this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 220 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What does OpenAI need a CEO for anyway? Just let chatGPT run the company if they are so gung-ho about it.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 month ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 176 points 1 month ago (11 children)

I can't wait for the AI bubble to burst.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

Another year of this shit? I don't think we can take it, honestly

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[–] [email protected] 110 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Imagine never hearing the word "No." as a complete sentence ever again in your life.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's not a bad power to have if you use it for good

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

He wanted a second laptop dock for home when we had limited supply and not everyone had one yet

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

I think it's also likely that it's very hard to amass billions unless you already have some sort of brain rot.

[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 month ago (2 children)

$7trillion is three times the GDP if Brazil. It is bigger then the US federal budget. Seriously it is insane.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 month ago (1 children)

He is an empty husk of a man who has completed his transformation into a pure PR machine

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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

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[–] msage 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

The hallucination is in the mind of the user – people fall for the illusion of talking to a creature.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This guy is losing touch of reality

[–] Tramort 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I know musk is bipolar. Is Altman too?

Bipolar can cause this kind of request. It's called a delusion of grandiosity.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think it's a delusion of grandeur.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 month ago

"But the breakthrough will come just as soon as the chips no one can make are delivered."

Probably.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 month ago

The climate? What climate? Who cares about the climate?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago

You can buy a lot of Twitters for that money

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Which is why China is also pushing hard for AI as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It needs lots of energy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

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:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2024-06-05/foundering-openai-e1-most-silicon-valley-man-alive-podcast

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

He will get that. The ultra rich ignore all healthy limits.

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