Yeah, totally... a full touchscreen computer in your pocket with no physical keyboard, pinch-to-zoom magic people thought was CGI, a browser that wasn't a joke, visual voicemail, and an OS so smooth it made every other phone look like it ran on car batteries. Truly underwhelming stuff.
It literally redefined an entire industry, vaporized half the product lines at Nokia/BlackBerry/Palm/Microsoft, and set the blueprint for every smartphone that exists today.
But sure..."unimpressive."
This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.
If you mean that the iPhone has come a long way and that it was unimpressive relative to the phones we have 18 years later, sure. But unimpressive it was not.
> This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.
I thought we were supposed to find less abrasive ways to engage each other, around these parts.
In any case, I admit that I could have phrased it better.
What I meant, was that “professionals” laughed at it (and there were a lot of them), but “customers,” did not.
I worked for a company, where they literally laughed in my face, when I told them “This thing will be trouble for us.” A few years later, their own product line was a smoking crater in the ground.
I think what PG meant by "do things that don't scale" is earnest effort in service of building a real product: talking to users, manually onboarding, hand-holding early customers so you can learn fast and iterate toward something that eventually does scale.
What this startup did isn't that, AFAICT. It wasn't manual work in service of learning...it was just fraud as a business model, no? Like, they were pretending the technology existed before it actually did. There's a bright line between unscalable hustle and misleading customers about what your product actually is.
Doing unscalable things is about being scrappy and close to the problem. Pretending humans are AI is just straight up deceiving people.
Totally agree with this point. There are several advice that pg and similar roles give which are not universally true. I reiterate your point that "doing things that don't scale" is meant specifically for searching for 1-1 user experience advice.
A similar exmaple is "Make something people want". This is generally true advice in focusing your efforts on solving customer's problems. Yet, this is disastrous advice if taking literally to the fullest extent (you can only imagine).
How so? Read the paper. The methodology was entirely observational. They did not intervene in the prosper.com loan market or interact with the borrowers. If anything, the paper identified a form of bias that exists in the real world, namely that people commonly "perceived" as less trustworthy are penalized despite their actual creditworthiness.
for anyone reading this, and curious, i'm learning nim with raylib. (naylib is the nim wrapper around raylib). and i'm making the code comments and the display show what's happening, making the nim files into discrete lessons, for myself as well as you. as of today's date, i've done the vectors and most of the graphics lessons, with sound effects coming soon.. https://github.com/stOneskull/nim
Well, of course you're correct that SQL is text, but that's not what the article is arguing about. The point isn't whether SQL is text... it's about the kind of text it is.
SQL is a formal language, not a natural one. It's precise, rigid, and requires a specialized understanding of schema, joins, and logic. text-to-sql systems don't exist because people are too lazy to type; they exist because most people can't fluently express analytical intent in sql syntax. They can describe what they want in natural language ("show me all active users who registerd this year"), but translating that into correct, optimized sql requires at least familiarity, and sometimes expertise
So the governance challenges discussed in the article aren't about "oh SQL is too hard to type"...they're about trust, validation, and control when you introduce an AI intermediary that converts natural lang into a query that might affect sensitive data
I think it's important to reinforce that SQL isn't an COBOL like attempt at building a querying language out of natural expressions (which you could see if you squint really hard). Instead SQL is a refinement of various querying languages (hence being the standard one) that co-evolved with relational algebra. If you have a chance to learn more within an academic environment courses on relational algebra and the abstract theory of set operations can be invaluable to building a basis for more naturally understanding the intent and tools available in SQL.
> They can describe what they want in natural language ("show me all active users who registerd this year"), but translating that into correct, optimized sql requires at least familiarity, and sometimes expertise
They can describe what they want in natural language only if they have sufficient familiarity and expertise.
If you think that being fluent in a language means you can ask clear and coherent questions in that language, I'd like to invite you to a couple of MS Teams calls this week.
Supplementing with vitamin D is honestly one of the easiest things you can do... it's cheap, available everywhere, and makes a real difference. Just make sure you're also taking magnesium citrate (or another good form of magnesium) with it, since your body needs magnesium to properly use vit D
An even better option is to go to your GP and have them run your bloodwork. It's cheap, depending on where you're from it might even be free, and you don't have to guess or randomly pick supplements you read about online. Most people on HN will live to a very high age, there's no reason to take random gambles on what you do to your body.
You're missing context and/or didn't read OP's comment. He said "will" with regards to reaching AGI. He said "only AGI can find" with regards to profit. It was the latter that this thread was addressing.
