15 ms·

As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are

As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. The whole time that I was at OpenAI until now GOOG has been the only individual stock that I've been holding. Despite the threat to their search business I think they'll bounce back because they have a lot of cards to play. OpenAI is an annoyance for Google, because they are willing to burn money to get users. Google can't as easily burn money, since they already have billions of users, but also they are a public company and have to answer to investors. But I doubt if OpenAI investors would sign up to give more money to be burned in a year. Google just needs to ease off on the red tape and make their innovations available to users as fast as they can. (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.)

mnky9800n 1y ago
Feel free to get started on Sam Altman.
ksec 1y ago
> (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.) Please do.
- isoprophlex 1y ago
  I would like to know how he manages to appear, in every single photo I see of him, to look slightly but unmistakenly... moist, or at least sweaty.
  - hlynurd 1y ago
    I often look moist after I use a moisturizer.
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    People keep assassinating him, and clones always look a bit moist the first day out of the pod.
    - falcor84 1y ago
      Are the assassinations because of something we already know about? some new advance that is still under wraps? or is it time travelers with knowledge about what he will do if left unchecked?
  - omnimus 1y ago
    Peter Thiel is the like that too. Hyperhidrosis is in some people common sideffect of drugs.
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - awful_comment 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - mvdtnz 1y ago
    He's certainly a damp boy.
  - derwiki 1y ago
    It’s a side effect of Ibogaine, the same drug that it was rumored Ed Muskie was on in the ‘72 campaign.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- throw1223323 1y ago
  Based on his interview with Joe Rogan, he has absolutely no imagination about what it means if humans actually manage to build general AI. Rogan basically ends up introducting him to some basic ideas about transhumanism. To me, he is a finance bro grifter who lucked into his current position. Without Ilya he would still be peddling WorldCoin.
  - ramraj07 1y ago
    Coming up next: dumb and dumber schools Noam Chomsky on modern philosophy...
    - kleiba 1y ago
      Almost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOIM1_xOSro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOIM1_xOSro
  - viraptor 1y ago
    There's weirdly many people who touch on the work around transhumanism but never heard the word before. There's a video of geohot basically talking about that idea, then someone from the audience mentions the name... and geohotz is confused. I'm honestly surprised.
    - tim333 1y ago
      The transhumanists tended to be philosopher types, the name coming from this kind of idea of humanism: >Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. (wikipedia) Whereas the other lot are often engineers / compsci / business people building stuff.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    > who lucked into his current position Which can be said for most of the survivorship-biased "greats" we talk about. Right time, right place. (Although to be fair — and we can think of the Two Steves, or Bill and Paul — there are often a number of people at the right time and right place — so somehow the few we still talk about knew to take advantage of that right time and right place.)
- sundarurfriend 1y ago
  It's a rabbit hole with many layers (levels?), but this is a good starting point and gateway to related information: Key Facts from "The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman's Firing from OpenAI": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-battle-of-the-board-redux https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-...
falcor84 1y ago
> Google can't as easily burn money I was actually surprised at Google's willingness to offer Gemini 2.5 Pro via AI Studio for free; having this was a significant contributor to my decision to cancel my OpenAI subscription.
- relistan 1y ago
  This is 100% why they did it.
- ff4 1y ago
  Google offering Gemini 2.5 Pro for free, enough to ditch OpenAI, reminds me of an old tactic. Microsoft gained control in the '90s by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows for free, undercutting Netscape’s browser. This leveraged Windows’ dominance to make Explorer the default choice, sidelining competitors and capturing the browser market. By 1998, Netscape’s share plummeted, and Microsoft controlled access to the web. Free isn’t generous—it’s strategic. Google’s hooking you into their ecosystem, betting you’ll build on their tools and stay. It feels like a deal, but it’s a moat. They’re not selling the model; they’re buying your loyalty.
  - ghurtado 1y ago
    > undercutting Netscape’s browser It almost sounds like you're saying that Netscape wasn't free, and I'm pretty sure it was always free, before and after Microsoft Explorer
    - ploxiln 1y ago
