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LZ_Khan commented on OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation   nytimes.com/2025/08/01/bu... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
eduardofcgo · 24 days ago
OpenAI valued at 300B will never be able to produce the same products "wrappers" that these 5 people startups are making. Same reason Facebook could not make Instagram, of Jira could never make bootcamp for example.
LZ_Khan · 24 days ago
Counterexample- Facebook made Threads which has similar # users as Twitter now.
LZ_Khan commented on OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation   nytimes.com/2025/08/01/bu... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
lelanthran · 24 days ago
Firstly, the $200/m plan is at a loss, they'll make a profit on PAYG tokens, not plans.

Secondly, this is looking very risky: they are at the bottom of the value chain and eventually they'll be running on razor thin margins like all actors who are at the bottom of the value chain.

Anything they can offer is doable by their competitors (in Google's case, they can even do it cheaper due to ow ing the vertical which OpenAI doesn't own).

Their position in the value chain means they are in a precarious spot: any killer app for AI that comes along will be owned by a customer of OpenAI, and if OpenAI attempts to skim that value for itself that customer will simply switch to a new provider of which there are many, including, eventually, the customer themselves should they decide to self host.

Being an AI provider right now is a very risky proposition because any attempt to capture value can be immediate met with "we're switching to a competitor" or even the nuclear "fine, we'll self host an open model ourselves".

We'll know more only when we see what the killer app is, when it eventually comes.

LZ_Khan · 24 days ago
I feel like being at the bottom of the value chain is a mis-categorization. If you consider base LLM model as their sole offering I agree with you, but these companies have shown an eagerness to eat their way up the value chain. Agent mode, Search, Study Mode, AI code editors, are such examples of products that could be higher-on-the-chain startups but are offered in-house by OpenAI.

This reminds me of Amazon choosing to sell products that it knows are doing well in the marketplace, out-competing third party sellers. OpenAI is positioned to out-compete its competitors on virtually anything because they have the talent and more importantly, control over the model weights and ability to customize their LLMs. It's possible the "wrapper" startups of today are simply doing the market research for OpenAI and are in danger of being consumed by OpenAI.

LZ_Khan commented on Reflections on OpenAI   calv.info/openai-reflecti... · Posted by u/calvinfo
LZ_Khan · a month ago
This is just the exact same culture as Deepmind minus the "everything on Slack" bulletpoint.

Dead Comment

LZ_Khan commented on Tesla Robotaxi Videos Show Speeding, Driving into Wrong Lane   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/jmsflknr
m101 · 2 months ago
I know that Tesla sometimes feels like a religion but there just might be a good time to short the stock. Before going out and saying it's bad software, short the stock first and then ethically berate it. I just did.

It's a 200 pe stock, sales are falling, so it won't have earnings to speak of next quarter. High pe stocks need growth to justify their multiples. Tesla is not growing.

Also if this robotaxi service isn't pulled off the road soon then it will be limited to a very select set of locations. If someone has to sit in these cars to monitor them all the time then Tesla may be losing money on every journey.

This premature move in releasing the robotaxi is certainly stock pumping.

LZ_Khan · 2 months ago
I just shorted it as well.. 3 days before you.

And I got roasted. Invest with caution.

LZ_Khan commented on Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmi... · Posted by u/sandslash
Waterluvian · 2 months ago
This got me thinking about something…

Isn’t an LLM basically a program that is impossible to virus scan and therefore can never be safely given access to any capable APIs?

For example: I’m a nice guy and spend billions on training LLMs. They’re amazing and free and I hand out the actual models for you all to use however you want. But I’ve trained it very heavily on a specific phrase or UUID or some other activation key being a signal to <do bad things, especially if it has console and maybe internet access>. And one day I can just leak that key into the world. Maybe it’s in spam, or on social media, etc.

How does the community detect that this exists in the model? Ie. How does the community virus scan the LLM for this behaviour?

LZ_Khan · 2 months ago
I do feel like large scale LLM vulnerabilities will be the real Y2K
LZ_Khan commented on GCP Outage   status.cloud.google.com/... · Posted by u/thanhhaimai
LZ_Khan · 2 months ago
Is this the new Y2k?
LZ_Khan commented on Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview   developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
epolanski · 4 months ago
This so much.

To me it seems so strange that few good language designers and ml folks didn't group together to work on this.

It's clear that there is a space for some LLM meta language that could be designed to compile to bytecode, binary, JS, etc.

It also doesn't need to be textual like we code, but some form of AST llama can manipulate with ease.

LZ_Khan · 4 months ago
readability would probably be the sticking point
LZ_Khan commented on Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency   github.com/KoljaB/Realtim... · Posted by u/koljab
smusamashah · 4 months ago
Saying this as a user of these tools (openai, Google voice chat etc). These are fast yes, but they don't allow talking naturally with pauses. When we talk, we take long and small pauses for thinking or for other reasons.

With these tools, AI starts taking as soon as we stop. Happens both in text and voice chat tools.

I saw a demo on twitter a few weeks back where AI was waiting for the person to actually finish what he was saying. Length of pauses wasn't a problem. I don't how complex that problem is though. Probably another AI needs to analyse the input so far a decide if it's a pause or not.

LZ_Khan · 4 months ago
Honestly I think this is a problem of over-engineering and simply allowing the user to press a button when he wants to start talking and press it when he's done is good enough. Or even a codeword for start and finish.

We don't need to feel like we're talking to a real person yet.

LZ_Khan commented on I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors   habr.com/en/articles/9058... · Posted by u/sochix
LZ_Khan · 4 months ago
First of all, congratulations. That's a huge feat and you seem to have overcome a lot of hurdles to make it.

That being said, I find it a bit discouraging that small-team passion projects with even the best product-market fit and minimal marketing spend only reach this level of profitability after 5 years.

Like, I can work at a FAANG, coast, make no real contribution to society and collect a 400K/yr check. Or I could go all in on a cool idea and risk getting no customers. Option 2 sounds more fun, but it's still so much stress and uncertainty for little payoff.

Do others feel the same?

u/LZ_Khan

KarmaCake day475December 16, 2019View Original