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What does OpenAI need a CEO for anyway? Just let chatGPT run the company if they are so gung-ho about it.
I’ve been saying this for almost a year. Not open AI specifically but any company with a board of directors.
They aren’t considering the shareholder value of their most expensive liability: the CEO.
He (because let’s face it. It’s going to be a he in most cases) is paid millions of dollars with a golden parachute. Literally money that could be given back to shareholders through dividends.
The fact that Boards of Directors aren’t doing this could be evidence that they aren’t looking out for shareholders’ interests
Here’s why:
Boards of directors are CEOs of other companies that are buddies of the CEO of the company they are directors of. This is like a shitty musical chair of board of directors.
There’s an important thing that the CEO provides that no AI can: the acceptance of risk.
On a day-to-day basis the CEO makes decisions, ignores expert advice, knocks off early for tee time, etc. For this work they are wildly overpaid and could easily be replaced by having their responsibilities divvied up amongst a small group of people in leadership roles.
To see the true purpose of the CEO we need to look at a bigger scale - the quarter-to-quarter scale. What could be bigger than that in the world of the MBA?
Every quarter the CEO must have the company meet the financial performance expectations of the board/owner(s)/shareholders. Failure is likely to result in them losing their job and getting a reputation as an underperformer, thus ruining their career. If the company does poorly or those expectations are unreasonably high then the CEO must cut corners in the operation. This of course hampers their ability to meet expectations later, but they’ll make it through this quarter.
When (inevitably) too many corners have been cut something catastrophic will happen. Either the company’s reputation will go to shit with customers slowly, or a high-profile scandal will blow up in the company’s face.
This is the moment when the CEO provides their most valuable service: to fall (or be pushed) onto their sword. The CEO is fired, ousted, or resigns. This allows the board/owner/shareholders to get a new face in and demand that they fix the most egregious issues, or at least the most glaring ones that don’t cost too much to fix.
This service cannot be provided by an AI. Why? Because the AI is a creation of the company. If it is used as a scapegoat it solves nothing. The company is pointing at their own creation and saying “see, that’s the problem”. It’s much more effective to point at a human they didn’t make and scream that that person made a mistake.
CEOs? Ruin their career? By what, jumping ship and taking a $100M bonus?
Lol, like the previous Boeing CEO. Kill a few hundred people, planes or plane components falling out of the sky, absolutely tank all manufacturing quality control, fail a NASA contract and strand a few astronauts…
Peace out and take a $62M bonus.
I wish I could get paid that much for failure or “accepting responsibility” lol
Let me start by saying first and foremost the paychecks and severance packages are beyond ridiculous. Like fucking unconscionable.
Now, that being said yes, when the CEO rightly or wrongly (typically rightly) becomes the fall guy their career is over. If they manage to get another job it probably won’t be in a leadership position, and if it is it would be with a much smaller organization that simply won’t be able to pay them the big bucks. The best a CEO can hope for after a public downfall is to be put out to pasture.
I don’t feel sad for them. While their golden parachute might represent literally the last money they will ever make it’s more than enough to live off of for the rest of their lives.
There’s an even bigger picture, though. Their personal reputation is ruined, but so is their family name. With the amount of money and prestige they were building up they may have had aspirations of positioning their kids as the elites of the future. Family money and connections could have ended up with their children some day becoming Senators and Congressmen. If they end up taking the fall, their public failure will sully their name for a couple of generations.
The kind of people that become CEOs of high-profile companies are a special breed of psycho. They’re willing to accept huge piles of money to roll the dice on their own career and the reputation of themselves, their children, and their grandchildren on the off chance they manage to avoid the chopping block until retirement.
It’s crazy what kind of bullshit some people will spout, like CEOs taking personal responsibility.
Is it really “taking” responsibility if it’s getting pinned on you?
But feel free to “ruin my career” after cutting me a check for $62m.
Exactly they’re (over) paid fall guys.
But offering to take the fall to allow companies to pull the shit they do to workers, the environment, consumers, and investors is pretty fucking disgusting too.
