Middle Management

it disheartens me to see comments that so easily dismiss the work it took for OpenAI to get here. 0-1 is extremely hard. you make mistakes and spend time/energy/money creating something new and proving PMF. sometimes these are valuable lessons, sometimes they are just waste but a rite of passage. i am not saying there is no bloat in the venture model-- the world would be a better place if everyone were just a tad less greedy. but if you even just look at how much it costs to feed and put a roof over an employee in the US it should be obvious why $5m would have been an astoundingly unrealistic expectation

that said, monopoly bad and competition good. open source is excellent.

it is (relatively) easy to copy something that you know works.

it is extremely hard to do something new, risky, and difficult when you don't know if it will work.

individual researchers rightly get a lot of glory for that when they do it! it's the coolest thing in the world.

Sam Altman

it disheartens me to see comments that so easily dismiss the work it took for OpenAI to get here. 0-1 is extremely hard. you make mistakes and spend time/energy/money creating something new and proving PMF. sometimes these are valuable lessons, sometimes they are just waste but a rite of passage. i am not saying there is no bloat in the venture model-- the world would be a better place if everyone were just a tad less greedy. but if you even just look at how much it costs to feed and put a roof over an employee in the US it should be obvious why $5m would have been an astoundingly unrealistic expectation

that said, monopoly bad and competition good. open source is excellent.

https://x.com/sama/status/1872664379608727589