i recently used gpt for the first time in several months (i'm a daily claude user) and didn't find this at all. it is most certainly trying to pull you into engagement with how it ends each response. "if you want, i could tell you about this thing that's relevant to what you are discussing and tease just enough so that you addictively answer yes"
To me it seems it was "Disney gets shares and we get to use their characters in Sora".
Even if Sora breaks even, why would you gift Disney stock? It's not like they actual gave 1B to openai.
Not about Sora, but about ChatGPT. I felt the same way for quite a while until I noticed that its response pattern has changed, apparently aiming for higher engagement. Someone aggressively pursued a metric.
At some point, ChatGPT started leaving annoying cliffhangers in its every response, like "Do you want me to share a little-known secret of X that professionals often use?" Like, come on!
I really thought he wasn't like the previous generations of tech leaders - as you mentioned OpenAI (with him in charge) seemed to be genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives.
He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even contribute to helping disease too.
Then they drop this and it just doesn't gel. So much of what they've done since has just doubled down on the Zuck-esque scumminess and greed too.
Part of me still sees Dario as genuine in the way that Sama seemed back in 2024, but I'm sure once he has enough investor pressure he'll cave the same way too.
He is a con man. Of course he’s charming and convincing, that’s how he ended up where he is. But he’s just as full of it as Musk when he was waxing lyrical about saving the world and going to Mars. They lie very convincingly.
I think his board fight within OpenAI where essentially lied to the board, his obsession with retinal scanning everyone for his biometric cryptocurrency (Worldcoin), how he left Y Combinator are just evidence that he’s not very heroic. Most cringe to me is that he and many others seem aware that what their are doing is corrosive and harmful to society on some level as Altman has admitted to having a bunker somewhere around Big Sur [0]. Which…WTF.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
Not too familiar with that history, but he still is listed as a courtesy credit/reviewer at the end of PG's blog entries, so I assume he didn't have too much of a bad exit?
This is a conflict of interest and I think one a very obvious one. He tried to have it both ways and was forced to choose in the end. I think putting himself in that situation rather than resigning up front to pursue OpenAI ambitions says a lot about his character.
It could prevent suicide, maybe, but we know that it does cause suicides, at least in some cases. Seems like a poor value proposition.
The things he does is convince investors to give him billions of dollars to build what he wants. Where exactly does that leave us?
To me, this just came off as pathetic. It hasn't solved anything and there's no reason to believe it ever will. The whole question is completely pointless except to put the idea in viewers heads that ChatGPT will soon revolutionize science, with no actual substance behind it. It's not even a question, there's only one possible answer. He's holding the guy verbally hostage just to manipulate dumb viewers.
So anyway that's the only memorable clip I've seen of Sam Altman, and based on that alone, fuck that guy.
Altman's reaction was very telling of the kind of person he is, just immediately lashing out at Gerstner in a childish way, asking if Gerstner wanted to sell his shares because he could find a buyer in no time.
It was a pathetically immature reaction, I wouldn't expect that from any kind of professional, even less someone who has held positions as Altman has and now sits at the top of the leadership for a company sucking hundreds of billions of investment.
Apart from that clip there's also the whole saga of sama @ Reddit, full of lies, deceptions, and the same kind of immature attitude peppered across Reddit itself.
If you're familiar with nepobaby brats and narcissists, this is not surprising.
After glazing OpenAI and Sam personally for 45 minutes straight. But as soon as Sam was questioned in the slightest, he exploded.
I think if you had to foot the bill for generating a bajillion gigabytes of slop with no real utility, you wouldn't be too mystified.
They showed off their technology and proved it was impressive. That's all it had to do.
I suspect they promised synthetic movies but it quickly became clear that they were never going to be able to deliver on this.
Slick fifteen second lulz-clips, sure, but I don't think they can make several of them consistent enough to fit into a larger video narrative without the audience finding it jarring and incoherent.
Perhaps legal at Disney also concluded that the output wouldn't be possible to copyright, which is their core business.
I'm curious if you still feel this way about current iterations of ChatGPT? It seems like it's now primed to engagement bait the user, especially when used through the web UI. You can ask it a simple question with a straight forward answer and it will still try to get you to follow up with more.
> What is the minimum thickness for Shimano M8100 disc brake rotors?
> For Shimano XT M8100-series rotors (like RT-MT800 / RT-MT900 commonly used with M8100 brakes), the minimum thickness is 1.5 mm. If the rotor measures 1.5 mm or thinner, Shimano says it should be replaced.
> (a bunch of pointless details in bullet points)
> If you want, tell me the exact rotor model (e.g., RT-MT800, RT-MT900, size), and I can confirm the spec for that specific one and what typical wear looks like.
The entire query could have been answered with "1.5mm". The "if you want" follow ups are so annoying.
My guess is they over committed server/energy resources, since they were generating ~30 images per frame of 1 second of video for results that may be discarded and then tried again.
Now that energy costs are increasingly less predictable because of the war, they're prioritizing what is sustainable. Willing to blow up the $1 billion Disney deal for Sora, because that's a popular IP that would have increased discarded server time.
Might be why the latest Iran propaganda video could be created in PowerPoint: https://bsky.app/profile/rachelbitecofer.bsky.social/post/3m...
(This sort of question, and the Grok sexual abuse, is why I'd like to see mandatory invisible watermarks on generated images/video)
Most people serious about this stuff usually have their own pipelines.
These are open weight models, so you can fine tune them on Lego content… But presumably they already have enough training data since they were made by Chinese companies who don’t give a shit about Western IP rights.
I'd like to know what self hosted models they've been using, if any, and who provided them, trained on Lego IP.