Winter is Coming for OpenAI

Brace yourselves, winter is coming for OpenAI - atleast, that's what we think. In this episode we look at OpenAI's recent massive funding round and ask "why would anyone want to fund a company that is set to lose net 5 billion USD for 2024?" We scrape through a whole lot of muck to find the meaningful signals in all this news, and there is a lot of it, so get ready!

• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:28) - Hot off the press
• (02:43) - Why listen?
• (06:07) - Why might VCs invest?
• (15:52) - What are people saying
• (23:10) - How *is* OpenAI making money?
• (28:18) - Is AI hype dying?
• (41:08) - Why might big companies invest?
• (48:47) - Concrete impacts of AI
• (52:37) - Outcome 1: OpenAI as a commodity
• (01:04:02) - Outcome 2: AGI
• (01:04:42) - Outcome 3: best plausible case
• (01:07:53) - Outcome 1*: many ways to bust
• (01:10:51) - Outcome 4+: shock factor
• (01:12:51) - What's the muck
• (01:21:17) - Extended outro

Links

• Reuters article - OpenAI closes $6.6 billion funding haul with investment from Microsoft and Nvidia
• Goldman Sachs report - GenAI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit
• Apricitas Economics article - The AI Investment Boom
• Discussion of "The AI Investment Boom" on YCombinator
• State of AI in 13 Charts
• Fortune article - OpenAI sees $5 billion loss in 2024 and soaring sales as big ChatGPT fee hikes planned, report says

More on AI Hype (Dying)

• Latent Space article - The Winds of AI Winter
• Article by Gary Marcus - The Great AI Retrenchment has Begun
• TimmermanReport article - AI: If Not Now, When? No, Really - When?
• MIT News article - Who Will Benefit from AI?
• Washington Post article - The AI Hype bubble is deflating. Now comes the hard part.
• Andreesen Horowitz article - Why AI Will Save the World

Other Sources

• Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Foundation Model Transparency Index
• Cointelegraph article - Europe gathers global experts to draft ‘Code of Practice’ for AI
• Reuters article - Microsoft's VP of GenAI research to join OpenAI
• Twitter post from Tim Brooks on joining DeepMind
• Edward Zitron article - The Man Who Killed Google Search