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One year ago, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and ChatGPT, said “within a year, ChatGPT will solve all of science”. Who knows what he means, but here we are, and no, it didn’t.
But keep this data point in mind next time you hear Sam promise a new feature or talk up the power of AI: about 7 days after every one of his ridiculous product/feature announcements you will find a story emerging about the finances of OpenAI. And the stories of the business and financing are always bad. OpenAI is losing money with every single prompt every single person puts into it. It’s how the 5th most visited website in the world every day, and every visit by every user is loss making.
OpenAI is losing more money than almost any company in human history. OpenAI needs to raise more money than any company in human history by the end of this year in order to remain functional.
All of this adds up to one simple truth: this is a bubble. A bubble, people! And Sam (and others) feed that bubble so they can drown out the business news.
Yes, GenAI is one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever created. But it’s only good for the things it was designed to do. It’s not intelligent - it’s a predictive algorithm. It doesn’t think - it’s literally just trying to please you with an answer that sounds good. It doesn’t learn - it is based on training data which has now run out. And the business model underlying it all is unsustainable.
Use it. Use it wisely and well. But don’t get caught out when the bubble bursts.
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