How does this affect OpenAI's prospects in the next few quarters?
Unlike Anthropic, OAI does not have an S-1 to pore over. Their finances are shrouded in rumor and speculation. I can't assess how much of a death knell a ~15B financing shortfall is.
Nobody on the outside knows for sure, but two key signals to watch are project sunsets and brain drain.
If the rumors of fundraising difficulties are true, OAI will have to prioritize its most profitable projects, potentially slowing down new training runs and optimizing existing models for efficiency at the expense of user experience.
Insiders are also the first to sense internal trouble, so if top talent starts leaving for competitors preparing to go public, it won't bode well for the company.
The amount itself is probably meaningless. The fact that there was a shortfall at all is, for me, the signal.
Not too long ago, people were fighting to throw money at them. That might be the sign that we're past the peak of inflated expectations and going down towards the through of disillusionment .
> The amount itself is probably meaningless. The fact that there was a shortfall at all is, for me, the signal.
It is a signal, but I am not sure what it is signalling...
It could be signalling that all surplus money has been consumed already (i.e. the investment class has no more money left to invest).
It could signal that the specific class of investment is no longer desirable (i.e. the investment money is there, but has no appetite for token-providers).
It could mean that OpenAI, specifically, is considered not worth committing to anymore.
We should be looking at how the entire class of token providers is doing; if the rest are still getting interest from investors but OAI is not, then it's just OAI that is in trouble. If the entire class is not getting the money they are asking for, then maybe the peak of the bubble is reached (or the surplus money is all invested).
lack of appetite, when broadly visible, removes future speculators from the new investment pool, and starts bleeding old speculators. This will create a downward pressure. As the dynamic plays out the second rung of speculators will bleed out too.
Thats how bubbles burst - as each tranche of speculators bails the next tranche gets spooked through the pricing signals.
If this is being announced here, it was probably started at least a few months ago, and at that point funding was likely looking a lot more forthcoming, so it would make sense to try to raise more than is strictly necessary if the price is good. On that basis, it might not be a problematic shortfall.
The person interviewed in the BBC article is a football player and fits the bill of 'active' and 'gets outside', none of which addressed the underlying issue.
My read on this article, which is validated by all the comments in this thread, is that it's a PSA to public health officials to have better outreach for darker skinned individuals living in the UK who seem to be getting systematically misdiagnosed because of a lack of knowledge.
> there is minimal methodologically rigorous research showing health benefits from exogenous supplementation.
In this day and age, this shouldn't be an open question tbh. There is an extensive body of research, with dozens of meta-analysis / systematic reviews aiming to settle the score on this. If you let Claude or your favorite LLM du jour loose on Pubmed I'm sure it will surface some very reliable conclusions.
> In this day and age, this shouldn't be an open question tbh.
Are you being paid by the Vitamin D council or something? I thought HN was about curious conversation.
> There is an extensive body of research, with dozens of meta-analysis / systematic reviews aiming to settle the score on this. If you let Claude or your favorite LLM du jour loose on Pubmed I'm sure it will surface some very reliable conclusions.
After I finished my degree in human nutrition, I decided to go to medical school because of the amount of free time I was spending on PubMed. I previously had high hopes for vitamin D, but I am now a skeptic specifically due to the dearth of rigorous and supportive studies on PubMed.
Do you have any favorite trials of exogenous supplementation that are in humans, large sample size, RTC with appropriate blinding, and have positive, meaningful / non-surrogate outcomes? This would seem easy to accomplish given its wide availability, low cost, and excellent safety margin.
> who seem to be getting systematically misdiagnosed because of a lack of knowledge
In contrast, vitamin D testing seems to be fairly commonplace in my practice setting, and unfortunately I see it being used as a scapegoat for dubious symptoms routinely.
> But maybe it wouldn't be that exciting to see some guys sitting at a desk.
Let me introduce you to the TV show Industry which takes you into the world of London high finance where tense phone calls, compliance violations and financial crimes are the order of the day [1]
Not sure why they do this, anyone has an idea? Like, the Internet is just there, I can go and watch porn whenever I like. If I am watching your show, it's because I am interested in something that is not porn. Also, if your show has a lot of these scenes, I can't watch in many places (ie: cafe, plane, with other people, etc..)
>
Not sure why they do this, anyone has an idea? Like, the Internet is just there, I can go and watch porn whenever I like.
It's HBO. They are known for this. But they definitely went too far with Industry in my opinion.
The sex and drug scenes are much more toned down in the latter two seasons. Part of the reason why is the cast had more leverage and strong armed the writers / directors.
Great show but definitely would be better with 90% of the sex / drug scenes removed.
