Another thought experiment - if OpenAI AGI was right around the corner, why are they wasting time/money/energy buying a product-less vanity hardware startup run by Ive?
Why not tackle robotics if anything.
Or really just be the best AGI and everyone will be knocking on your door to license it in their hardware/software stacks, you will print infinite money.
AGI is not enough. Seriously, imagine if they had an AGI in their ChatGPT interface. It’s not enough to do anything truly meaningful. It’s like a genius in the woods somewhere. For AGI to have an impact it needs to be everywhere.
Robotics to navigate the physical world seems more impactful than some pin/glasses product to provide a passive audio/visual interface to the chatbot doesn't seem so earth shattering either though.
What would you do with a 10x or 100x smarter Siri/Alexa?
I still don't see my life changing.
Give me a robot that can legitimately do household errands like the dishes, laundry, etc.. now we are talking.
Once AGI is accomplished I can’t imagine what else it would do but bootstrap itself up which, depending on compute, could scale quite far. OpenAI would only need to feed it compute for the most part.
I don’t think AGI is close, but once it happens it’s hard to imagine it not “escaping” (whenever we want to define that as).
This line of thought doesn't work, because any company approaching AGI might be actively trying to hide that information from regulators and the military. Being the 1st AGI company is actually pretty risky.
However their actual actions resemble companies who know AGI isn’t even on the horizon and moreso they are acting as exactly as if they believe the AI hype bubble is coming to an end and they need to dump the stuff into the public markets asap.
There really isn’t any other way to interpret OpenAI’s actions for the last few months.
Sure it could all be a feint to hide their amazing progress. Or it could be what it looks like.
Given the hype cycles of the last 20 years, I’m going with the second.
Name any other company acting like that besides OpenAI. Or any person besides Sam Altman, the guy who screwed up OpenAI's structure/board/funding. You just have a narrative you want to be true, and one company half fits into that narrative.
If Ive hype brings more investment valuation than it costs to acquire his company, and the time costs etc., it's a win for current investors regardless of if it is a good investment for the investors in the new round.
Is VC really funding a trillion dollars of GPU purchases to replace labor that could instead be bid out to developing world mechanical turks for $1/hr?
Why not tackle robotics if anything. Or really just be the best AGI and everyone will be knocking on your door to license it in their hardware/software stacks, you will print infinite money.