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How Does OpenAI Survive
Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at the end of
While I don’t want to rehash the arguments made in previous newsletters and podcasts, here’s the crux of the matter: generative AI is a product with no mass-market utility - at least on the scale of truly revolutionary movements like the original cloud computing and smartphone booms - and it’s one that costs an eye-watering amount to build and run. While you could point to tools like Sora (which doesn’t seem particularly useful, and is still far from commercialization), or searchGPT (which would have the same hallucinatory issues that dogged Google search’s own pivot to AI, while also competing against the GPT-enabled Bing), it’s tough to make the case that these products will fill the burning shortfall in OpenAI’s balance sheet, and would likely only add to its operational costs To survive, OpenAI must break every startup record known to man, and to thrive, it must either reinvent transformer-based architecture to reduce its compute requirements, and then invent an entirely new kind of artificial intelligence to do the things that people want AI to do.
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