liamconnell

I think NYT uses multiple titles for some articles. I had copy pasted it

I’m guessing that Amodei meant it as a humorous inside joke.

It’s also shorthand for “the end of massive R&D capex” and “the transition to market capture”. The final stage, what McKinsey types call “harvesting”, is probably not on Amodei’s radar. Based on what I’ve seen of his public personality, he would see it as too philistine and will hand it off to another custodial exec.

> It is, but when a model/harness/tools/system prompts are the same/similar in the generator and reviewer fail in similar ways.

Is there empirical evidence for that? Where is it on an epistemic meter between (1) “it sounds good when I say it”, and (10) “someone ran evaluation and got significant support.”

“Vibes” (2/3 on scale) are ok, just honestly curious.

Not mentioned in the article, but one interesting area where OpenAI could play is in participant identification and recruitment for clinical trials. In fact, ChatGPT could also help operate the clinical trials which is a highly paperwork intensive business, and therefore something that AI could add value to.

Ultimately pharmaceutical companies pay up to $100,000 per participant to hospital networks these charges must be itemized as expenses from the hospital on the most part (bounties are illegal usually.) open AI would provide a cheap way in for pharmaceutical companies to identify participants given that OpenAI has an incredible perspective into the physical and psychological state of their users. Imagine how much more is shared with OpenAI compared to a clinical trial coordinator at a hospital when a psychiatric drug is being tested.

This would also give OpenAI leverage in partnering with pharmaceutical companies. OpenAI executives have stated this is a goal, but otherwise they’ve made little progress on it.

It’s wild to imagine - someone with borderline personality disorder having delusional conversations with an AI chat Bot for six months, receiving an offer to participate in a clinical trial, and then having their subsequent AI conversations used as evidence to analyze the efficacy of the drug. The ironic thing is if that person had delusions about hidden forces listening to them…they’d be RIGHT!

> Someone would purchase it and run it again under a new company.

That happened a long time ago! Microsoft already owns the model weights!

Loved Bluebeard as well. A mature Vonnegut who knew how to use motifs from his earlier work. And for an old guy, he kept his writing fresh and energetic. The miniature story of the dog without a tail always comes back to me.

I read the second two books this year and was unfortunately disappointed.

First two were so fun but I think I got hung up on some of the more clumsy stylistic parts of the Endymion books. I guess my “trust” in the author comes from the style and tropes they use, and if I they lose my trust none of the deeper parts resonate. Glad you enjoyed!

Neither are on-brand for hacker news but:

[Best fiction] Stoner - John Williams [Best non-fiction] Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe

The US crypto lobby has already raised over 240 million for the 2026 election. It’s a cancer attacking our society’s institutions.

Didn’t see that yet, interesting!

The CFO isn't talking about selling tokens to pharma companies. There's no money in that. She proposed revenue sharing. In this scenario, OpenAI's AI service helps discover drug candidates, and shares the IP ownership of the candidate (which is basically a risky bet that it will get through clinical trials and be profitable). Biotech is a complicated market filled with smart people and great negotiators - they dont give away IP ownership without a lot of thought.

If OpenAI wants anything more valuable than selling tokens, they will need to offer something valuable and differentiated. Right now they are not differentiated in the space at all. Look up "OpenAI Biotech" - anything that they've built themselves?

If any company will have a new product that biotech companies will pay top dollar for, its Google. Deepmind has been in biology (proteins) for almost a decade and they it has subsidiaries like Isomorphic Labs that are bringing products to market.

Good point!

On the other hand, Historically Amazon didnt compete with Google (until GCP). They do compete with Microsoft, which is pretty closely aligned with OAI. They also have large investments in Anthropic.

Even if OpenAI did win here, would it be a profit monster like Google Adwords? Adwords had the auction model which meant that certain categories were hugely lucrative for Google. Can a chatbot do the same? If I know that the product I buy is simply auctioned off to the highest bidder, what's the point of using an agent to help me shop? There has to be a pretext of the agent actually looking out for my best interest, otherwise I would just use search. Nobody expects adwords to look out for their best interest. They are always free to skip the ads section if they choose.

It will be hard for ChatGPT to implement an auction model since it will be different for each product category. Hiring a lawyer will probably have a different interaction from buying groceries. On Google+AdWords, its all just search results and ads.

If there is no auction, then all of this is WAY less profitable than the Google model. So once again - not going to save OAI from negative margins.

Yes that's what I meant. But Amazon will fight for its life to stop this. So OpenAI will have to go to other retailers, which don't have the same product catalogue size as Amazon. Best case scenario: Target or Walmart. But there is a reason that OpenAI announced deals with Etsy and Shopify rather than those.

And OpenAI doesn't have as much product insight as the retailers so they have to rely on the retailer to choose which is the "best" mechanical keyboard for this person. And at that point, pretty much all of the shopping value is being provided by the retailer rather than ChatGPT, so why would they get much money?

There's a market for this but its not going to be trivial for OpenAI to win it. And it probably wont be a cashflow monster like AdWords or Amazon.

Yes but its not relevant to the agent use cases (which are mostly about interacting with external systems). So agents built by Microsoft (Copilot) can natively interact with Office files in Sharepoint, and the Sharepoint product team can build to enable this in special ways. OpenAI has to use the APIs and deal with rate limits, speed issues and other limitations.