This is like medical series about ER, in real life it doesn't happen. In real life nobody cares, things slip trough, people die, finally someone receives a huge bill.
With the current capabilities of LLMs I'd imagine removing the "it's not A, it is B" tell would be rather simple and involve a modification of the system prompt.
The fact that none of the frontier labs have done so is probably because it's another way to easily fingerprint their own slop. It's known that Anthropic already has a mechanism for ID'ing Claude output. As more and more of internet communication is mediated through agents, there is value in finding a way to prevent slop from being re-ingested during training and avoiding model collapse.
Star Trek TNG as a whole was a masterclass on how to effectively manage a high performance team. It's a favorite watch in tech leadership circles for this reason. Every now and then I re-watch this clip of Data taking over the enterprise and the inevitable hiccups he runs into [1].
Keep in mind that Star Trek is a fictional utopia. When writing a script, one can make anything work out well.
The original Star Trek was Roddenberry's vision of utopia. The benevolent dictator always makes the right decisions. He's surrounded by his loyal band of perfect lieutenants, who apparently have zero desire to advance, and have no flaws at all. Any and all of them are willing to sacrifice themselves for the others. None do anything bad (unless it's a plot device with an explanation that absolves them).
Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed watching ST very much. Just keep in mind that that it's a fiction.
It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures. Ask about sci-fi and what comes to mind first is almost always some kind of dystopia. Terminator, 1984, Deep Space 9, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Dune, Tank Girl, Minority Report, iRobot, Westworld, Altwred Carbon. Those aren't worlds that seem like great places to live if you're not rich! So Star Trek is much a work of fiction as the rest of those, but for all its flaws, at least is paints a mostly nice picture of the future that someone might want to live in, not crushed under the heel of a corporation. It makes sense; a story with no conflict isn't interesting, and dystopia provides for conflict. To philosophize, it's why I think we're so afraid of AI and robots and the future. It's why I wrote my book the way I did.
> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.
Utopias used to be the most common scifi futures. This is what the so called Cyberpunks (Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, ...) rebelled against.
It used to be all about what wonders technology will bring us. By the time of the 70s it became clear that technology doesn't necessarily make everything better, but can be a burden in itself, or even widen the gap between the haves and haves not. And that is what they wrote about. It turned out to be the most popular scifi with audiences deeming it more believable.
They used to be more common maybe, but even the titular "Utopia" by Thomas More had slavery. Sometimes the "perfect" settings were imperfect due to the times they were written, often they were intentionally imperfect, and that was the point.
E.g. consider HG Wells The Time Machine, where the future start out seeming quite like an utopia but then we meet the Morlocks.
But lots of books were downright dystopian much earlier. Heck, several of the "standards bearers" for dystopias pre-date cyberpunk by a lot, like Brave New World, This Perfect Day, 1984.
Particularly stories like The Time Machine where the setting as a whole very much was revealed not to be an utopia were among the most common "utopian" settings pre-cyberpunk.
Pure utopias were very rare for a reason: They're really hard to set compelling in stories in, and so most of the ones that do exist tend to set stories on their edges and fault lines.
What changed with cyberpunk wasn't that (surface) utopias went away, or even that we get to see the imperfect underside, but that the script is flipped so that the protagonist isn't a tourist on the underside, but belongs there, and is often alienated from any seemingly perfect parts of the world they inhabit.
Compare settings that do show both sides, like The Time Machine, and a cyberpunk version of The Time Machine would probably have a protagonist that was a Morlock. The world itself wouldn't change, but we'd get to see it from the opposite POV.
> Pure utopias were very rare for a reason: They're really hard to set compelling in stories in, and so most of the ones that do exist tend to set stories on their edges and fault lines.
True, and I think Iain M. Banks specifically commented on this in interviews and essays. The Culture novels are mostly set outside of The Culture. Star Trek is mostly set on the fringes of or outside of Federation space, but especially during Roddenberry's lifetime, no matter what the crew was dealing with, they were very self-consciously people from a utopia.
Yeah, I specifically had the Culture in mind when I wrote that, because Banks seemed a lot more self-aware of that and playing with and actually telling us fun things about his utopia and trying to actively flesh it out, while to me at least it feels like Roddenberry was caught up in wanting Star Trek to be morality plays in space that had to teach a lesson to the point of getting very heavy handed with it at times (and he might be right the heavy-handedness was necessary given some of the takes I've seen on various episodes), while still telling us frustratingly little about his utopia itself.
> America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
So, by this logic, a homeless person with a used iPhone is better off than Louis XIV (who literally owned all of France) just because the king couldnt play Candy Crush?
This statement confuses global technological progress across centuries with an individuals actual financial security, social power, and quality of life within their own modern society.