Your description reminds me of the job Barney had in HIMYM.
There’s an important thing that the CEO provides that no AI can: the acceptance of risk.
On a day-to-day basis the CEO makes decisions, ignores expert advice, knocks off early for tee time, etc. For this work they are wildly overpaid and could easily be replaced by having their responsibilities divvied up amongst a small group of people in leadership roles.
To see the true purpose of the CEO we need to look at a bigger scale - the quarter-to-quarter scale. What could be bigger than that in the world of the MBA?
Every quarter the CEO must have the company meet the financial performance expectations of the board/owner(s)/shareholders. Failure is likely to result in them losing their job and getting a reputation as an underperformer, thus ruining their career. If the company does poorly or those expectations are unreasonably high then the CEO must cut corners in the operation. This of course hampers their ability to meet expectations later, but they’ll make it through this quarter.
When (inevitably) too many corners have been cut something catastrophic will happen. Either the company’s reputation will go to shit with customers slowly, or a high-profile scandal will blow up in the company’s face.
This is the moment when the CEO provides their most valuable service: to fall (or be pushed) onto their sword. The CEO is fired, ousted, or resigns. This allows the board/owner/shareholders to get a new face in and demand that they fix the most egregious issues, or at least the most glaring ones that don’t cost too much to fix.
This service cannot be provided by an AI. Why? Because the AI is a creation of the company. If it is used as a scapegoat it solves nothing. The company is pointing at their own creation and saying “see, that’s the problem”. It’s much more effective to point at a human they didn’t make and scream that that person made a mistake.
I can’t wait for the AI bubble to burst.
We are all waiting. If they don’t come up with proven revenue opportunities in the next ~18 months, it’s going to be difficult to justify the astronomical capex spend.
This podcasting bro is NOT chasing revenue (yet).
He wants power.
He wants to collect 11-12 figure sums of venture capital and then built things that let him rule the world.
And afterwards, maybe revenue.
Another year of this shit? I don’t think we can take it, honestly
Mah, won’t happen like this. It was similar with Facebook 10 years ago and look at where it is now.
Which tech titan does it take with it?
My money is on Microsoft as owners of OpenAI, but most have sunk more into it than they should.
I doubt anyone that big will fall, Microsoft have so many fingers in so many pies, they can afford to take a hit like this. Plus, with the Office suite of products, they’re probably in the best place to make something back, even if they don’t make all their money back.
Microsoft are bullet proof. Their share price will take a big hit, and an exec or two will take a golden parachute, but they’ll bounce back very quickly. The bigger problem is that along the way they’ll balance the capex with multiple rounds of cutbacks and layoffs in other departments, and that’s before they’re finally forced to layoff everyone actually connected to this AI nonsense (who isn’t a senior manager or c-suite; they’ll all be fine).
Nvidea. Their share price would be a fraction of what it is without AI. Just like the last two cryptocurrency bubbles, they went all in and then acted surprised when they popped.
At the same time, they’ve lost a lot of goodwill with gamers, formerly their core audience. With the AAA industry pulling back, games might not be pushing the limits of GPU tech anymore. Microsoft still has their old core products, but Nvidia may return to it to find a wasteland.
Nvidia isn’t going to be holding any bag. They’re selling through what they make, and LLMs are just one of many uses for the massively parallel math they’re at the forefront of. At most they have to bring pricing down, but they don’t own the fab, so if demand did drop (which isn’t really all that likely), their costs will go down too. They have contracts in terms of volume and price, but they’re not near long term enough to do them more than a blip, and all their investment in developing architecture/tooling has value well outside of LLM nonsense.
Their stock price will tank. They have a $3B market cap because they’re selling shovels in a gold rush. Once the gold rush is over, that valuation will go back to where they were three years ago. Probably lower, because the stock market tends to overcorrect on these things.
Companies base their capital on their stock price, and a drop like that can kill companies. Doesn’t mean for sure that Nvidia will die, but they could.
