My guess is this is as much about talent acquisition as it is about talent retention. Give the bored, overpaid top talent outside problems to mentor for/collaborate on that will still have strong ties to OpenAI, so they don't have the urge to just quit and start such companies on their own.
I don't think there is any money given, except travel costs for first and last week.
I think everyone is starting to see this as a middle man problem to solve, look at ERP systems for instance when they popped up it had some growing pains as an industry. (or even early windows/microsoft 'developers, developers, developers' target audience)
I OpenAI see it will take a lot of third party devs to take what OpenAI has and run with it. So they want to build a good developer and start up network to make sure that there are a good, solid ecosystem of options corporations and people can use AI wise.
The gap was that workers were using their own implementation instead of the company's implementation.
These third-party apps get huge token usage with agenentic patterns. So losing out on them and being forced to make more internal products to tune to specific use cases is not something they want to biuld out or explore
If you believed everything posted here we'd all be on the streets by now
- OpenAI needs talent, and it's generally hard to find. Money will buy you smart PhDs who want to be on the conveyer belt, but not people who want to be a centre of a project of their own. This at least puts them in the orbit of OpenAI - some will fly away, some will set up something to be aquihired, some will just give up and try to join OpenAI anyway
- the amount of cash they will put into this is likely minuscule compared to their mammoth raises. It doesn't fundamentally change their funding needs
- OpenAI's biggest danger is that someone out there finds a better way to do AI. Right now they have a moat made of cash - to replicate them, you generally need a lot of hardware and cash for the electricity bill. Remember the blind panic when DeepSeek came out? So, anything they can do to stop that sprouting elsewhere is worth the money. Sprouting within OpenAI would be a nice-to-have.
To me, it sounded like, "let's find all the idea guys who can't afford a tech founder. Then we'll see which ones have the best ideas, and move forward with those. As a bonus, we'll know exactly where we'd be able to acquihire a product manager for it!"
I'm highly capable of building some great things, but at my dayjob I'm filled to brim with things to do and a non-ending list of tasks in front of me.
I've built cool stuff before, and if given a little push and some support could probably come up with something useful - and I can implement much of it myself.
Put me in the room with cool people, throw out some conversation starters, shake it up and I'll come up with something.
Most will submit the app with a dime a dozen ideas. (Or, at internet scale, a dime a few hundred thousand I guess?) No need to even consider those guys.
But it will be a pyramid. There will likely be 20-30 submissions that are at once, truly novel, and "why didn't I think of that!"-type ideas.
Finally, a handful of the submissions will be groundbreaking.
Et voilá. Right there you've identified the guys and gals thinking outside the LLM box about LLMs. Or even AI in general.
This is probably purely a pivot in market strategy to profitability to increase token usage, increase consumer/public's trust more than farming ideas for internal projects.
The entire internet is now structured to sell to you. premium subscriptions for simple things that aren't technical problems, but are instead artificial complexity to monetize your every move. They profit from the fact that its artificially difficult to host your own data, sync your own devices, or connect to each other without an intermediary.
All of this becomes worse with AI stratifying hardware power again. AI is great, but on american capitalists its pearls before swine.
Edit: if you don't think this is true, look at the history of truly any country and see what happens when subsistence farmers and indigenous communities refuse to work for capitalists
The world really benefits from well funded institutions doing research and development. Medicine has also largely advanced due in part to this.
What’s lost is the recapture. I don’t think governments are typically the best candidate to bring a new technology to marketable applications, but I do think they should be able to force terms of licensure and royalties. Keeping both those costs predictable and flat across industry would drive even more innovation to market.
What happens instead is private entities take public research and capture it almost entirely in as few hands as possible.
In short, the loss of civic pride and shared responsibility to society has created the nickel and dime you to death capitalism we are seeing in the rise today. Externalization of all costs possible and capture as much profit as possible. No thought to second order effects or how the system that is being dodged to contribute back to gave way for the ability for people to so grossly take advantage of it in the first place
^ This is the secret sauce. For decades the arrangement was exactly that: defense projects would create new technologies, then once those were finished, they were handed to private industry to figure out how to make a $20,000 MIL-spec LCD screen cheap enough and in vast enough quantities that you can buy 3 of them for less than $1,000 while the manufacturer, distributor, and retailer make a solid profit each. That's not an easy thing to do and it's what corporations have historically been good at. And it makes things better for the defense industry too, because they can then apply those lessons to their own hardware where appropriate. Win/win.
But we don't fund research anymore, or at least not that sort of it. Or perhaps there's just not much else to find. I think it's a bit of both. But in any case nothing new is getting made which is why technology feels so dull right now. The most innovative products right now are just thinner, dumber, lighter versions of things we already have, and that's not nothing but it isn't very interesting either.
but what, exactly, makes you believe this internship program is not an idea generated by the big bag of words?
minimaxir•3h ago
Insanity•2h ago
moralestapia•2h ago
Exactly what I read between the lines on this.
bananapub•2h ago
system2•1h ago
reducesuffering•35m ago
https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940