I simply just cant understand why would someone repeat such a statement (and I have seen it everywhere).
> > America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
> False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
There's a lot of reasonable arguments to unpack here.
But no, it's not that Louis XIV didn't have an iPhone, it's that the vast middle class in developed countries has central heating and access to penicillin and don't die from giving birth as much.
Also, America's poor are definitely worse off than medieval kings. They don't have access to those basic things that keep most modern people wealthier than medieval kings, like food, shelter and health care.
Some of the older (pre-medieval) king's ruins in Denmark are (by our standards) small stone houses with a moat, and what makes them remarkable is that they're made of stone, and the moat is rather big, so it keeps people out. Like metal doors in apartment buildings, sort of. (Correction for the historians: The oldest king's ruins are of course just holes in the ground where wooden beams used to stand.)
s/America's poor/Europe's lower middle class/ and you're there.
I think that we are both well aware that the statement was not about "Candy Crush" or "Louis XIV". As the "America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings" was not about technological progress.
Some more thoughts for you: since 19xx workers are productive to the scale of 10x (feel free to downplay it to whatever factor over 3x as this is the minimal amount, everyone agrees on except of those that harvest the difference) against those times. But we are still working 8/8/8. Who takes the difference? Of 10x (or 3x)?
You think the biggest difference is Candy Crush? Have you forgotten about clean drinking water, plumbing, abundance of food, air conditioning, medicine, healthcare, etc?
Is there a definition of standard of living? A king would be entertaining, socialising, and strategising most of the time (along with a lot more pursuits of hunting, etc for leisure). While I understand they had less access to healthcare and variety of food, travel, etc...id still argue they had a better standard of living than someone that works 8-10h/day and then comes home to cook and clean?
America's poor today have clean water, health care, washing machines, central heating and air conditioning, flush toilets, hot and cold running water, electric lights, hot showers, fresh vegetables and fruit year round, glass windows, cotton undies, ice cream, TVs with 24/7 entertainment, talk to anyone in the world at the push of a button, need I go on?
The poor have those things because they still have some amount of power. They're still needed for work, and if you make too many of them too desperate, they can threaten the people at the top. But if you let the wealth (and power) gap get too large this will no longer be the case, and the poor might lose access to those things. If the wealth gap becomes such that the rich can afford automated production and protection but the poor can not, the current economic and political systems will no longer have a reason to give access to any of those things to the poor.
No they didn't. In castles meat wasn't very fresh at all, and food poisoning was both common and a common cause of death especially in medieval times. Which is why we have so many traditional dishes that are effectively just ways to keep food fresh and especially safe for longer. How many stew recipes did people invent worldwide, for example? Slow cooking will keep food edible for a week if you do it right. And if you really push it, for months (ie. add animal gelatin as a last step and keep cooking for 2 hours after that, at some point it will solidify and you get something that can be considered "instant soup" by extremely flexible interpretation). If you look back 100 years there are books with year-round menus, and bits of that survive. Why? To give you specific dishes when the ingredients are available according to the "agricultural calendar" as it's called in France. Christmas is great. October sucks.
The very oldest book in the bible contains the basic recipe for keeping meat fresh for ~week, and that's what Kosher, Halal, ... are really about.
And yeah, it depends. Roman emperors, for example, would have had fresh meat available whenever. Medieval kings, no way. Renaissance kings ... probably not constant fresh meat, and certainly not constant fresh fish, but a lot better than medieval kings.
> On the other hand kings had free-range organic grown meat prepared by personal cook anytime they wanted which is a true luxury even
There is no refrigeration, so "fresh" meat has to be slaughtered the same day. Kings tended to live in populated areas, so wild game would be scarce. Majority of meat would have been pork kept in pens (not free-range in the modern sense), or mutton/goat (free range, but typically older and tougher). At the same time, even a king likely wasn't slaughtering 365 pigs/year just to have fresh meat every day - lots of dried, smoked, or even salted meat in the diet...
I think it’s disingenuous to imply that there isn’t an inequality issue because the basic standard of living has advanced since the Middle Ages. Even if we compare the standard of living for say, Mississippi lower third and Uganda lower third, it’s obvious that you’re better off in Mississippi. However, the fact that the wealth and means to uplift the poor actually exists in the US but is not exercised is itself an issue - Uganda does not have that possibility.
> Even if we compare the standard of living for say, Mississippi lower third and Uganda lower third, it’s obvious that you’re better off in Mississippi.
I mean, it’s no wonder people move from uganda to mississipi (or other places in the us) and not rhe other way around.
Writing has been on the wall since before LLMs took over. Companies invested an incredible amount of money into "big data" over the past 15 years, and the returns are still nowhere to be seen. Data science and data engineering departments have been among the most impacted in all the layoff waves since covid.
