Today I’m going to walk you through a fairly unique position: that OpenAI is just another boring AI startup lacking any meaningful product roadmap or strategy, using the press as a tool to pump its bags while very rarely delivering on what it’s promised. It is a company with massive amounts of cash, industrial backing, and brand recognition, and otherwise is, much like its customers, desperately trying to work out how to make money selling products built on top of Large Language Models.
OpenAI lives and dies on its mythology as the center of innovation in the world of AI, yet reality is so much more mediocre. Its revenue growth is slowing, its products are commoditized, its models are hardly state-of-the-art, the overall generative AI industry has lost its sheen, and its killer app is a mythology that has converted a handful of very rich people and very few others.
It would have still had the flaws and issues inherit with the process, but imagine current level LLMs that were trained on data that was curated and responsibly collected. It would also have helped to have the training emphasis on being accurate and search for verification and clarify, rather than be pleasing and agreeable to a fault. In the end it’s not AGI and can’t be alone, but the methods chosen was the direction that would be profitable and that’s where and why we are here now.