      > Netscape, in contrast, sells the consumer version of Navigator for a suggested price of $49. Users can download a free evaluation copy from the Internet, but it expires in 90 days and does not include technical support. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/19/business/netscape-moves-to-raise-stakes-in-browser-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/19/business/netscape-moves-t...
      - franze 1y ago
imiric 1y ago
> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than traditional ads are. It would also be far more profitable, so I'm sure that marketers are salivating at this opportunity, and adtech masterminds are hard at work to make this a reality already. The repercussions of this will be much greater than we can imagine. I would love to be wrong, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise.
- jononor 1y ago
  I agree with you. There is also a move toward "agents", where the AI can make decisions and take actions for you. It is very early days for that, but it looks ike it might come sooner than I had though. That opens up even more potential for influence on financial decisions (which is what adtech wants) - it could choose which things to buy for a given "need".
  - imiric 1y ago
    Hey, we could save them all the busywork, and just wire all our money to corporations... But financial nightmare scenarios aside, I'm more concerned about the influence from private and government agencies. Advertising is propaganda that seeks to separate us from our money, but other forms of propaganda that influences how we think and act has much deeper sociopolitical effects. The instability we see today is largely the result of psyops conducted over decades across all media outlets, but once it becomes possible to influence something as personal as a chatbot, the situation will get even more insane. It's unthinkable that we're merrily building that future without seemingly any precautions in mind.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    I have yet to understand this obsession with agents. Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce? Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the collective have already foreseen its ultimate role. As though the people pushing the ARPANET into the public realm were so certain that it would become the Encyclopedia Galactica!
codelion 1y ago
It's interesting to hear your perspective as a former OpenAI employee. The point about the sustainability of subscription fees for chatbots is definitely something worth considering. Many developers mention the challenge of balancing user expectations for free services with the costs of maintaining sophisticated AI models. I think the ad-supported model might become more prevalent, but it also comes with its own set of challenges regarding user privacy and experience. And I agree that Google's situation is complex – they have the resources, but also the expectations that come with being a public company.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- yimby2001 1y ago
  [dead]
netcan 1y ago
> there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term. Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong. Also, Google don't have a great history of getting new businesses up and running regardless of tech chops and timing. Google were pioneers to cloud computing... but amazon and MSFT built better businesses. At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such. Maybe it isn't. Or... maybe LLMs themselves are commodities like ISPs. The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known.
- kibibu 1y ago
  What happens when OpenAI introduces sponsored answers?
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  >It's be a >$10bn business already. But not profitable yet.
  - miohtama 1y ago
    For comparison, Uber is still not profitable after 15 years or so. Give it some time.
    - Tepix 1y ago
      Time for them to finally disappear
    - jefftk 1y ago
      Uber had their first profitable year in 2023, and their profit margin was 22% in 2024. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-technologies-full-2024-earnings-132735851.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-technologies-full-2024-e...
ramraj07 1y ago
I don't know what you did there, but clearly being ex OpenAI isn't the intellectual or product flex it is: I and every other smart person I know still use ChatGPT (paid) because even now it's the best at what it does and we keep trying Google and Claude and keep coming back. They got and as of now continue to get things right for the most part. If you still aren'ĥt seeing it maybe you should introspect what you're missing.
- epolanski 1y ago
  I don't know your experience doesn't match mine. NotebookLM by Google is in a class of its own in the use case of "provide documents and ask a chat or questions about them" for personal use. ChatGPT and Claude are nowhere near. ChatGPT uses RAG so it "understands" less about the topic and sometimes hallucinate. When it comes to coding Claude 3.5/3.7 embedded in Cursor or stand alone kept giving better results in real world coding, and even there Gemini 2.5 blew it away in my experience. Antirez, hping and Redis creator among many others releases a video on AI pretty much every day (albeit in Italian) and his tests where Gemini reviews his PRs for Redis are by far the better out of all the models available.
  - ramraj07 1y ago
