I suspect they do care about communicating with customers, but it's total chaos and carnage internally.

Such as "decided it wasn't an operational priority to email users when features were enabled for them".

You could literally hire an entirely new guy, give him instructions to build such an email system, and let him put the right triggers on the user account permissions database to send out the right emails at the right time.

And then, when it's built, you can start adding more features like sending the emails only when demand is low and/or at times of day when you get the best click through rate. And then next you can start measuring the increase in revenue from sending those emails.

Before long, you have a whole marketing and comms team. Which you probably want as a big company anyway.

I'm sure we've all seen companies grow too fast become less productive than when there were a ten person startup.

Incremental rollouts are hard.

Incremental rollouts are hard, and so is communicating in a way that makes everyone happy.

This is my best guess as well, they are rocketing down the interstate at 200mph and just trying to keep the wheels on the car. When you're absolutely killing it I guess making X% more by being better at messaging just isn't worth it since to do that you'd have to take someone off something potentially more critical. Still makes me a little sad though.

Aren't they unprofitable? and have fierce competition from everyone?

Don't users validate your market? ChatGPT has plenty of users, so I would think competitors only hurt their value.

Clearly, you can be a company like Microsoft where nobody is challenging your dominance in PC operating systems, and you can make huge sums of money. So competitors certainly aren't vital.

Or if you've cleverly sewn up a market with patents or trade secrets or a giant first-mover advantage or network effects, and nobody's got any chance of challenging your dominance in your specific market niche - again that could be highly profitable.

On the other hand, if you're selling ten-dollar bills for five dollars, you might have millions of satisfied paying customers, but no competitors because nobody else thinks your unit economics make sense. Or if you run a DVD rental store, you might be profitable and have many return customers, but you might not attract competitors because they don't think DVD rental is a growth business.

So some people consider a lack of competition an ominous sign.

a whole bunch of AI startups were founded around the same time. surely each can't validate the market for the others and be validated by the others in turn

Plus they make 20 dollars a month from a lot of people.

The best defence is to move so quickly that you are an established part of the business framework by the time these forces can gather, or to go so slowly that nobody takes you as a threat.

No startup can go slowly.

Otherwise known as the AirBnB playbook.

In ten years we will enjoy a higher productivity due to AI and a richer society as a result. We have already seen it with protein folding which AI is amazing at[0].

The only reasonable fear of AI is for some jobs and that China gets their first.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02083-2

This is no different then saying "Look, nuclear weapons aren't actually dangerous, if they were we'd all be dead because the apocalypse would have already happened", which is probably the dumbest take on the close calls and real risks that exist.

What are some metrics that justify this claim?

They are also on pace to exceed $1B in revenue. [1]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-faste...

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-passes-1-bill...

not credible

well that would be good if Reuters were the source of the figure

but they're not, they're simply reporting on what SimilarWeb has estimated

https://www.similarweb.com/website/chatgpt.com/#technologies

and that estimate is essentially based on nothing

Views are easy to inflate, I wouldn't even consider it in the same ballpark. This video[1] of Vivaldis 4 seasons has about 1/4 billion views.

The shortest time to 100 million users is almost a definition of the quickest growing company.

[0]: first or second largest youtuber. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRxofEmo3HA

That hasn't happened yet for OpenAI, but I'm sure it will happen eventually, and then we'll know.

My perception is apes still feel like the main character, each and every one of them.

To use a fictional but entirely apt quote:

> I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about: Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.

This question is poorly formed because it’s not clear who the “we” is. If it’s you and me, that train left the station a while ago. If it’s any humans, well Sam Altman is probably a human and all of these are impressive products, but still just tools.

This is a large part of what held them back: GPT3.5 had most of the capabilities of the initial ChatGPT release, just with a different interface. Yet GPT3.5 failed to get any hype because the rollout was glacial. They made some claims that it was great, but to verify this for yourself you had to wait months. Only when they finally made a product that everyone could try out at the same time, with minimal hassle, did OpenAI turn from a "niche research company" to the fastest growing start-up. And this seems to have been a one-time thing, now they are back to staggered releases.

I believe two other factors were the cost (especially of fine tuned models, IIRC fine tuned davinci cost $0.20 per thousand tokens) and also that OpenAI hadn't very clearly shown just how much higher the quality could get once RLHF'd. I remember asking davinci-instruct to parse some data, and the reliability really seemed much lower than ChatGPT at launch, to the point that, at the time, I thought GPT-4 was secretly powering ChatGPT.

> We are deploying image and voice capabilities gradually > > OpenAI’s goal is to build AGI that is safe and beneficial. We believe in making our tools available gradually, which allows us to make improvements and refine risk mitigations over time while also preparing everyone for more powerful systems in the future. This strategy becomes even more important with advanced models involving voice and vision.

> We’re rolling out voice and images in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise users over the next two weeks.

    Voice Chat (Not available yet) [Click here to be notified when you have access]

Agreed. Other notable mentions: choosing "ChatGPT" as their product name and not having mobile apps.

Sounds like their marketing is doing just fine. If you were to just leave and forget about it, then sure, they need to work on their retention. But you won’t, so they don’t.

I do love these companies that succeed in spite of their marketing & design and not because of it. It shows you have something very special.

Sarcasm aside, I understand your complaint, but still, a little funny.

I'm a plus customer and an API user, and they barely send me anything. One day I just signed in and saw that I suddenly had interpreter access, for instane.

Frustratingly, at least the image gen is live on Bing, but I guess Microsoft is paying more than me for access.