alt Hacker NewsWSJ: Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse.
These plus working with Jony Ive on hardware, makes it sound like they took their eyes off the ball.
Replies
100%. Especially if it’s just ads and a new Siri/Alexa that they’ve got cooking.
it in't about taking eyes off the ball, it is about playing very different ball - they de-facto became commercial entity with short term plans/goals/targets/metrics and all the management games creeping in. Beating Google, such a large company who has been successfully playing that game for quarter of century is very hard, if not impossible until Google would make serious error itself.
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.
I don't think this is about Google. This is about advertising being the make or break moment for OpenAI.
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.
> advertising, AI agents for health and shopping,
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?
if you want to compete with google it seems like ad space is the single most important thing to push out quickly.
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.