    Time for my next round of Evals then. I had a 40 PR coding streak last weekend with mostly o3-mini-pro, will test the latest 2.5 now.
    - chasd00 1y ago
      PR = pull request? So every bit of garbage from the LLM, over and over, resulted in an individual pull request? Why not just do one when your branch is finally right?
      - Philpax 1y ago
        Presumably because they were discrete changes (i.e. new features), and it didn't make sense to group them together.
greggsy 1y ago
‘think soon people expect this service to be provided for free’ I have been using the free version for the past year or so and it’s totally serviceable for the odd question or script. The kids get three free fun images, which is great because that’s about as much as I want them to do.
apwell23 1y ago
> And don't let me get started with Sam Altman. would love to hear more about this. I made a post asking more about sam altman last year after hearing paul graham quote call him 'micheal jordan of listening' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829
tunaoftheland 1y ago
The ads angle is an interesting one since that's what motivates most things that Google and Meta do. Their LLMs' context window size has been growing, and while this might the natural general progression with LLMs, for those 2 ads businesses there's pretty straight paths to using their LLMs for even more targeted ads. For example, with the recent Llama "herd" releases, the LLMs have surprisingly large context window and one can imagine why Meta might want that: For stuffing in it as much of the personal content that they already have of their users. Then their LLMs can generate ads in the tone and style of the users and emotionally manipulate them to click on the link. Google's LLMs also have large context windows and such capability might be too tempting to ignore. Thinking this, there were moments that made me think that I was being to cynical, but I don't think they'll leave that kind of money on the table, an opportunity to reduce human ad writers headcount while improving click stats for higher profit. EDIT: Some typo fixes, tho many remain, I'm sure :)
- jcfrei 1y ago
  The real threat to Google, Meta is that LLMs become so cheap that its trivial for a company like Apple to make them available for free and include all the latest links to good products. No more search required if each M chip powered device can give you up-to-date recommendations for any product/service query.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    That is my fantasy, actually.
    - bitpush 1y ago
      Meta's models cant be used by companies about a certain threshold, so nope. Apple can wait it out to use a 'free model', but at that point it'll be like picking up an open source database like Postgres - you wont get any competitive advantage.
  - varelse 1y ago
    [dead]
knallfrosch 1y ago
Microsoft CoPilot (which I equate with OpenAI ChatGPT, because MS basically owns OpenAI) already shows ads in it's chat mode. It's just a matter of time. Netflix, music streamers, individual podcasters, YouTubers, TV manufacturers – they all converge on an ad-based business model.
- thidr0 1y ago
  People consistently like free stuff more than they dislike ads. Another instantiation: people like cheap goods more than they dislike buying foreign made goods
hdjjhhvvhga 1y ago
> And don't let me get started with Sam Altman. Why not? That's one of the reasons I visit HN instead of some random forum after all.
somenameforme 1y ago
> "[Google is] a public company and have to answer to investors" As is an increasing trend, they're a "public" company, like Facebook. They have tiered shares with Larry Page and Sergey Brin owning the majority of the voting power by themselves. GOOG shares in particular are class C and have no voting power whatsoever.
wslh 1y ago
I get your perspective, but what we're seeing looks more like complex systems theory, emergent behavior, optimization, new winners. If models become commoditized, the real value shifts to last-mile delivery: mobile, desktop, and server integration across regions like China, Korea, the U.S., and Europe. This is where differentiated UX and speed matter. It's also a classic Innovator's Dilemma situation like Google are slower to move, while new players can take risks and redefine the game. It's not just about burning money or model size, it's about who delivers value where it actually gets used. I also think the influx of new scientists and engineers into AI raises the odds of shifting its economics: whether through new hardware (TPUs/GPUs) and/or more efficient methods.
olalonde 1y ago
Do you think Sam will follow through with this? > Therefore, 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. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”
- tim333 1y ago
  That feels like it came from a past era. (I looked it up - it was 2019).
zkmon 1y ago
People left, to do what kind of startups? Can't think of any business idea that won't get outdated, or overrun in months.
- donny2018 1y ago
  AI startups were easy cash grabs until very recently. But I think the wave is settling down - doing real AI startup turned out to be VERY hard, and the rest of the "startups" are mostly just wrappers for OpenAI/Anthropic APIs.
riku_iki 1y ago
> The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees other significant revenue surfaces: - providing LLM APIs to enterprises - ChatBot Ads market: once people will switch from google search, there will be Ads $200B market at stake for a winner
