The VCs and bloggers have also shifted tone and are hedging to save themselves from embarrassment. It used to be “AGI is just around the corner” and now it’s “Just because we haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean we never will” (Andreesen) or “Actually bubbles are good” (Stratechery).

Gary called it a long time ago but I think the Dwarkesh and Karpathy podcast is when the shift started.

I think you must mean Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI.

You can criticize OpenAI for many things but this was blatantly misquoted.

They were talking about backstops for chips, to get fabs constructed in the US. If anyone else said this, it would have been considered a great idea, both republicans and democrats talked about the same thing to get TSMC production into the US, but everyone pretended that OpenAI was talking about data centers in this context. They weren't/

You could just read the primary sources. The things hes showing people to have said.

The gist is altman was trying to be slick about requiesting a government bailout, got called out on his bullshit, and then decided to lie and say he never wanted a bailout

The implication being the bubble is getting closer and closer to popping, since even altman is thinking about how to survive the pop

The crux of the article was altman trying to get a bailout, and when people called him on his bullshit, lying thay he never wanted a bailout. You cant trust the man

That wasn't my take - it was more broadly a 'given past statements and accompanying behaviour, we can't trust future statements to align with future behaviour'.

Can you more explicitly describe what the X and Y points you allude to are?

Gary Marcus has been writing a piece like this roughly every 2 months for 20 years, and he gets a lot of attention because he seems respectable (he is not), and many papers are looking for a respectable source that has this opinion.

Care to enlighten those of us that know nothing about Gary's track record?

Believe it or not, that's actually a walkback from the $5 to $7 trillion he was pushing for almost two years ago.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/repor...

They are going all in, promising so many deals to so many companies that if OpenAI fails, the entire US economy will explode. Expecting the government will bail them out to prevent such a disaster.

> what prompted OpenAI recently to need this 1.4T investment?

Capital denial to competitors.

I think every company would like to have that. OpenAI is in a hyped up position that it can get it, so they go for it.

I don't buy that they can create AGI by investing trillions in training models and infrastructure.

If you ask me, this is just more money spent on pollution.

The need to replace humans to be profitable, just sounds like the end goal is to destroy the planet with datacenters and hurt people generally.

Sounds like a net negative for the planet.

All of Sam’s shenanigans go back to that one popular post on here many months ago about how AI has no moat. LLMs are a commodity, Chinese companies are just releasing them for free. Sam has gone all in on OpenAI and needs to secure his company, he knows it could be another decade until they discover an innovation on par with tranformers and there’s absolutely no way they can go from burning tens of billions of dollars a year to profitable by selling a rapidly commoditized technology.

The need to say “fuck you” to Elon and one-up him.

The "I don't need to answer your simple questions on profit and loss statements" sentiment was odd. Likely odd enough to spur institutional investors to dig deeper or attract short interest.

Yeah that and the rush to IPO OpenAI....

Here's the juicy stuff mentioned in the article: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

This is the same kind of bullshit rationalization they used to say that the bank bailouts of 2009 weren't really bank bailouts.

They were bank bailouts.

Unsecured government loans are either bailouts, entitlements in disguise, or (usually misguided) attempts at broad economic stimulus. This definitely isn't either of the latter two.