You're missing context and/or didn't read OP's comment. He said "because". It will happen because that's the only way to reach profit. That's why it will happen.
Yeah, exactly. The context here was about the profitability part of OP's comment. The parent said "plenty of businesses fail to find a way to make a profit," and my point was that OP's statement doesn't contradict that. OP was saying they'll need AGI to be profitable, not that they're guaranteed to become profitable.
Sure, they phrased it as "they will reach AGI," but that's clearly tongue-in-cheek...the underlying idea is "they better reach AGI, because that's the only way they could make money." So my comment ("necessary, not sufficient") was just pointing out that even if AGI is required for profitability, it doesn't mean they'll actually get there or succeed once they do, and that the original comment was perfectly compatible with the idea that not every business reaches profitability.
This take feels like classic Cal Newport pattern-matching: something looks vaguely "consumerish," so it must signal decline. It's a huge overreach.
Whether OpenAI becomes a truly massive, world-defining company is an open question, but it's not going to be decided by Sora. Treating a research-facing video generator as if it's OpenAI's attempt at the next TikTok is just missing the forest for the trees. Sora isn't a product bet, it's a technology demo or a testbed for video and image modeling. They threw a basic interface on top so people could actually use it. If they shut that interface down tomorrow, it wouldn't change a thing about the underlying progress in generative modeling.
You can argue that OpenAI lacks focus, or that they waste energy on these experiments. That's a reasonable discussion. But calling it "the beginning of the end" because of one side project is just unserious. Tech companies at the frontier run hundreds of little prototypes like this... most get abandoned, and that's fine.
The real question about OpenAI's future has nothing to do with Sora. It's whether large language and multimodal models eventually become a zero-margin commodity. If that happens, OpenAI's valuation problem isn't about branding or app strategy, it's about economics. Can they build a moat beyond "we have the biggest model"? Because that won't hold once opensource and fine-tuned domain models catch up.
So sure, Sora might be a distraction. But pretending that a minor interface launch is some great unraveling of OpenAI's trajectory is just lazy narrative-hunting.
Their first bet was than they were going to be the frontier model provider by a good margin, and that others would not be able to compete on the "intelligence". And that they could get distribution via big customers looking to buy model access.
The dominant-model-provider strategy has already failed, many actors have models that rival them - both established (Google) and newcomers (Anthropic). Open models are not to shabby either, enough to undermine the narrative "we are uniquely able to do powerful models". As you say, there is a commodification process started, and it might be a race to the bottom in terms of margin.
So, OpenAI has moved into a new/adapted strategy, where they want to own the customers to a much larger degree, and rely less on partners/customers for distribution. This is likely because their prospective partners have a bunch of viable models to select between (many end products for power users lets people select freely), and high competitive pressure on costs (as it defines the margin and competitiveness) of the end products. Codex, Sora, their new web browser announcement, adjustments in ChatGPT is all to ensure a lot of direct end users - more brand recognition, more influence, more monetization possibilities.
So I think it is a considerable pivot from their initial plan/hopes. But it is not an unraveling - it is a rather smart response to the fierce competition in the market.
I agree. My bet is that OpenAI will not fullfill its mission of developing AGI by 2035. And I would be surprised if they ever did. As much as they might want to, there is only so many dreams you can whisper into rich people's ears before they tell you to go away. And without rich people's money, OpenAI will fall like a house of cards. The wealthy won't have infinite patience
It seems they are going to try to maximize their installed base, build the infrastructure, and try to own everything in between, whether it’s LLM or some other architecture that arises. Owning data centers and an installed base sounds great in theory, but it assumes you can outbuild hyperscalers on infrastructure and that your users will stick around. Data centers are a low margin grind and the installed base in AI isn’t locked in like iPhones. Apple and Google still control the endpoints, and I think they’ll ultimately decide who wins by what they integrate at the OS level.
There are also interesting things one could do with models like Sora, depending how it actually performs in practice: prompting to segment, for example; and the thing could very possibly, if it's fast enough etc. become a foundation for robotics.
Yeah, totally... a full touchscreen computer in your pocket with no physical keyboard, pinch-to-zoom magic people thought was CGI, a browser that wasn't a joke, visual voicemail, and an OS so smooth it made every other phone look like it ran on car batteries. Truly underwhelming stuff.
It literally redefined an entire industry, vaporized half the product lines at Nokia/BlackBerry/Palm/Microsoft, and set the blueprint for every smartphone that exists today.
But sure..."unimpressive."
This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.
If you mean that the iPhone has come a long way and that it was unimpressive relative to the phones we have 18 years later, sure. But unimpressive it was not.