There’s a strong chance the IPO window has passed. I just don’t see investors willing to jump in here given all the questions about the financial viability of AI.

The bulk of those investing now are broadly just pumping cash into the fire to keep their prior investments from going to zero.

We have hit a mass deceleration of what the current tech can do with transformers. The tech is also on a path to hyper-commoditization which will destroy the value of the big players as there zero moat to be had here. Absent a new major breakthrough it looks like we’re well on our way into the “trough of disillusionment” for the current AI hype cycle.

Will be interesting to see how all this plays out, but get your popcorn ready.

ChatGPT seems to have become a LinkedIn lunatic. I just asked Opus and ChatGPT to explain bitonic sort:

Opus: Let me build an interactive explainer for bitonic sort (builds diagram/no nonsense)

GPT:

"This algorithm feels weird but once you see it it clicks"

(Emoji) The Core Idea ...; (Emoji) High-Level Flow ...; (Emoji) Superpower ...; (Emoji) Why You Should Care;

"If you want, I can: ... (things it wants me to do next)"

From the article: "You can see that in the recent iterations of ChatGPT. It has become such a sycophant, and creates answers and options, that you end up engaging with it. That’s juicing growth. Facebook style."

This is something I relalized lately. ChatGPT is juicing growth Facebook style. The last time, I asked it a medical question, it answered the question, but ended the answer with something like "Can I tell you one more thing from your X,Y,Z results which is most doctors miss ? " And I replied "yes" to it, and not just once.

I was curious what was going on. And Om nails it in this article - they have imported the Facebook rank and file and they are playing 'Farmville' now.

I was already not positive of what OpenAI is being seen as a corporate, but a "Facebook" version of OpenAI, scares the beejus out of me.

They have a bunch of mental health related lawsuit on them, yet last week I got an OpenAI newsletter suggesting I ask chatgpt about breathing exercises, mental health, etc.

They are absolutely farming engagement.

>That’s juicing growth. Facebook style

yes, the sycophant noted by Om, but also:

+ asking you (prompting the human?) to keep the convo going in very specific ways

+ seemingly more personalization each day

both unfortunately crowd out the long tail which LLMs might otherwise help us explore, but of course the algorithms prefer putting us in positive feedback loops in echo chambers we like (and are conditioned to like)

The latest clickbait style can be mitigated by custom instructions. I use: "Tell it like it is; don't sugar-coat responses. Use academic university level explanations unless instructed otherwise. Do not end with teaser offers or curiosity hooks. Give the full answer immediately. If related topics exist, show them as a brief bullet list. Use professional language and style."

Now I actually often like the related topics hooks, just not the clickbaity version from last few weeks.

If not for Codex performing so well for me from VS Code I'd happily migrate to Claude or Gemini.

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The quoted revenue numbers seem insane, but I guess it's the result of corporate deals where every developer seat is hundreds of dollars a month?

My job has been publicly promoting who's on top of the "AI use dashboard" while our whole product falls apart. Surely this house of cards has to collapse at some point, better get public money before it does.

OpenAI needs to focus on how Claude is leaving them in the dust for LLM assisted coding.

I feel like OpenAI has been executing extremely well since it started leaning harder into Codex.

Right now, the people who really see it are power users of AI and software engineers. Most equity investors still don’t seem to get it.

It feels like the calm before the storm. A lot of the groundwork is being laid quietly beneath the surface.

And at least in the country where I live, I can already feel real momentum building around enterprise adoption, both in terms of partnerships and go-to-market structure.

Does an IPO make a government bailout more likely if they go bust?

What happens when Microsoft stops using ChatGpt as their main LLM for CoPilot? I feel the death knell when that occurs

  One thing odd, maybe just to me, is why OpenAI has been stuffing its ranks with former Facebookers who are known to juice growth, find edges, and keep people addicted. They have little background in getting enterprises to buy into a product. Simo herself ran the Facebook app. That organization’s genius is consumer engagement: behavioral hooks, dopamine loops, the relentless optimization of the feed. You can see that in the recent iterations of ChatGPT. It has become such a sycophant, and creates answers and options, that you end up engaging with it. That’s juicing growth. Facebook style.

This is because ChatGPT is gearing up to sell ads. It's the only way to sustain a free chat service in the long term. Ads require engagement and usage. Hiring former Meta employees for this is smart business - even if HN crowd doesn't like it.

People say OpenAI is burning money and is on the verge of collapse. The same people will say OpenAI building an ads business on ChatGPT is "enshittifcation". These people are quite insufferable, no offense to the many who are exactly as I described.

When all else fails, dump on Retail

How does a non-employee get exposure to the OpenAI IPO?

this is more nuanced than the title suggests. worth reading the whole thing

In general "stickyness" among developers isn't that high, the way it is for consumers. Or the insane stickyness in "big boy contracts" government, accenture, etc,.

So I feel like the company which does these huge contracts will at the end eat up the coding business for nothing. The only way to avoid that is for anthropic to build up a huge IP lead in the code agent space. That is too difficult in my opinion. Because its hard to get exclusive access to code itself, the data advantage is not going to be there. Compute advantage is also difficult. And it's very difficult to hold on to architectural IP advantages in the LLM space.

Even if you get yourself embedded deep into traditional coding workflows (integrations with VCS, CI, IDEs, code forges, etc), usually SW infrastructure tends to like things decoupled through interfaces. Example: the most popular way to using code agents is the separate TUI application claude code which `cat`s and `grep`s your code. MCP, etc,. This means substitute-ability which is bad news.

I was thinking of ways these companies can actually get the coding business. One idea I had was to make proprietary context management tools that collect information over time and keep them permanent. And proprietary ways to correctly access them when needed. Here lock-in is real - you do the usual sleazy company things, you make it difficult to migrate "org understanding" out of your data format (it might even be technically difficult in reality). And that way there is perpetual lock-in. It even compounds over time. "Switch to my competitor and start your understanding from scratch reducing productivity by 37%, OR agree to my increased prices!". But amazing context management for coding tools is yet to be developed. Right now it is mostly slicing and combining a few markdown files, and `grep`, which is not exactly IP.

"The moat is state"

I got an ad for the first time in ChatGPT yesterday. Expected, but no thanks, I'm already done with this new focus.

The "I" in AGI stands for IPO.

Time to jump ship.

I have noticed 5.3 in xtra high was a turd today. High used to be enough for most of my use cases. xhigh used to surprise me. Now it's incapable of following the very first instructions.

I just hope open source models get as good as last few month's top models before the enshittification has gone too far.

As I said, from AGI to IPO and everyone will forget and move on.

"IPO to dump this pile of debt that is about to collapse on unsuspecting index fund buyers"

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Focus on programming since they just bruteforce the type checkers/compilers to find out if their slop was correct the first time.

Basically an illusion. Imagine if they focused on medical tech instead? You cant bruteforce vaccines or radiation therapy

Is it just me, or has Om become almost entirely unreadable of late? This post is 80% posturing about the WSJ's ‘narrative’ and 20% vague metaphors about ‘souls’ and ‘spigots’. It’s essentially tech-themed poetry. I appreciate he’s cynical about the AI hype cycle, but there’s absolutely no signal here. Ben Thompson might be equally enamoured with his own voice, but he at least tethers his ego to actual unit economics and a framework you can test. Om is just sharing a mood board and calling it analysis

I thought it is against OpenAI interest to IPO, especially now that it has made a deal with the Pentagon. IPO would likely prevent the company from burning money at the current rate and pursue shorter terms profit.