alt Hacker News> "You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100% a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?" an early backer of OpenAI told FT. "It's a deeply unfocused company."
This is exactly the dynamic I've been worried about.
If you go to OpenAI's site to learn what they're all about, they're pretty clear about it: "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity", "Join us in shaping the future of technology". They think and I agree that ChatGPT is great, but the future of humanity does not depend on precisely how successful this one consumer chatbot is, and so it is not the company's focus. Anyone who understands OpenAI at even a basic level would recognize this, it's neither new nor subtle.
I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that OpenAI investors do not understand OpenAI and are just revenue growth junkies.
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They’re investors. More or less by definition they only care about revenue growth.
OAI has zero focus. How many acquisitions (value destructive it seems) and projects have they killed?
Whats comical is Steve Jobs preached the notion of focus decades ago.
Why can't people follow simple advice from someone who already acquired the scar tissue? Its literally madness.
Sam shouldve been fired and stayed fired. He's great at raising money, but running the firm? Absolute basket case of a CEO in that regard.
The deeper issue is structural, not just investor misunderstanding. OpenAI converted from a nonprofit-controlled entity to a PBC specifically to attract this kind of capital. When you take $6.6B from investors expecting returns, you create fiduciary pressures that are hard to keep out of strategic decisions regardless of what the mission statement says.
The 2023 board fight illustrated exactly this conflict in real time: the board tried to exercise mission-aligned oversight and was effectively overruled by capital. The new governance structure gave investors more influence, not less.
"We take the mission seriously" and "we need to justify an $852B valuation" can coexist for a while, but not forever. The investors may be revenue-focused, but they were invited in under terms that make their expectations structurally legitimate — which is what makes this more than just a perception problem.
> ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity
Thus far based on their actions, a reasonable read would be that they believe “humanity” would be better off with fewer people. Whoever you think OpenAI is or was, you’d have to be willfully ignorant of the actions of those who run it to believe it and Sam now.