It's incredibly frustrating to try and figure out how this grift works. The company is bleeeing money at high pressure. The more users they get, the faster they lose money. Even if you're a true believer who thinks their product is useful and will be ubiquitous in the near future, there's no way this makes sense as an investment.

It could be a greater fool scam, but if you're goddamn Softbank, Microsoft, or NVIDIA investing hundreds of millions, surely you are the biggest fool already? Who's MSFT gonna flip their share to? Scrooge McDuck? A G7 member government? God?

Or maybe they're expecting to become so ubiquitous you can't live without ChatGPT, at which point they will jack up the price (the good old MS EEE/Oracle Hustle). I suppose that would parse, but the novelty is already fading and public sentiment is at a downward slope. Even if you're a true believer, you'd have to beat the competition first. You could also hope for a magician to come along and suddenly invent chips that are an order of magnitude more efficient, but you'd still need to pay another king's ransom to have them designed, manufactured and sold to you (and absolutely not to your competitors).

How do they get away with these bonkers numbers? They're somehow going to make 20 times more revenue in the remaining year than they have until now? They're going to nearly double their earnings every year? They're gonna fucking invest seven trillion in TSMC chip fabs? These numbers are made up by a nine-year old. My burger restaurant where we use natural diamonds as grill charcoal is gonna be worth inifite plus one zillion brazillion skibidillion dollars next year. Please invest in it.

That same tired script of "You can't say AI is useless, I use it as a $productivityApp, so it's clearly not worth nothing, which invalidates all your claims." shows up in Zitron's comment box, it's like clockwork.

I dunno man, maybe it's because the ability to generate templates and spellcheck is a free feature in most IDEs and would be a rounding error of a rounding error when we're talking about billion dollar investments?

This landed on HN like a dead fish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41722985

Another submission with what looks like a lot more positive spin got more reaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726603

Edit choice comment from the latter

If you assume that the costs of inference would continue to decrease while they would be able to get billion people hooked on 42 per dollar plan..

That’s $0.5 trillion revenue rate

A billion people. Paying the equivalent of a premium streaming service. For something that can't even generate pr0n.

Color me skeptical.

SoftBank's Vision Fund will be investing $500 million in OpenAI

The herald of destruction: SoftBank! OpenAI is doomed!

Thank you Ed for validating my off-the-cuff comment I made on the train this morning:

https://lobste.rs/s/92qcme/insatiable_hunger_open_ai#c_vgiyrk

ClosedAI

Hand me the rubber hose, I'm bout to mainline this ed

psst I see dead corpos

(I've made a Kendrick joke before, and fuck it I'm gonna make it again)

tangent but something I don't really understand is why openai doesn't sell ads against their chats with non-paying users. I can't recall even seeing it brought up as an option. why is that?