The last two weeks at OpenAI
A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay on ten of the challenges I expected OpenAI to face this year.
Things just got worse. Here’s some of what’s happened in the last two weeks.
👉 Sora demo blows minds but fails basic physics and biology
👉 One of OpenAI’s best known researchers, Andrej Karpathy, co-lead on the new agent project, departs
👉 ChatGPT has a mostly unexplained 6 hour (?) meltdown
👉 Google and Mistral close the gap w GPT-4
👉 New results from Subbarao Kambhapati cast doubts on the robustness of chain of thought prompting
👉 Two new lawsuits again them have just been filed, one specifically on copyright and the other a broader class action
👉 Microsoft starts seeing other startups
Still no word on new board members so far as I know. Whoever joins will have to lot to consider.
— Gary Marcus
Glad to hear it. I'm dead set against it. I read somewhere like the Financial Times a couple years back, that it will eliminate 70% of the workforce. That will be fine if we planning for a different kind of economy, but we're not. How about we create an actual workforce with human beings. When/if we nail that we can move onto the next step. As far as Hollywood, as a member of the WGA, we're behind on this issue as was SAG. AI is already stolen manuscripts, likenesses, etc. It may be an asset to business because they only have one interest: money. But to creatives, it's an existential threat.
We covered some of their larger macro problems in our latest podcast. In addition to ethics issues, they have major product and marketing challenges, specifically with the attention approach which has created a hype bubble, and their lack of understanding about who their true customer is (hint, it's not the general public in spite of their tsunami approach to PR).
The crossing the chasm moment for ChatGPT will only carry them for so long. Sooner or later the repeated and frequent missteps will drag them down. In hindsight, the Altman firing looks pretty smart. Too bad investors did not see it as so, too.