What is somewhat justifying OpenAI's valuation is that they are still trying for AGI. They are not just working on models that work here and now, they are still approaching "simulating worlds" from all kinds of angles (vision, image generation, video generation, world generation), presumably in hopes that this will at some point coalesce in a model with much better understanding of our world and its agency in it. If this comes to pass OpenAI's value is near unlimited. If it doesn't, its value is at best half what it is today
And that's the dealbreaker for me since they've been so adamant on scaling taking them there, while we're all seeing how it's been diminishing returns for a while.
I was worried a few years back with the overwhelming buzz, but my 2017 blogpost is still holding strong. To be fair it did point to ASI where valuation is indeed unlimited, but nowadays the definition of AGI is quite weakened in comparison.. but does that then convey an unlimited valuation?
Yes, this is kind of like Tesla promising full self driving in 2016
I completely agree. I'm ashamed to admit, I've actually walked to the car wash without my car on more than one occasion. We all make mistakes!
Not that dumb, no. That's why it's laughable to claim that LLMs are intelligent.
"If your goal is to get your dirty car washed… you should probably drive it to the car wash "
The large hosted model providers always "fix" these issues as best as they can after they become popular. It's a consistent pattern repeated many times now, benefitting from this exact scenario seemingly "debunking" it well after the fact. Often the original behavior can be replicated after finding sufficient distance of modified wording/numbers/etc from the original prompt.
But this question posed to humans is plenty ambiguous because it doesn't specify whether you need to get to the boat or not, and whether or not the boat is at the wash already. ChatGPT Free Tier handles the ambiguity, note the finishing remark:
"If the boat wash is 50 meters down the street…
Drive? By the time you start the engine, you’re already there.
Sail? Unless there’s a canal running down your street, that’s going to be a very short and very awkward voyage.
Walk? You’ll be there in about 40 seconds.
The obvious winner is walk — unless this is a trick question and your yacht is currently parked in your living room.
If your yacht is already in the water and the wash is dock-accessible, then you’d idle it over. But if you’re just going there to arrange detailing, definitely walk."
"any human can instantly grok the right answer."
When asking a human about general world knowledge, they don't have the generality to give good answers for 90% of it. Even very basic questions humans like this, humans will trip up on many many more than the frontier LLMs.
"AGI" is the IPO.
How?
If we have AGI, we have a scenario where human knowledge-based value creation as we know it is suddenly worthless. It's not a stretch to imagine that human labor-based value creation wouldn't be far behind. Altman himself has said that it would break capitalism.
This isn't a value proposition for a business, it's an end of value proposition for society. The only people who find real value in that are people who spend far too much time online doing things like arguing about Roko's Basilisk - which is just Pascal's Wager with GPUs - and people who are so wealthy that they've been disconnected with real-world consequences.
The only reason anyone sees value in this is because the second group of people think it'll serve their self-concept as the best and brightest humanity has ever had to offer. They're confusing ego with ability to create economic value.
The majority of my coworkers now push AI-generated code each day, and it has completely absolved me of any fear whatsoever that AI will take my job.
a) AI is going to replace a Bazillion-Dollar Industry and that
b) being an AI model provider does not allow to capture margins above 5% long-term
I am not saying that this is what will happen, but it's a plausible scenario. Without farmers we would all be dead but that does not mean the they capture monopoly rents on their assets.