tom_m 1y ago
I believe it. This is what typically happens. I would go to AWS re:invent and just watch people in the audience either cheer or break down as they announced new offerings wash away their business. It's very difficult to compete in a war of attrition with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Not just small startups - even if you have ungodly amounts of funding. Obviously the costs for AI will lower and everyone will more or less have the same quality in their models. They may already be approaching a maximum (or maximum required) here. The bubble will burst and we'll start the next hype cycle. The winners, as always, the giants and anyone who managed to sell to them I couldn't possibly see OpenAI as a winner in this space, not ever really. It has long since been apparent to me that Google would win this one. It would probably be more clear to others if their marketing and delivery of their AI products weren't such a sh-- show. Google is so incredibly uncoordinated here it's shocking...but they do have the resources, the right tech, the absolute position with existing user base, and the right ideas. As soon as they get better organized here it's game over.
famouswaffles 1y ago
Open AI don't always have the best models (especially for programming) but they've consistently had the best product/user experience. And even in the model front, other companies seem to play catchup more than anything most of the time.
- int_19h 1y ago
  The best user experience for what? The most practical use case for generative AI today is coding assistants, and if you look at that market, the best offerings are third-party IDEs that build on top of models they don't own. E.g. Cursor + Gemini 2.5. On the model front, it used to be the case that other companies were playing catch-up with OpenAI. I was one of the people consistently pointing out that "better than GPT o1" on a bunch of benchmarks does not reliably translate to actual improvements when you try to use them. But this is no longer the case, either - Gemini 2.5 is really that good, and Claude is also beating them in some real world scenarios.
  - famouswaffles 1y ago
    >The best user experience for what? The app has more features than anyone else, often implemented the smoothest/best way. Image Input (which the gemini site still sucks at even though the model itself is very capable), Voice mode (which used to be much worse in gemini until recently), Advanced Voice mode (no-one else has really implemented this yet. Gemini recently enabled native audio-in but not out), Live Video, Image gen, Deep research etc were all things Open AI did first and did well. Video Input is only just starting to roll out to Gemini live but has been a Plus subscription staple for months now. >The most practical use case for generative AI today is coding assistants Chatgpt gets 500M+ weekly active users and was the 6th most visited in the world last month. I doubt coding assistance is gpt's most frequent use case. And Google has underperformed in coding until 2.5 pro. >On the model front, it used to be the case that other companies were playing catch-up with OpenAI. I was one of the people consistently pointing out that "better than GPT o1" on a bunch of benchmarks does not reliably translate to actual improvements when you try to use them. But this is no longer the case, either - Gemini 2.5 is really that good, and Claude is also beating them in some real world scenarios. No that's still the case. Playing catch-up doesn't mean the competitor never catches up or even briefly supersedes it. It means Open AI will in short order release something that beats everyone else or introduces some new thing that everyone tries to beat. Image Input, 'Omni'- modality, Reasoning etc. All things Open AI brought to the table first. Sure, 2.5-pro is great but it doesn't look like it will beat o3 which looks to be released in a matter of weeks.
stellajager 1y ago
What cards has google played over the past three years such that you are willing to trust them play the "cards at hand" that you alleged that they have? I could think of several things they did right, but I'm curious to hear which one of them are more significant than others from someone I think has better judgement than I do.
sumedh 1y ago
> OpenAI is an annoyance for Google Remember Google is the same company which could not deliver a simple Chat App. Open AI has the potential to become a bigger Ad company and make more money.
- bitpush 1y ago
  Google has so many channels for ad delivery. ChatGPT is only competing against Google Search, which is arguably the biggest. But dont forget, Google has YouTube, Google Maps, Google Play, Google TV and this is before you start to consider Google's Ad Network (the thing where publishers embed something to get ads from Google network). So nope, ChatGPT is not in even in the same league as Google. You could argue Meta has similar reach (facebook.com, instagram) but that's just two.
  - sumedh 1y ago
    The same argument can be made for social network and chat App yet Google could not succeed at both of them.
reportgenix 1y ago
valuable information
adrianN 1y ago
I think paying to bias AI answers in your favor is much more attractive than plain ads.