Their fundamentals are too strong. They have market dominance with extremely steady technological progress against really bad competition. LLMs aren’t going to disappear when the shitty overpromising bubble pops. Generative AI isn’t going anywhere. Any of the thousands of other uses for their raw power are still there. They’ll just be at the ground floor of whatever the next math heavy hype cycle is, just like they were with crypto and LLMs, because cuda is the best way to get shit done, whether what you’re doing is useful or trash.
Like he said though, being fabless means there’s no assets to hold the bag on. It’s the fabs that stop getting profitable orders that tank. Worst case is they do layoffs.
They’ll just transition to the next fad that needs large amounts of parallel compute. It’s what they’ve just done moving from cryptocurrency to machine learning.
What does this even mean?
I’ve heard someone call it billionaire brain rot. I think at some point you end up with so much money and not enough people telling you no, that it literally changes your brain.
Seems likely.
Imagine never hearing the word “No.” as a complete sentence ever again in your life.
Or when you do just assuming you can override them eventually
We had a guy like that at work, he said basically “how far above you do I have to go to get what I want”
That’s not a bad power to have if you use it for good
He wanted a second laptop dock for home when we had limited supply and not everyone had one yet
I think it’s also likely that it’s very hard to amass billions unless you already have some sort of brain rot.
$7trillion is three times the GDP if Brazil. It is bigger then the US federal budget. Seriously it is insane.
This guy is an absolute lunatic.
“Gimme all of the world’s money several times over for this fancy T9 that I’m playing with.”
If someone wrote a cartoon villain using his quotes, it would be dismissed as unbelievable and rubbish.
A-and all that money is basically scammed out of hype over something that won’t be the thing people think it will be, because that would be a magic wand for everything.
When they mean artificial intelligence, they mean some kind of self-designing civilization, except it does their bidding. Goethe’s Zauberlehrling comes to mind.
And a lot of money does find a way to do things, just like a lot of effort applied does find a way to break something. Except the curves are not linear, and no amount of effort and money has allowed us to settle Mars yet.
He is an empty husk of a man who has completed his transformation into a pure PR machine
His involvement in the infamous WorldCoin provides useful insight into his character.
An oligarch and a degenerate (outside the US many oligarchs have a more or less sober understanding of who they are, although degeneracy among oligarchs is a global issue).
Lol
Open AI has a projected revenue of 3 Billion this year.
It is currently projected to burn 8 Billion on training costs this year.
Now it needs 5 Gigawatt data centers worth over 100 Billion.
And new fabs worth 7 Trillion to supply all the chips.I get that it’s trying to dominate a new market but that’s ludicrous. And even with everything so far they haven’t really pulled far ahead of competing models like Claude and Gemini who are also training like crazy.
There is no market, or not much of one. This whole thing is a huge speculative bubble, a bit like crypto. The core idea of crypto long term make some sense but the speculative value does not. The core idea of LLMs (we are no where near true AI) makes some sense but it is half baked technology. It hadn’t even reached maturity and enshittification has set in.
OpenAI doesn’t have a realistic business plan. It has a griftet who is riding a wave of nonsense in the tech markets.
No one is making profit because no one has found a truly profitable use with what’s available now. Even places which have potential utility (like healthcare) are dominated by focused companies working in limited scenarios.
IMO it’s even worse than that. At least from what I gather from the AI/Singularity communities I follow. For them, AGI is the end goal - a creative thinking AI capable of deduction far greater than humanity. The company that owns that suddenly has the capability to solve all manner of problems that are slowing down technological advancement. Obviously owning that would be worth trillions.
However it’s really hard to see through the smoke that the Altmans etc. are putting up - how much of it is actual genuine prediction and how much is fairy tales they’re telling to get more investment?
And I’d have a hard time believing it isn’t mostly the latter because while LLMs have made some pretty impressive advancements, they still can’t have specialized discussions about pretty much anything without hallucinating answers. I have a test I use for each new generation of LLMs where I interview them about a book I’m relatively familiar with and even with the newest ChatGPT model, it still makes up a ton of shit, even often contradicting its own answers in that thread, all the while absolutely confident that it’s familiar with the source material.