It was always a pointless job. I’d watch data people manually put together PowerPoints by hand when it’s the same powerpoint every week and could be entirely automatic.
But they don’t, because they want to look busy. And it’s not like they actually understand the data anyway, because they’ve never worked in the area the data comes from.
There's every incentive for nation states and other espionage outfits to keep these types of exploits under wraps. This has probably been the new normal for some time ..
I for one have experienced multiple lifetimes worth of internet madness and will be looking to airgap / disconnect as many devices as I can get away with.
It is a reflection of Bay Area tech culture, which dominates internet conversation and somewhat unfairly 'represents' US or global tech culture as a whole.
For companies in this bubble creative destruction is the order of the day and this manifests in me-too behavior from executives coupled with breathless enthusiasm for new technologies. It can often be excessive from the POV of an outsider looking in but not embracing the new thing fast enough could be the difference between filing Chapter 11 or having a trillion dollar market cap for these firms. All of this could occur within the span of 6 months.
Companies/Organizations outside this bubble don't face the same pressures (at least in a compressed timeframe) so they lag a little bit in responding to trends. But make no mistake the 'creative destruction' is occurring in full force and will wipe out any firm that's not ready for what's coming.
"But make no mistake the 'creative destruction' is occurring in full force and will wipe out any firm that's not ready for what's coming." - could you explain what do you mean by it?
Engineers in the US are by and large writing a lot less manual code now than they were 6 months ago. There are engineers who are not writing any code at all by hand.
Is this a skill that makes up the bulk of the economic value of a SWE? That's up for debate. Either way, it is a skill that commanded premium salaries not that long ago and was a non-trivial cost for any forward thinking technology company.
That has all changed very abruptly. It is _cheap_ now to produce source code. The expectation is that this will reduce the labor cost and make companies more productive i.e. productivity = output (software) / input (labor cost).
There are whole classes of companies whose service was to provide tools for SWEs (i.e. devtools) that have no foundation to build on now. The entire SaaS ecosystem is predicated (in part) on the cost of standing up a fit-for-purpose web app to solve some internal business problem being too high to be worth it for most large enterprises. Hence why they are okay spending hundreds of thousands or millions per year in subscriptions to these companies. That's changed now with AI being able to spin up entire products soup to nuts at the cost of a few hundred dollars worth of tokens.
In summary, the changes in how we work within the past 6 months to a year have been nothing short of seismic. If you or your firm are not experimenting with AI tools then it's important that you pay attention now because the chance that your business will be gone or your job will be eliminated has increased 100x. Whether you like it or not the job description for being a software developer has changed.
I'm sure someone will point out some spec that's better on the PS5, but the extra $200 will make up the difference if you spend more time looking than the 15 seconds I just did.
>I'm sure someone will point out some spec that's better on the PS5
They're not even in the same ballpark - the PS5 is more than an order of magnitude better in GPU performance.
Despite how much it does matter, RAM is not the only thing you need for running LLMs - that N150 is not going to run anything but really tiny models at any sort of reasonable speed - certainly nothing that approaches using all of its ram. The GPU in the PS5 is ~25x faster. And if you're running games the RAM doesn't really affect performance at all once you have "enough" for a given game.
You're right that you probably could build something quite a bit faster than a PS5 for the same price though - if you can build/find everything but the GPU for ~250 USD and slap a 16gb 9060xt (~25tflops @32bit compared to the PS5 gpus ~10tflops @32bit) in it for another ~350 USD it should theoretically do a better job - the GPU in the PS5 was on par with mid-high end PC GPUs on launch, but that was like 5 years ago.
N150 isn't really what you'd want to use for a gaming machine. At a budget of mid $300s - the best (new) Mini PC you're going to find right now is probably this unit[1] with a Ryzen 7 7735U (680M iGPU) and 16GB RAM. Not the most powerful device - but I have a similar one I use to play emulator games, indie games on steam - throw Steam OS on it and it's a great living room device. Expand that budget to $530 and you can get this guy[2] with a Ryzen 7 255 (780M iGPU) - which will play modern games (on low settings for many).
Once I saw that Kobo was going all in on the color e-readers I decided I'm going to sit this whole trend out and bought another Aura One. Between it and the one I currently own they should carry me for a long, long time.
The Aura One is essentially perfect. The only gripes I have are the USB port and non-removable battery. It is a bit slow with the stock OS but with KOreader it runs amazingly well.
Unlike Anthropic, OAI does not have an S-1 to pore over. Their finances are shrouded in rumor and speculation. I can't assess how much of a death knell a ~15B financing shortfall is.
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