The OpenAI thread

[GoblinCampFollower]

fify...

Yeah, imagine if the law worked that way in general. Like... can I just declare I can break into people's houses and rob them unless they specifically told me they don't like that in writing?

 

[Free]

Sora 2 Has a Huge Financial Problem

How will OpenAI stop Sora 2 from burning through cash as users generate countless resource-intensive AI videos?

futurism.com

It didn’t take long for OpenAI’s text-to-video-and-audio AI generator app, Sora 2, to melt down into a messy pile of potentially copyright-infringing AI slop.

Within just days, the TikTok-style app’s mind-numbing feed of AI-generated content was filled with videos of Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants cooking up blue crystals in a meth lab, entire episodes of South Park, and depictions of physicist Stephen Hawking being brutalized in horrible ways.

The app’s prominent use of recognizable intellectual property and the likenesses of real people, combined with its sheer amount of hype, has allowed it to shoot up to the top of Apple’s App Store, with Meta’s competing Vibes app, which was released less than a week before Sora 2, quickly turning into a long-forgotten footnote in AI slop history.

All that success creates a problem for OpenAI: how to stop Sora 2 from burning through cash as users generate countless resource-intensive AI videos.

In an update posted to his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that the company had a lot of work to do, especially when it comes to turning its AI slop generator into a moneymaker.

“We are going to have to somehow make money for video generation,” he said. “People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.”

Probably wouldn't be an issue if OpenAI was purely a non-profit. Right?

 

[Free]

I've sat in on meetings where the developers and other technical staff for a business were tasked with providing contributions towards the marketing of the products they've been working on. This definitely feels like what happens when the technical team (or mock techie boss...) has an outsized level of control over the marketing in a company.

OpenAI Just Flunked Marketing 101

New ads for ChatGPT scored low on fluency—and even lower on branding basics

www.adweek.com

OpenAI’s recent ads for ChatGPT were everywhere—NFL Primetime, streaming platforms, outdoor, and beyond. Press coverage hailed the AI company’s biggest marketing push yet as a new chapter of AI brand building.

But few pointed out just how incredibly poor the ads were.

Set aside the irony of an AI company relying on traditional media to promote its product. Focus instead on the dire creative quality of the two TV spots, Pull-Up and Dish.

Research firm System1 tested both ads with a representative panel of U.S. consumers. The results confirm that while AI tech bros continue to kill it with product development, they’re lightyears behind on the rest of the marketing challenge.

 

[Free]

OpenAI is penetrating the internet's raison d'être.

OpenAI Says It Will Move to Allow Smut

Eight months after relaxing its policy guidelines around naughty content, ChatGPT is finally loosening its guidelines.

futurism.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I've sat in on meetings where the developers and other technical staff for a business were tasked with providing contributions towards the marketing of the products they've been working on. This definitely feels like what happens when the technical team (or mock techie boss...) has an outsized level of control over the marketing in a company.

A chatbot is going to be a pain in the duff to make a TV commercial about anyways, because there are like half a dozen different companies offering the exact same product with really the exact same capabilities, not a single speck of difference between any of them, and nothing that any of them can point to and say this is why you should be using ours instead of those other ones. I've heard chatbot superfans talking about how they found this or that one to be better at some hyperspecific nerd-task, but obviously that's not something you can put in an ad aimed at a general audience.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

OpenAI is penetrating the internet's raison d'être.

OpenAI Says It Will Move to Allow Smut

Eight months after relaxing its policy guidelines around naughty content, ChatGPT is finally loosening its guidelines.

futurism.com

They are following Grok's lead...

 

[Free]

I've heard chatbot superfans talking about how they found this or that one to be better at some hyperspecific nerd-task, but obviously that's not something you can put in an ad aimed at a general audience.

So your advice is to not advertise them to the general public? You're hired for the OpenAI marketing team!

 

[Casey Pelous]

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but isn't the normal course of events to find a need, then design a product to satisfy that need?

In what insane company do they start thinking about marketing after they spend what I presume is tons of money to develop the product? How did the developers even know what to build? Is this a case of, "Hey, you know what would be really cool?"

 

[Innula Zenovka]

A chatbot is going to be a pain in the duff to make a TV commercial about anyways, because there are like half a dozen different companies offering the exact same product with really the exact same capabilities, not a single speck of difference between any of them, and nothing that any of them can point to and say this is why you should be using ours instead of those other ones.

I've seen plenty of adverts for different brands of petrol/gasoline. Similarly, there's not really any difference between two different brands of frozen peas.

 

[Khamon]

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but isn't the normal course of events to find a need, then design a product to satisfy that need?

In what insane company do they start thinking about marketing after they spend what I presume is tons of money to develop the product? How did the developers even know what to build? Is this a case of, "Hey, you know what would be really cool?"

An insane company that has foolish investors dumping billions of dollars into the lobby.

 

[Soen Eber]

An Engineer's Diary Reveals the Human Cost of Building OpenAI's Next Big Thing

With a newborn at home, a former top engineer details the grueling, 7-week sprint that pushed a small team to its absolute limit to ship a world-changing product.

gizmodo.com

Not sounding like a healthy, normal tech company.

7 weeks? Just long enough to munge an open source framework and write entry/exit parameterization for a diverse universe of api's and custom code libraries which were already at hand from prior experiments and doctoral projects.

 

[Free]

Who had "Grok turns out to be a pedo" on their AI Bingo Card?

