My biggest complaint with OpenAI/ChatGPT is their horrible "marketing" (for lack of a better term). They announce stuff like this (or like plugins), I get excited, I go to use it, it hasn't rolled out to me yet (which is frustrating as a paying customer), and my only recourse is.... check back daily? They never send an email "Plugins are available for you!", "Voice chat is now enabled on your account!" and so often I forget about the new feature unless I stumble across it later.
Just now I opened the app, went to setting, went to "New Features", and all I saw was Bing Browsing disabled (unable to enable). Ok, I didn't even know that was a thing that worked at one point. Maybe I need an update? Go to the App Store, nope, I'm up to to date. Kill the app, relaunch, open settings, now "New Features" isn't even listed. I can promise you I won't be browsing the settings part of this app regularly to see if there is a new feature. Heck, not only do they not email/push about new features they don't even message in-app about them, I really don't understand.
Maybe they are doing so well they don't have to care about communicating with customer right now but it really annoys me and I wish they did better.
Emailing users when a new feature is enabled for their account isn't even the kind of thing that would distract an existing very busy developer.
You could literally hire an entirely new guy, give him instructions to build such an email system, and let him put the right triggers on the user account permissions database to send out the right emails at the right time.
And then, when it's built, you can start adding more features like sending the emails only when demand is low and/or at times of day when you get the best click through rate. And then next you can start measuring the increase in revenue from sending those emails.
Before long, you have a whole marketing and comms team. Which you probably want as a big company anyway.
The peanut gallery could (and does) say this about 1000 little features that 1000 different people claim to be so necessary that OpenAI is incompetent for not having, yet none of those people agree that those other features are priorities.
But this issue far predates their current success. GPT2 was held back for a while. GPT3 launched as "waitlist only" with an application process, and so did GPT3.5.
This is a large part of what held them back: GPT3.5 had most of the capabilities of the initial ChatGPT release, just with a different interface. Yet GPT3.5 failed to get any hype because the rollout was glacial. They made some claims that it was great, but to verify this for yourself you had to wait months. Only when they finally made a product that everyone could try out at the same time, with minimal hassle, did OpenAI turn from a "niche research company" to the fastest growing start-up. And this seems to have been a one-time thing, now they are back to staggered releases.
> GPT3.5 had most of the capabilities of the initial ChatGPT release, just with a different interface
I believe two other factors were the cost (especially of fine tuned models, IIRC fine tuned davinci cost $0.20 per thousand tokens) and also that OpenAI hadn't very clearly shown just how much higher the quality could get once RLHF'd. I remember asking davinci-instruct to parse some data, and the reliability really seemed much lower than ChatGPT at launch, to the point that, at the time, I thought GPT-4 was secretly powering ChatGPT.
At what point to you go from startup to not when you have 10 billion invested and countless employees and is practically a sub branch of microsoft. Sounds cooler though I guess
I'm not sure when a company begins to not be a start up, but by the time they have a wave of news claiming their product kills teenagers, or they're engaging in antitrust, or they're effectively using space labor, that's when they are definitely no longer a start up.
That hasn't happened yet for OpenAI, but I'm sure it will happen eventually, and then we'll know.
I think you stop being a startup when there are engineers who do not know the CEO. I would guess OpenAI is still a startup by that definition (they don't have that many engineers IIRC) but I don't actually know.
That's really a function of what kind of CEO the company has, and what do you mean by "know". I worked remotely for a company employing hundreds of people, around for couple decades and with offices in different regions of the world, and I still got to talk to the CEO a couple times, and he knows me by name, all by virtue of bumping into him a couple times on corridor while on one of my infrequent visits to the office.
> I suspect they do care about communicating with customers, but it's total chaos and carnage internally.
This is my best guess as well, they are rocketing down the interstate at 200mph and just trying to keep the wheels on the car. When you're absolutely killing it I guess making X% more by being better at messaging just isn't worth it since to do that you'd have to take someone off something potentially more critical. Still makes me a little sad though.
Whether or not you’re profitable has very little to do with how valuable others think you are. And usually having competitors is something that validates your market.
Clearly, you can be a company like Microsoft where nobody is challenging your dominance in PC operating systems, and you can make huge sums of money. So competitors certainly aren't vital.
Or if you've cleverly sewn up a market with patents or trade secrets or a giant first-mover advantage or network effects, and nobody's got any chance of challenging your dominance in your specific market niche - again that could be highly profitable.
On the other hand, if you're selling ten-dollar bills for five dollars, you might have millions of satisfied paying customers, but no competitors because nobody else thinks your unit economics make sense. Or if you run a DVD rental store, you might be profitable and have many return customers, but you might not attract competitors because they don't think DVD rental is a growth business.
So some people consider a lack of competition an ominous sign.
> And usually having competitors is something that validates your market
a whole bunch of AI startups were founded around the same time. surely each can't validate the market for the others and be validated by the others in turn
The surviving ones can. The same way that multiple species of trees, growing on the same patch of the ground, desperately competing for sunlight, together validate that the soil underneath is fertile.