mnky9800n 1y ago

Feel free to get started on Sam Altman.

ksec 1y ago

> (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.) Please do.

isoprophlex 1y ago
I would like to know how he manages to appear, in every single photo I see of him, to look slightly but unmistakenly... moist, or at least sweaty.
- hlynurd 1y ago
  I often look moist after I use a moisturizer.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  People keep assassinating him, and clones always look a bit moist the first day out of the pod.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    Are the assassinations because of something we already know about? some new advance that is still under wraps? or is it time travelers with knowledge about what he will do if left unchecked?
- omnimus 1y ago
  Peter Thiel is the like that too. Hyperhidrosis is in some people common sideffect of drugs.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  [flagged]
- awful_comment 1y ago
  [flagged]
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  He's certainly a damp boy.
- derwiki 1y ago
  It’s a side effect of Ibogaine, the same drug that it was rumored Ed Muskie was on in the ‘72 campaign.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
throw1223323 1y ago
Based on his interview with Joe Rogan, he has absolutely no imagination about what it means if humans actually manage to build general AI. Rogan basically ends up introducting him to some basic ideas about transhumanism. To me, he is a finance bro grifter who lucked into his current position. Without Ilya he would still be peddling WorldCoin.
- ramraj07 1y ago
  Coming up next: dumb and dumber schools Noam Chomsky on modern philosophy...
  - kleiba 1y ago
    Almost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOIM1_xOSro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOIM1_xOSro
- viraptor 1y ago
  There's weirdly many people who touch on the work around transhumanism but never heard the word before. There's a video of geohot basically talking about that idea, then someone from the audience mentions the name... and geohotz is confused. I'm honestly surprised.
  - tim333 1y ago
    The transhumanists tended to be philosopher types, the name coming from this kind of idea of humanism: >Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. (wikipedia) Whereas the other lot are often engineers / compsci / business people building stuff.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  > who lucked into his current position Which can be said for most of the survivorship-biased "greats" we talk about. Right time, right place. (Although to be fair — and we can think of the Two Steves, or Bill and Paul — there are often a number of people at the right time and right place — so somehow the few we still talk about knew to take advantage of that right time and right place.)
sundarurfriend 1y ago
It's a rabbit hole with many layers (levels?), but this is a good starting point and gateway to related information: Key Facts from "The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman's Firing from OpenAI": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-battle-of-the-board-redux https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-...

falcor84 1y ago

> Google can't as easily burn money I was actually surprised at Google's willingness to offer Gemini 2.5 Pro via AI Studio for free; having this was a significant contributor to my decision to cancel my OpenAI subscription.

relistan 1y ago
This is 100% why they did it.
ff4 1y ago
Google offering Gemini 2.5 Pro for free, enough to ditch OpenAI, reminds me of an old tactic. Microsoft gained control in the '90s by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows for free, undercutting Netscape’s browser. This leveraged Windows’ dominance to make Explorer the default choice, sidelining competitors and capturing the browser market. By 1998, Netscape’s share plummeted, and Microsoft controlled access to the web. Free isn’t generous—it’s strategic. Google’s hooking you into their ecosystem, betting you’ll build on their tools and stay. It feels like a deal, but it’s a moat. They’re not selling the model; they’re buying your loyalty.
- ghurtado 1y ago
  > undercutting Netscape’s browser It almost sounds like you're saying that Netscape wasn't free, and I'm pretty sure it was always free, before and after Microsoft Explorer
  - ploxiln 1y ago
    > Netscape, in contrast, sells the consumer version of Navigator for a suggested price of $49. Users can download a free evaluation copy from the Internet, but it expires in 90 days and does not include technical support. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/19/business/netscape-moves-to-raise-stakes-in-browser-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/19/business/netscape-moves-t...
    - franze 1y ago