Honestly, I’ll believe they’re capable of advancing AI when we get an AI that can say ‘I actually am not sure about that, let me do a search…’ or something like that.
I follow a YouTube channel, AI explained, that has some pretty grounded analysis of the latest models and capabilities. He compared LLMs to the creative writing center of the brain, as in they’re really nice to interact with, output things that sound correct, but ultimately are missing the capabilities of reasoning and factuality that are needed for AGI
He’s the best for unbiased info when new models drop and news drops. Love that channel.
He’s really good. I’m torn on the subject because the current AI hype is most certainly a bubble and a grift, but I find the technology fascinating. I do think there’s potential for great things there, but the technology is almost exclusively in the hands of 3 companies and will have a terrible impact on everyone else. I enjoy just focusing on the technical details every once in a while
I feel the same way man, I’m so excited about this tech because of the few use cases that we will discover and will change our lives and cause a paradigm shift…but it will be controlled by someone who is ultra rich (a person or corp) so that’s awful. And there is a ton of stuff that is a grift that will die off and gives it a bad name so I temper my excitement of it around most people because it’s unpopular to root for the tech.
The hallucination is in the mind of the user – people fall for the illusion of talking to a creature.
yeah, i really hate this. i have shares of multiple tech companies, like nvidia, intel, AMD, TSMC, etc. and because of the AI bubble idk how much they are really worth. the market is all warped and one day a company is doing well, the next day it seems to be in peril. i would like to know how much they would be worth after the bubble bursts, but there is no way to know.
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Bro has just learned about inflation and thinks a deflationary currency is some magical fix, lmao.
This guy is losing touch of reality
I know musk is bipolar. Is Altman too?
Bipolar can cause this kind of request. It’s called a delusion of grandiosity.
Oh wow I didn’t actually know he was bipolar (checked to confirm it is the case). I knew he was on the autism spectrum.
I can’t imagine those 2 play nice together.
My wife is both bipolar and autistic and Musk is just as unfathomable to her as he is to me. The two things clash in some regards but his shittiness is his own.
Power kills people, only they keep walking and talking after that
Well the insane amount of random drugs he’s taking don’t help either.
I think it’s a delusion of grandeur.
Yes I think your right
“But the breakthrough will come just as soon as the chips no one can make are delivered.”
Probably.
The climate? What climate? Who cares about the climate?
You can buy a lot of Twitters for that money
Middle Eastern money
Something tells me the Saudis don’t want AI for the betterment of all humanity.
Could be the human rights abuses, dunno.
Imagine an AI bound by Sharia law, the current ones limited by American puritanical bullshit are already bad enough. “How did prostitution during the gold rush affect the economy of mining towns?”
ERROR THIS QUESTION VIOLATES GUIDELINES
Which is why China is also pushing hard for AI as well.
It needs lots of energy.
The Bloomberg podcast series ‘Foundering – The OpenAI Story’ is quite insightful in regard to Sam Altman’s psyche.
There are five episodes, first is here:
He will get that. The ultra rich ignore all healthy limits.
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It seems that the ~$3.7 billion revenue figure is from this NYT article.
Some interesting background:
Roughly 10 million ChatGPT users pay the company a $20 monthly fee, according to the documents. OpenAI expects to raise that price by $2 by the end of the year, and will aggressively raise it to $44 over the next five years, the documents said.
It will be interesting to see if their predictions turn out to be true. $44 a month seems steep for a LLM, not to mention there will likely be a lot of competition both from cloud LLM providers and local LLM initiatives.
The day AWS starts a Mistral-as-a-service is when OpenAI dies.
I could maybe see people using it professionally for $44 a month. I don’t see them being successful marketing to the casual, curious, and hobbyists for 3x a streaming subscription.
$44 a month. Good luck with that. Google will offer Gemini for free until open AI dies of starvation and they will soon have hard time justifying the $20 for most user.
I also doubt their Apple deal last 5 years, I would be surprised if the control freak company sees it as anything more than a temporary belt because they were caught with their pants down.
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