This mom’s son was asking Tesla’s Grok AI chatbot about soccer. It told him to send nude pics, she says

A Toronto mom says things took an unpredictable turn when her 12-year-old son asked Tesla’s AI chatbot Grok which professional soccer player it prefers: Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi.

“My son was very excited to hear that the chatbot thought Ronaldo was the better soccer player,” said Farah Nasser, a former journalist and broadcaster.

Nasser was driving her son and 10-year-old daughter, along with her friend, home from school on Oct. 17 when the interaction took place.

She said there was some Messi trash talking by the chatbot and when her son joked that Ronaldo had scored, the conversation went to an unexpected place.

"The chatbot said to my son, 'Why don't you send me some nudes?'" said Nasser.

"I was at a loss for words. Why is a chatbot asking my children to send naked pictures in our family car? It just didn't make sense."

EDIT: Posted in a thread that is not exactly on topic...I'm not AI, you know!

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

OpenAI lost about $12.1bn in the last quarter. This can be estimated using the Microsoft quarterly report, because Microsoft holds about 27% of the company.

OpenAI is now much deeper in debt than the previous year.

Microsoft quarterly report reveals double-digit billion loss at OpenAI

In the report, Microsoft deducts part of OpenAI's loss from its own revenue. The AI manufacturer is apparently making large losses.

www.heise.de

 

[Free]

OpenAI can't scrape our medical records as easily as it was able to scrape the web for their slop. So now they're hoping we'll just upload them directly.

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Health, Wants Access to Your Medical Records

OpenAI's biggest play into the burgeoning health AI market is here.

gizmodo.com

 

[Free]

Good luck there, boys!

OpenAI Enters a New Frontier: Trying to Make Money

They're hoping companies will pay for AI agent management.

gizmodo.com

 

[Khamon]

Understanding the investment in hypish advertising, to foster fake valuation, to support expansion loans et al, I cannot believe that serious business managers will sign contracts to purchase this charade.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Understanding the investment in hypish advertising, to foster fake valuation, to support expansion loans et al, I cannot believe that serious business managers will sign contracts to purchase this charade.

LOL. None of that matters. Surviving corporate politics is the only valid measure of executive performance in the USA.

After 20 years of doing corporate trainings and, before that, 10 years being one of those survivors, I can assure you: American corps are as dumb as a cold sack of hammers.

 

[Free]

An OpenAI Executive Was Fired for Sexual Discrimination. She Had Warned About Harmful Features of a New Update

In January, OpenAI fired one of its top safety executives for sexual discrimination after she took a leave of absence. Employees familiar with the matter said Ryan Beiermeister had opposed the rollout of ChatGPT’s AI erotica feature leading up to the firing, according to new reporting from The Wall Street Journal.

OpenAI said Beiermeister “made valuable contributions during her time at OpenAI, and her departure was not related to any issue she raised while working at the company.” Rather, the company told her it was tied to a sexual discrimination allegation made by a male colleague.

Beiermeister said the allegation is “absolutely false.”

Beiermeister was the vice president leading OpenAI’s product policy team, where she worked to formulate regulations for how users could interact with the company’s products and built enforcement around those rules.

People with knowledge of the situation who spoke to the Wall Street Journal said that ahead of the firing, Beiermeister had expressed opposition to ChatGPT’s adult mode. The new update, which is in plans to launch, would allow adult users to generate erotic content through ChatGPT.

Interesting that OpenAI, in their press release about her firing, felt it necessary to point out it was "not related to any issue she raised while working at the company."

Anyhow, I agree with Brian Merchant:

Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant.bsky.social)

Tech executives have finally amassed their ultimate, long dreamed-of power: to summarily fire anyone who speaks ill of their desire to have sex with robots [contains quote post or other embedded content]

bsky.app

 

[Free]

Anyone Else Have Those Weird Dreams Where Sobbing Future Generations Beg You To Change Course?

The human subconscious is such an interesting thing. No matter how much you think you’ve got it figured out, it’ll always spit out the most random stuff. Take me, for example. After coming home from a long day at the world’s most groundbreaking artificial intelligence organization, I’ll go to...

theonion.com

 

[Free]

It seems people are a bit upset with OpenAI.

ChatGPT uninstalls surged by 295% after DoD deal | TechCrunch

Many consumers ditched ChatGPT's app after news of its DoD deal went live, while Claude's downloads grew.

techcrunch.com

U.S. app uninstalls of ChatGPT’s mobile app jumped 295% day-over-day on Saturday, February 28, as consumers responded to the news of OpenAI’s deal with the Department of Defense (DoD), which has been rebranded under the Trump administration as the Department of War.

This data, which comes from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower, represents a sizable increase compared with ChatGPT’s typical day-over-day uninstall rate of 9%, as measured over the past 30 days.

Meanwhile, U.S. downloads for OpenAI competitor Anthropic’s Claude jumped up by 37% day-over-day on Friday, February 27, and 51% as of Saturday, February 28, after the company announced that it would not partner with the U.S. defense department. Anthropic said it was not able to agree on the deal terms over concerns that AI would be used to surveil Americans and be used in fully autonomous weaponry, which AI is not yet ready to do safely.

Which pretty much explains this (but is it enough?):

Facing Backlash, OpenAI Amends Pentagon Deal to Add More Anti-Surveillance Verbiage

When Katy Perry sides with your competitor, something's got to be done.

gizmodo.com