imiric 1y ago

> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than traditional ads are. It would also be far more profitable, so I'm sure that marketers are salivating at this opportunity, and adtech masterminds are hard at work to make this a reality already. The repercussions of this will be much greater than we can imagine. I would love to be wrong, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

jononor 1y ago
I agree with you. There is also a move toward "agents", where the AI can make decisions and take actions for you. It is very early days for that, but it looks ike it might come sooner than I had though. That opens up even more potential for influence on financial decisions (which is what adtech wants) - it could choose which things to buy for a given "need".
- imiric 1y ago
  Hey, we could save them all the busywork, and just wire all our money to corporations... But financial nightmare scenarios aside, I'm more concerned about the influence from private and government agencies. Advertising is propaganda that seeks to separate us from our money, but other forms of propaganda that influences how we think and act has much deeper sociopolitical effects. The instability we see today is largely the result of psyops conducted over decades across all media outlets, but once it becomes possible to influence something as personal as a chatbot, the situation will get even more insane. It's unthinkable that we're merrily building that future without seemingly any precautions in mind.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  I have yet to understand this obsession with agents. Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce? Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the collective have already foreseen its ultimate role. As though the people pushing the ARPANET into the public realm were so certain that it would become the Encyclopedia Galactica!

codelion 1y ago

It's interesting to hear your perspective as a former OpenAI employee. The point about the sustainability of subscription fees for chatbots is definitely something worth considering. Many developers mention the challenge of balancing user expectations for free services with the costs of maintaining sophisticated AI models. I think the ad-supported model might become more prevalent, but it also comes with its own set of challenges regarding user privacy and experience. And I agree that Google's situation is complex – they have the resources, but also the expectations that come with being a public company.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
yimby2001 1y ago
[dead]

netcan 1y ago

> there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term. Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong. Also, Google don't have a great history of getting new businesses up and running regardless of tech chops and timing. Google were pioneers to cloud computing... but amazon and MSFT built better businesses. At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such. Maybe it isn't. Or... maybe LLMs themselves are commodities like ISPs. The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known.

kibibu 1y ago
What happens when OpenAI introduces sponsored answers?
tonyedgecombe 1y ago
>It's be a >$10bn business already. But not profitable yet.
- miohtama 1y ago
  For comparison, Uber is still not profitable after 15 years or so. Give it some time.
  - Tepix 1y ago
    Time for them to finally disappear
  - jefftk 1y ago
    Uber had their first profitable year in 2023, and their profit margin was 22% in 2024. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-technologies-full-2024-earnings-132735851.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-technologies-full-2024-e...

ramraj07 1y ago

I don't know what you did there, but clearly being ex OpenAI isn't the intellectual or product flex it is: I and every other smart person I know still use ChatGPT (paid) because even now it's the best at what it does and we keep trying Google and Claude and keep coming back. They got and as of now continue to get things right for the most part. If you still aren'ĥt seeing it maybe you should introspect what you're missing.

epolanski 1y ago
I don't know your experience doesn't match mine. NotebookLM by Google is in a class of its own in the use case of "provide documents and ask a chat or questions about them" for personal use. ChatGPT and Claude are nowhere near. ChatGPT uses RAG so it "understands" less about the topic and sometimes hallucinate. When it comes to coding Claude 3.5/3.7 embedded in Cursor or stand alone kept giving better results in real world coding, and even there Gemini 2.5 blew it away in my experience. Antirez, hping and Redis creator among many others releases a video on AI pretty much every day (albeit in Italian) and his tests where Gemini reviews his PRs for Redis are by far the better out of all the models available.
- ramraj07 1y ago
  Time for my next round of Evals then. I had a 40 PR coding streak last weekend with mostly o3-mini-pro, will test the latest 2.5 now.
  - chasd00 1y ago
    PR = pull request? So every bit of garbage from the LLM, over and over, resulted in an individual pull request? Why not just do one when your branch is finally right?
    - Philpax 1y ago
      Presumably because they were discrete changes (i.e. new features), and it didn't make sense to group them together.

