I once read that on the 80s it was believed that female runners would soon outpace male runners because the trend line for them was moving up so fast. This turned out not to be the case because the curve wasn't exponential but "S" shaped - the female runners eventually plateaued. It's easy to assume that exponential growth will continue indefinitely but it's rarely the case that this is true.
But it was just two people and they were criticized by peers for being space cadets at the time. There are always some people ready to make a fool of themselves for recognition, perhaps.
Agreed, but when will the exponential bend over. Moore's law went on for a long time, industrial revolution, population growth. Very hard to know in advance.
Even if we accept that premise, why should OpenAI be the ones to manage a $7T investment in hardware and datacenter development over, y'know, hardware and datacenter companies like Nvidia and Amazon? OpenAI has zero experience in those fields.
Let's talk about that. GPT-3.5 (specifically text-davinci-003) was a massive leap over everything that came before it. GPT-4 was a massive leap over GPT-3.5. Everything since (GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o, GPT o1) feels like steady incremental improvement (putting aside multimodal capabilities) rather than massive leaps. I'm far from convinced that the rate of progress made with foundation models in 2022-2023 has continued in 2024 let alone from extrapolating that it will continue for the next several years.
If it was, companies like Microsoft and Apple would have acquired them a long time ago. The fact they decided to have a partnership means they have reason to believe the hype isn't real beyond what we already know today and they don't want to have to explain it to shareholders in the near future.
Why buy stakes and not the whole thing to block your competitors from making deals with them? This is big corp 101 and has happened countless times. It's even more likely if OpenAI is to be a $7T company in the future. Such an acquisition would be approved in a second... if the hype was real.
There's no such thing. Every company is up for sale, if you have the money.
Rare exceptions are old companies where the founder is still around and rejects deal after deal on pride. OpenAI is nothing like that, as the profit/non-profit drama exemplifies.
