Silicon Valley forgot what normal people want
The vibes are off at OpenAI
The vibes are off at OpenAI
Silicon Valley forgot what normal people want
Apple debuts Business Service that includes offering Ads in Map
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The vibes are off at OpenAI
OpenAI’s current batch of public controversies started early in the year. At the end of February, the company agreed to an apparently expansive Pentagon contract that its competitor Anthropic had refused to sign out of concerns about autonomous weapons.
Then came the product announcements. Last month, OpenAI unexpectedly announced it would discontinue Sora, an AI video-generation app that it had planned to roll into ChatGPT. It exited its Disney partnership so rapidly that the companies had reportedly been working together just 30 minutes before Disney found out about the shutdown.
“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” OpenAI’s Fidji Simo reportedly told employees last month, as the company announced it would pivot to focusing on enterprise and coding tools. Even its once-heralded Stargate data center project may have largely stalled.
At the start of this week, a piece in The New Yorker expanded on years of reports of Altman potentially misleading OpenAI’s board, former company executives, and even contemporaries in roles he held before cofounding OpenAI.
As the pressure builds to square OpenAI’s revenue with its nearly unprecedented spending, the company is looking to put its compute behind projects with the highest profit potential. It’s attempting to catch up to leading rival Anthropic’s current popularity in coding, while also facing significant competition from Google, since Gemini is well integrated within Google’s ecosystem of apps and tools. It’s possible the company will find a way to pull ahead — but things may not be going as smoothly as Altman hopes....
Silicon Valley forgot what normal people want
What NFTs, AI and the metaverse tell us about “thought leadership”!
One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he’d made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers! - He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing.
While this particular kind of hubris makes people crashing bores, it’s not just an annoying personal trait. It seems to have seeped into the professional side of Silicon Valley as well.
Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future. My guess is that they’re aping what they thought Steve Jobs was doing when he, for instance, got rid of the optical drives on the MacBook Air. At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.
The people who tell us that AI will dominate our future and take our jobs are the people who are hoping that will be true. They may be hoping this because it makes them feel important, or because they want to be billionaires, or because they simply do not understand other people. I think that final point is underestimated. If you are going to provide me with a robot servant, I have a very clear bar: It’s gotta be at least as much bang for my buck as my dishwasher. (famously people’s #1 task for future robots is - do the dishes surveys say)
The actual use for LLMs in most normal people’s lives is cheating on schoolwork. For adults, it’s looking up information — LLMs are in the process of supplanting Google Search. Google had been degrading its search project for some time, and the results just kept getting worse. This opened the door for an alternative, and the LLMs stepped through.
How is it that all these wunderkinds trying to build the next product to take over the world haven’t thought about this? I think the answer is simple. They do not have much in common with normal people, and haven’t thought much about what normal people’s lives are like, or what normal people value. What they have been doing instead is getting high on their own supply — listening to VC podcasts, freaking themselves out about whether they’ll be able to keep up with AI agents, and otherwise getting increasingly more detached from reality.
The hubristic entrepreneurs (and the VCs who need them) are a relatively small slice of the population. It may be the case that the real way to shape the future isn’t to dictate it to consumers. It is simpler just to give people things they actually want….
Apple debuts Business Service that includes offering Ads in Map
Apple Inc. introduced a new platform that helps businesses manage devices and reach customers, in part by making it easier to advertise on its Maps app. The offering — called Apple Business — lets users configure employee groups and device settings, the company said in a statement Tuesday. The free service will be available April 14 in more than 200 countries and regions, Apple said.
Apple Business, a new platform for businesses of all kinds that combines cloud services, device management, and collaboration features into one system.Businesses may use the platform to control staff devices, set up applications, and set up email and calendars for their own use. It also has iCloud storage choices and AppleCare+ subscription programs. Companies in the U.S. and Canada will be allowed to put ads at the top of search results and in suggested places. This is a sign that Apple is expanding its advertising business outside its usual offerings.
Apple is more interested in getting businesses to use its products and services, especially because it wants to get more corporate customers….