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> a casual 1300% revenue growth in under 4 years for a company that is already valued in the hundreds of billions.

Such a weird sentence. The correct causality should be: It's valued in the hundreds of billions because the investors expect a 1300% revenue growth.

I like the little blurb at the end which said that Codex had 1.5 million users. So, if you can get each of them to pony up a mere $186k a piece, they can hit those revenue numbers.

I, too, can make $280B in revenue by 2030 (by selling $10 bills for $5 (as long as I bamboozle enough investors into giving me sufficient capital, of course)).

OpenAI is a bet on LLMs replacing a large chunk of the labour force in whatever sector it’s best at replacing. It’s essentially looking to get companies to pay $5k-$10k a month to have coding agents replace the output of a single software engineer.

If the S-curve levels off below that level OpenAI will be an unsuccessful company.

I have used AI a bit, like it for a bunch of use cases. But god damn, these numbers are so big. Gotta wonder, are the returns even worth it? RAM prices up, electricity prices up, hard disk prices up… Maybe this is the price to pay for “progress”, but it sure is wild

Consequences come later friendo.

I honestly don't think that sounds terribly outrageous.

OpenAI and Anthropic aren't building companies that aim to be API endpoints or chatbots forever, their vision is clearly: you will do everything through them.

The gamble is that this change is going to reach deeper into every business it touches than Microsoft Office ever did, and that this will happen extremely quickly. The way things are headed I increasingly think that's not a terrible bet.

I think he meant for Anthropic?

Its a circular economy...He is talking about the money moving from Nvidia to OpenAI and back to Nvidia. You got to go with the flow...

He is counting on hundreds of husbands: https://xkcd.com/605/

> and about the same as Microsoft

> Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero consequence.

Seems accurate?

What they are saying is if Microsoft ends up buying the rest of their shares then i.e. Microsoft's total revenue by 2030 will be more than $280 billion.

I was a paying customer ($20 a month) until AI prompted a layoff in my dying field that is web design and front end design coding. Now everytime chatGPT yells at me about memory i tell it fine Im just gonna use Gemini! I bet a lot of ppl are doing the same thing as both sit at the top of the iPhone charts.

Today I got a feature request from another team in a call. I typed into our slack channel as a note. Someone typed @cursor and moments later the feature was implemented (correctly) and ready to merge.

The tools are good! The main bottleneck right now is better scaffolding so that they can be thoroughly adopted and so that the agents can QA their own work.

I see no particular reason not to think that software engineering as we know it will be massively disrupted in the next few years, and probably other industries close behind.

A wise move.

and that's just my doordash order..

ugh lower the interest rates Jerome, I'll do anything to tank the economy until you finally do.

I have done my fair share of misunderestimating before, but I've never been off by that much.

best comment

> how does this not set off a severe chain reaction?

Just like you and me, Sam Altman can say anything he likes to say. To pump the investors' confidence, to make the US administration believe he's serious about AGI, or just to make himself feel good. It's not legally binding in any way.

You should never read it as "OpenAI committed to..." but as "Altman said these words..." and words mean very little today.

I think TSMC laughed them out of the room when they announced the original numbers. So maybe there’s no reaction now because everyone already knew not to trust OpenAI’s promises.

These were more like infrastructure suggestions.

>I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we wipe out 2/3 of jobs with AI, who is going to be buying all the stuff?

Money is just a proxy for access to resources. If a machine that is capable of replacing almost all jobs is really created then money will matter much less than access to said machine. Taken to the extreme to make the point, if you had a genie that could grant your every wish, what would you need money for ?

We're already there. Most of us have jobs that are just made up to fill the gaps after steam power and automation. In the future, we'll have jobs that fill up the AI gap. It's UBI, but more arbitrary so we can tell ourselves we're useful while group X is not.

Companies will save billions on those pesky health insurance premiums and payroll taxes...by paying for OAI tokens instead.

Then when the labor market is nice and hollowed out, the tokens will go up in price several-fold.

In fairness it's mostly Anthropic that is constantly banging the were taking your jobs drum.

Everyone else has been less explicit, likely because it's just not politically a good idea to keep pronouncing it.

