dherlsThe OpenAI Graveyard: All the Deals and Products That Haven't Happened
This is important context in the wake of yesterday’s “raise” announcement. A lot of this stuff seems to just quietly never happen once the ink on the PR puff dries.
The AI industry increasingly looks in scramble mode to keep the hype going as those storm clouds of financial and business reality get darker and darker on the horizon.
They nominally come across as a more stable ship with less clouds over its leadership.
However all of the major privately held AI players are struggling to paint a business and financial picture that doesn’t look “terrible” at best and “verge of market moving implosion” at worst.
For now the only thing keeping this all alive is more and more irrational cash being thrown on the pile in the faint hope that something stops the implosion from happening.
Outwardly it looks much better.
But between their token curtailment and time of day restrictions, and some of the clues in the code leak (regex for sentiment, telling the public client to be "brief") it seems like they are facing some capacity issues.
Im guessing that the accountants at all the AI incumbents drink heavily.
Relative to OAI they are healthier.
That isn’t saying much.
> healthier
Correct. As compared to other AI companies. Tangible product, specific market segment and stable user base.
But whether it is worth a trillion dollars (like some of the peers are pretending to be) is yet to be seen. A lot of companies are using Anthropic products, but whether the spend is worth it, is also yet to be seen. A more realistic end state for Anthropic would be that they’d enterprise customers, with limited but steady spend due to Anthropic finally having to stop subsidizing tokens and a valuation in around $200-350B.
sell the roadmap, deliver a sku, sell/comp consulting services on escalations
the silicon valley shuffle, tried & true
For a company bringing a new technology from zero to mainstream, I think it's pretty normal that there will be a lot of failed attempts at productization.
The thing that isn't normal is the degree of experimentation relative to company valuation. Normally once a company reaches $700 B+ valuation, they've figured out their product and monetization strategy. ChatGPT is clearly still iterating heavily on that - not normal for a company that size.
And not normal for a company that has been at it this long.
The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two. ChatGPT was opened to the public on November 30th, 2022, which was 1219 days ago- almost 50% more time has elapsed than between the Apple II and Visicalc.
Without me trying to be snarky why do you feel spreadsheet software launching is comparable to this scenario?
Visicalc is often described as the killer app of the first generation Personal Computer(1). It was the product that drove them into every small business in the country, that blew up sales of personal computers and brought them out of the realm of hobbyists into enterprise. And, honestly, I think Visicalc and spreadsheets are still a greater benefit than what I've seen out of generative AI today. And that happened a lot faster than where we are today with generative AI. Apple had enormous actual profits by 1980 (Apple IPO'd in 1980 with a 21% operating margin). So I think that a lot of the "just got to give it more time" argument misses that the previous computer based revolutions that we know about productized and threw off gobs of cash a heck of a lot faster than this one has.
If the end result of this is "certain classes of white collar workers are 10-25% more productive" (which is the best results I can extrapolate from what I've seen so far) then it's really hard to imagine how OpenAI can return a profit to their investors.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc#Killer_app is pretty much the normal narrative on Visicalc and its importance to the Personal Computer.
All the “raises” consist of “committed capital” and all of the revenue is annualized.
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