Superstar? This Ed Zitron?

"Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI."

-July 29, 2024

https://x.com/edzitron/status/1817955630784917548

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root-parent 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And they did raise new funding as he predicted...Since July 2024, OpenAI has raised or secured roughly $170 billion in new capital. Numbers never see before. So yes its the one, and remarkably right so far.

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reducesuffering 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Notice how he didn't say "I predict they will raise new funding", he predicted collapse, with the implicit retort that there's no way they will raise more funding than has ever been done before and invent a whole new AI. He was mocking the supposed things that would need to happen. He strongly assumed collapse.

2 years these charlatans have had their "imminent collapse" predictions repeatedly wrong, meanwhile all valuations, AGI progress in unsolved problems, and frontier leadership have been repeatedly vindicated that we are beginning ASI / the singularity.

	▲	thereitgoes456 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, come on. He's not perfect, but compared to CEOs and researchers predicting AGI and complete economic upheaval every 3 months, he's looking very good. He's no more a charlatan than Altman is. His predictions (while often wrong) are at least somewhat justified and backed up by genuine scoops and original research. Altman goes on podcasts and talks about building Dyson spheres for energy.

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echelon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can't imagine OpenAI being a multi-trillion dollar company?

Open weights will drop costs, but distribution matters. OpenAI has that.

Costs will come down. Deep entrenchment will not.

	▲	hajile 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How will costs come down? Each generation of model is more expensive to train and run than the last. More efficient hardware? That means throwing out billions of dollars worth of existing hardware and buying billions more in hardware. The cheapest hardware is the stuff they already have because spending $70B in hardware to halve a $2-4B electricity bill just doesn’t make financial sense (and that’s if doubling hardware efficiency can happen before they go under). If they cut costs by using smaller models, they are then racing to the bottom vs China which seems hard to do (especially with China’s cheap solar energy).

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hajile 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As it stands, the leaked financials prove him correct. Given their losses (not counting restructuring) they are going to need enough funding to buy any of the bottom 300-400 of the F500 companies outright just to keep the lights on for the next year.

To say that’s an outrageous amount isn’t overstating in the slightest.

Given they are already being forced to drop inference prices in an attempt to compete with Chinese providers, I don’t know if billionaire investors will be willing to hand out that much money this time around if they can’t generate enough value to break even despite the hype.