greggsy 1y ago

‘think soon people expect this service to be provided for free’ I have been using the free version for the past year or so and it’s totally serviceable for the odd question or script. The kids get three free fun images, which is great because that’s about as much as I want them to do.

apwell23 1y ago

> And don't let me get started with Sam Altman. would love to hear more about this. I made a post asking more about sam altman last year after hearing paul graham quote call him 'micheal jordan of listening' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829

tunaoftheland 1y ago

The ads angle is an interesting one since that's what motivates most things that Google and Meta do. Their LLMs' context window size has been growing, and while this might the natural general progression with LLMs, for those 2 ads businesses there's pretty straight paths to using their LLMs for even more targeted ads. For example, with the recent Llama "herd" releases, the LLMs have surprisingly large context window and one can imagine why Meta might want that: For stuffing in it as much of the personal content that they already have of their users. Then their LLMs can generate ads in the tone and style of the users and emotionally manipulate them to click on the link. Google's LLMs also have large context windows and such capability might be too tempting to ignore. Thinking this, there were moments that made me think that I was being to cynical, but I don't think they'll leave that kind of money on the table, an opportunity to reduce human ad writers headcount while improving click stats for higher profit. EDIT: Some typo fixes, tho many remain, I'm sure :)

jcfrei 1y ago
The real threat to Google, Meta is that LLMs become so cheap that its trivial for a company like Apple to make them available for free and include all the latest links to good products. No more search required if each M chip powered device can give you up-to-date recommendations for any product/service query.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  That is my fantasy, actually.
  - bitpush 1y ago
    Meta's models cant be used by companies about a certain threshold, so nope. Apple can wait it out to use a 'free model', but at that point it'll be like picking up an open source database like Postgres - you wont get any competitive advantage.
- varelse 1y ago
  [dead]

knallfrosch 1y ago

Microsoft CoPilot (which I equate with OpenAI ChatGPT, because MS basically owns OpenAI) already shows ads in it's chat mode. It's just a matter of time. Netflix, music streamers, individual podcasters, YouTubers, TV manufacturers – they all converge on an ad-based business model.

thidr0 1y ago
People consistently like free stuff more than they dislike ads. Another instantiation: people like cheap goods more than they dislike buying foreign made goods

hdjjhhvvhga 1y ago

> And don't let me get started with Sam Altman. Why not? That's one of the reasons I visit HN instead of some random forum after all.

somenameforme 1y ago

> "[Google is] a public company and have to answer to investors" As is an increasing trend, they're a "public" company, like Facebook. They have tiered shares with Larry Page and Sergey Brin owning the majority of the voting power by themselves. GOOG shares in particular are class C and have no voting power whatsoever.

wslh 1y ago

I get your perspective, but what we're seeing looks more like complex systems theory, emergent behavior, optimization, new winners. If models become commoditized, the real value shifts to last-mile delivery: mobile, desktop, and server integration across regions like China, Korea, the U.S., and Europe. This is where differentiated UX and speed matter. It's also a classic Innovator's Dilemma situation like Google are slower to move, while new players can take risks and redefine the game. It's not just about burning money or model size, it's about who delivers value where it actually gets used. I also think the influx of new scientists and engineers into AI raises the odds of shifting its economics: whether through new hardware (TPUs/GPUs) and/or more efficient methods.

olalonde 1y ago

Do you think Sam will follow through with this? > Therefore, 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. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”

tim333 1y ago
That feels like it came from a past era. (I looked it up - it was 2019).

zkmon 1y ago

People left, to do what kind of startups? Can't think of any business idea that won't get outdated, or overrun in months.

donny2018 1y ago
AI startups were easy cash grabs until very recently. But I think the wave is settling down - doing real AI startup turned out to be VERY hard, and the rest of the "startups" are mostly just wrappers for OpenAI/Anthropic APIs.

