> the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT

There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.

The bottleneck isn’t the people doing the work but the leadership’s bandwidth for strategic thinking

There are two layers here: 1) low level LLM architecture 2) applying low level LLM architecture in novel ways. It is true that there are maybe a couple hundred people who can make significant advances on layer 1, but layer 2 constantly drives progress on whatever level of capability layer 1 is at, and it depends mostly on broad and diverse subject matter expertise, and doesn't require any low level ability to implement or improve on LLM architectures, only understanding how to apply them more effectively in new fields. The real key thing is finding ways to create automated validation systems, similar to what is possible for coding, that can be used to create synthetic datasets for reinforcement learning. Layer 2 capabilities do feed back into improved core models, even if you have the same core architecture, because you are generating more and improved data for retraining.

Far be it from me to backseat drive for Sam Altman, but is the problem really that the core product needs improvement, or that it needs a better ecosystem? I can't imagine people are choosing they're chatbots based on providing the perfect answers, it's what you can do with it. I would assume google has the advantage because it's built into a tool people already use every day, not because it's nominally "better" at generating text. Didn't people prefer chatgpt 4 to 5 anyways?

ha what an incredible consumer-friendly outcome! Hopefully competition keeps the focus on improving models and prevents irritating kinds of monetization

Delaying doesn't necessarily mean they stop working on it. Also it might be a question of compute resource allocation as well.

I for one would say, the later they add the "ads" feature, the better...

>There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry

My guess is that it's smaller than that. Only a few people in the world are capable of pushing into the unknown and breaking new ground and discoveries