This made me realize OpenAI is actually in the Artificial Humans business right now, not just AI. I am not sure if this was what they wanted.

They have to deal with real humans. Billions of conversations with billions of people. In the Social Networks era this was easy. SN companies outsourced talking with humans part to other users. They had the c2c model. They just provided the platform, transmitted the messages and scaled up to billion users. They quietly watched to gather data and serve ads.

But these AI companies have to generate all those messages themself. They are basically like a giant call center. And call centers are stressful. Human communication at scale is a hard problem. Possibly harder than AGI. And those researchers in AI labs may net be best people to solve this problem.

ChatGPT started as something like a research experiment. Now it's the #1 app in the world. I'm not sure about the future of ChatGPT (and Claude). These companies want to sell AI workers to assist/replace human employees. An artificial human companion like in the movie Her (2013) is a different thing. It's a different business. A harder one. Maybe they sunset it at some point or go full b2b.

AH