the same market that OpenAI operates by taking a look at their products and services, are Anthropic (w/ Claude), Google (w/ Gemini) and some others ones like Meta and Mistral with open models.

* All those companies/models, together, make up some market that you can put any name you want to it (The AI Model Market TM)

That is the market I'm talking about, and that is the one that I estimated to be 90%+ which was pretty much on point, as usual :).

1: https://gs.statcounter.com/ai-chatbot-market-share

2: https://www.ctol.digital/news/latest-llm-market-share-mar-20...

[1]: https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940

Then things went unexpectedly well, people were valuing them at billions of dollars, and they suddenly decided they weren't open any more. Suddenly they were all about Altman's Interests Safety (AI Safety for short).

The board tried to fulfil its obligation to get the nonprofit to do the things in its charter, and they were unsuccessful.

But they found themselves alone in that it turns out the employees (who were employed by the for-profit company) and investors (MSFT in particular) didn't care about the mission and wanted to follow the money instead.

So the board had no choice but to capitulate and leave.

The dude announces new initiatives from the White House, regularly briefs Senators and senior DoD leaders, and is the top get for interviews around the world for AI topics.

There’s a lot more to be ambitious about than just money.

It generally means broadening access to something. Finance loves democratising access to stupid things, for example.

> word is a homonym of its antonym?

Inflammable in common use.

Checks-and-balances need to be robust enough to survive bad people. Otherwise, they're not checks-and-balances.

One of the tricks is a broad range of diverse stakeholders with enforcement power. For example, if OpenAI does anything non-open, you'd like organizations FSF, CC, and similar to be represented on their board and to be able to enforce those rules in court.

I'm a citizen, the laws of politics are the problem.

> Musk is a complex figure

Hogwash. He's greedy. There's nothing complex about that.

> and he often exacts a tool on the people around him

Yea it's a one way transfer of wealth from them to him. The _literal_ definition of a "toll."

> When he goes into "demon mode"

When he decides to lie, cheat and steal? Why do you strain so hard to lionize this behavior?

> you don't want to be in his way.

Name a billionaire who's way you would _like_ to be in. Elon Musk literally stops existing tomorrow. A person who's name you don't currently know will become known and take his place.

His place needs to be removed. It's not a function of his "personality" or "particulars." That's just goofy "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" thinking.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

At the same time, though, we need you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but all commenters) to follow HN's rules regardless of what other commenters are doing.

Think of it like speeding tickets [2]. There are always lots of other drivers speeding just as bad (nay, worse) than you were, and yet it's always you who gets pulled over, right? Or at least it always feels that way.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...