riku_iki 1y ago

> The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees other significant revenue surfaces: - providing LLM APIs to enterprises - ChatBot Ads market: once people will switch from google search, there will be Ads $200B market at stake for a winner

tom_m 1y ago

I believe it. This is what typically happens. I would go to AWS re:invent and just watch people in the audience either cheer or break down as they announced new offerings wash away their business. It's very difficult to compete in a war of attrition with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Not just small startups - even if you have ungodly amounts of funding. Obviously the costs for AI will lower and everyone will more or less have the same quality in their models. They may already be approaching a maximum (or maximum required) here. The bubble will burst and we'll start the next hype cycle. The winners, as always, the giants and anyone who managed to sell to them I couldn't possibly see OpenAI as a winner in this space, not ever really. It has long since been apparent to me that Google would win this one. It would probably be more clear to others if their marketing and delivery of their AI products weren't such a sh-- show. Google is so incredibly uncoordinated here it's shocking...but they do have the resources, the right tech, the absolute position with existing user base, and the right ideas. As soon as they get better organized here it's game over.

famouswaffles 1y ago

Open AI don't always have the best models (especially for programming) but they've consistently had the best product/user experience. And even in the model front, other companies seem to play catchup more than anything most of the time.

int_19h 1y ago
The best user experience for what? The most practical use case for generative AI today is coding assistants, and if you look at that market, the best offerings are third-party IDEs that build on top of models they don't own. E.g. Cursor + Gemini 2.5. On the model front, it used to be the case that other companies were playing catch-up with OpenAI. I was one of the people consistently pointing out that "better than GPT o1" on a bunch of benchmarks does not reliably translate to actual improvements when you try to use them. But this is no longer the case, either - Gemini 2.5 is really that good, and Claude is also beating them in some real world scenarios.
- famouswaffles 1y ago
  >The best user experience for what? The app has more features than anyone else, often implemented the smoothest/best way. Image Input (which the gemini site still sucks at even though the model itself is very capable), Voice mode (which used to be much worse in gemini until recently), Advanced Voice mode (no-one else has really implemented this yet. Gemini recently enabled native audio-in but not out), Live Video, Image gen, Deep research etc were all things Open AI did first and did well. Video Input is only just starting to roll out to Gemini live but has been a Plus subscription staple for months now. >The most practical use case for generative AI today is coding assistants Chatgpt gets 500M+ weekly active users and was the 6th most visited in the world last month. I doubt coding assistance is gpt's most frequent use case. And Google has underperformed in coding until 2.5 pro. >On the model front, it used to be the case that other companies were playing catch-up with OpenAI. I was one of the people consistently pointing out that "better than GPT o1" on a bunch of benchmarks does not reliably translate to actual improvements when you try to use them. But this is no longer the case, either - Gemini 2.5 is really that good, and Claude is also beating them in some real world scenarios. No that's still the case. Playing catch-up doesn't mean the competitor never catches up or even briefly supersedes it. It means Open AI will in short order release something that beats everyone else or introduces some new thing that everyone tries to beat. Image Input, 'Omni'- modality, Reasoning etc. All things Open AI brought to the table first. Sure, 2.5-pro is great but it doesn't look like it will beat o3 which looks to be released in a matter of weeks.

stellajager 1y ago

What cards has google played over the past three years such that you are willing to trust them play the "cards at hand" that you alleged that they have? I could think of several things they did right, but I'm curious to hear which one of them are more significant than others from someone I think has better judgement than I do.

sumedh 1y ago

> OpenAI is an annoyance for Google Remember Google is the same company which could not deliver a simple Chat App. Open AI has the potential to become a bigger Ad company and make more money.

bitpush 1y ago
Google has so many channels for ad delivery. ChatGPT is only competing against Google Search, which is arguably the biggest. But dont forget, Google has YouTube, Google Maps, Google Play, Google TV and this is before you start to consider Google's Ad Network (the thing where publishers embed something to get ads from Google network). So nope, ChatGPT is not in even in the same league as Google. You could argue Meta has similar reach (facebook.com, instagram) but that's just two.
- sumedh 1y ago
  The same argument can be made for social network and chat App yet Google could not succeed at both of them.

reportgenix 1y ago

valuable information

adrianN 1y ago

I think paying to bias AI answers in your favor is much more attractive than plain ads.