When dealing with a tech where people have credible reasons to believe it can be enormously harmful on every possible time scale, maybe it would behoove them to not rocket down the interstate at 200mph?
There is always going to be people who against any new technology and who makes up reasons to be against it.
The best defence is to move so quickly that you are an established part of the business framework by the time these forces can gather, or to go so slowly that nobody takes you as a threat.
No, successfully navigate past this version of Covid vacine deniers, 5g conspiracists etc.
In ten years we will enjoy a higher productivity due to AI and a richer society as a result. We have already seen it with protein folding which AI is amazing at[0].
The only reasonable fear of AI is for some jobs and that China gets their first.
Right, it is perfectly valid to only accept the potential good points while neglecting all the potential bad points.
This is no different then saying "Look, nuclear weapons aren't actually dangerous, if they were we'd all be dead because the apocalypse would have already happened", which is probably the dumbest take on the close calls and real risks that exist.
I think their main goal is to be perceived as the most advanced AI company. Why? Because that's how you get the best people working for you. The main determinant of success for companies like OpenAI is people.
Considering the field and progress that is being made I find this idea terrifying. All the big problems like "How will we actually control what we're building?" being answered "that's too hard; let's punt and solve that after we figure out how to consume voice data". One way or another this is likely the last technological advance that humans will make.
> How will we actually control what we're building?
This question is poorly formed because it’s not clear who the “we” is. If it’s you and me, that train left the station a while ago. If it’s any humans, well Sam Altman is probably a human and all of these are impressive products, but still just tools.
I don't know if @skeeter2020's assertion is correct, but it is certainly the goal.
To use a fictional but entirely apt quote:
> I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about: Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.
As long as it's better at some of the advances that would make it even better at those advances, or better at more advances, then it'll quickly become better than us in approximately everything, and at that point humans become NPCs of their own story.
Are either of those things indicative of "fastest growth ever"? Maybe 100 million users, but we live in a world where it's hard to know how meaningful that is (ie Tucker's X videos getting 300 million views).
This happens when there are thousands other simple things and a lot of complicated things. When your devs are stretched, you sort by priority and I can tell you this is not that important.
They do marketing like a 3-person startup that found a saas starter template, connected Stripe with shoestrings, and hasn't looked back. In order to start using the API, I actually had to cancel and sign back up again (because I think I was on a previous rev of the billing model).
I do love these companies that succeed in spite of their marketing & design and not because of it. It shows you have something very special.
Sounds like their marketing is doing just fine. If you were to just leave and forget about it, then sure, they need to work on their retention. But you won’t, so they don’t.
They do explain why in the post. (Still, you may not agree, of course.)
> We are deploying image and voice capabilities gradually
>
> OpenAI’s goal is to build AGI that is safe and beneficial. We believe in making our tools available gradually, which allows us to make improvements and refine risk mitigations over time while also preparing everyone for more powerful systems in the future. This strategy becomes even more important with advanced models involving voice and vision.
My issue isn't fully with them rolling out slowly, my issue is never knowing when you will get the feature or rather not being told when you do get it. I'm fine with "sometime in the next X days/months you will get feature Y", my issue is the only way to see if you got feature Y is to check back daily.
First of all, I understand what you're saying. Communication is important. I just think it's funny to ever talk about "lack of communication". All I want is for businesses to stop communicating with me. Even better if I don't have to ask (unsubscribe).
That's fair, I completely understand where you are coming from. From a growth/money-making perspective it'd be smart to message customers about new features but table stakes would be something like:
Voice Chat (Not available yet) [Click here to be notified when you have access]
Or something along those lines. It sours my opinion of ChatGPT every time I go to use a newly announced feature to find out I don't have it yet and have no clue when I will.
User impressions and revisit rate are key factors in raising money and showing success. It’s natural that they would select for user flows that keep you coming back daily rather than risk you don’t use it for a day or two waiting for an email.
They're focused on scaling to meet the current (overwhelming) demand. Given the 'if you build it, they will come' dynamic they're experiencing, any focus on marketing would be a waste of resources.
It has always seemed like OpenAI succeeds in spite of itself. API access was historically an absolute nightmare, and it just seemed like they didn't even want customers.
I can honestly wait. I am excited for 5 and 10 years from now. I really am. This is going to be amazing. If I miss out for a week or a month in the meantime I don't mind.
I'm a plus customer and an API user, and they barely send me anything. One day I just signed in and saw that I suddenly had interpreter access, for instane.
In general, if companies e-mail you, it's almost always with worthless bullshit and/or attempts at tricking you into spending more money. OpenAI is not doing that, hence radio silence.
Just now I opened the app, went to setting, went to "New Features", and all I saw was Bing Browsing disabled (unable to enable). Ok, I didn't even know that was a thing that worked at one point. Maybe I need an update? Go to the App Store, nope, I'm up to to date. Kill the app, relaunch, open settings, now "New Features" isn't even listed. I can promise you I won't be browsing the settings part of this app regularly to see if there is a new feature. Heck, not only do they not email/push about new features they don't even message in-app about them, I really don't understand.
Maybe they are doing so well they don't have to care about communicating with customer right now but it really annoys me and I wish they did better.