It's part of Anthropics marketing though. Maybe to push the idea you can't beat us so join us?

I’ve seen no discussion about what the social consequences are going to be if a predicted 2/3rds of people lose their jobs.

I don’t imagine they’re pretty.

> Nothing about the economics of the AI boom makes any sense.

what if… MBAs turned from economics to a religion and no one noticed?

UBI is a more of a convenient trick we use to suppress the part of our conscious that tells us "wiping out 2/3 of American jobs is Bad".

Welcome to late stage capitalism. Where non of the incentives have anything to do with helping people and reducing costs for things people care about - energy, food, healthcare, basic needs.

Tripling productivity is not the same as thirding jobs. Demand will grow. People enjoy products and services.

"It may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world."

> You think the billionaires are going to allow themselves to be taxed heavily enough to support UBI

They will have no choice. Proletariat must not be hungry and agitated. Free legal MJ for everyone!

In the ex-USSR internet segment there was a saying on nerd forums - "Don't know matan(1), will convert you to methane". Just saying :) . It's not like billionaire sociopaths had ever any issues with "useless" humans. Peter Thiel even follows a modern neo-religion along those lines.

(1) matan - mathematical analysis, as a reference to a widely known and hard to learn university course.

MS, GOOG bonds being sold to fund capex still put them green $/employee, they will survive of not thrive.

OpenAI...not so sure, they need an IPO soon while public still is high off the double bull run post 2020

However, we are all going to be paying higher energy costs for these ridiculous infrastructure claims. Utilities typically price out energy three years in advance. If they were protecting for twice as many energy sinks, that represents an enormous amount of generation capacity which needs to be accounted for in projections.

I saw a report that previous capacity pricing was $28/MWh/day. Latest numbers have shot up to $300.

It's not unforeseeable that the US demarcates Special Economic Zones without environmental oversight or labor regulations to speed up the construction.

this is the underreported second-order risk. Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix all allocated HBM capacity based on hyperscaler capex projections. NAND fabs are similarly committed. a 57% reduction in projected OpenAI spend (.4T -> B) doesn't just affect NVIDIA orders -- it ripples into the memory suppliers who shifted capacity to HBM and away from commodity DRAM/NAND. if multiple hyperscalers revise down simultaneously you get a situation similar to the 2019 crypto ASIC overhang: companies tooled up for demand that evaporated. not predicting that, but the purchasing commitments question is real.

Based on what? Each model so far has been noticeably better than the last, so I don’t see why the next wouldn’t be too?

I hadn't heard of openrouter.ai. I have heard of OpenAI.

Is this like Windows and MacOS not being in the top 10 of distrowatch.com?

The number of tokens seen per model on OpenRouter is not a good measure of quality.

There are so many plausible explanations for why a particular model is or is not ranked in the top 10 by this metric.

Maybe people using OpenAI models are so happy that they don't care about other models and have no need for OpenRouter. Maybe OpenAI models produce fewer tokens, or are more expensive per token.

Your conclusion might be correct, but citing the number of tokens seen by OpenRouter is not very strong evidence.

OpenAI, frankly, benefits from the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" phenomenon.

And there's a reason that OpenRouter has an OpenAI compatible layer highlighted not deep in docs, but on their Quickstart page: https://openrouter.ai/docs/quickstart#using-the-openai-sdk

The number of projects accessing OpenAI directly, who might only reach for OpenRouter once an alternative is desired, is unknowable (since OpenAI doesn't share usage statistics), but likely meaningful.

Could also just be a bias in the audience

The bankruptcy couldn't happen to nicer company.

Wasn't it always an expectation, not a commitment?

If they didn't appropriately account for risk that the expectation would not pan out, well, that's on them.

"there is no moat" usually mean "we have no moat" or "we want you to believe we have no moat". There are always moats, like being directly in front of eyes and thumbs (Apple) or having extensive data (Google) along hardware production capabilities, datacenters, and tons of money.

Has AI transformed the economy radically? Yes.

AI made “basically zero” difference in U.S. economic growth last year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZHN0-ZNe_4&t=399s