I had a sense things may be turning against them when my accountant asked me last week if I’d like to participate in their new round ($750B premoney) with no carry. How am I suddenly blessed with such exclusive access, at no cost?!

Are you an accredited investor?

"Would you like to hold this bag for us, sir?"

Yes, I'm reading this as a sign of strategic failure and decline.

ChatGPT is an interesting product - I like it for certain things - but after last year's PR scramble almost all the news out of OpenAI is a disappointment, with hovering hints of retrenchment.

I still like it as a general search engine and everyday LLM over Gemini. Maybe I’m just used to the style.

agree it's becoming my new default search engine. But it is actively getting worse in a distasteful sense:

    Want to hear the one TRICK most people forget when doing X...?

Yes, every response ends with that. Why did they set it up that way?

To try and get continued usage. They no doubt A/B tested the shit out of this and saw it gets higher responses

It's quite transparently a trick to prolong engagement with the app, just as pretty much any internet product which aims to maximize the LTV extracted from the user base.

I would suggest to edit the default prompt to tell it to avoid engagement bait.

Honestly, it’s bait phrased but I’ve learnt a fair bit from those and end up learning a lot more from the session overall.

I far prefer perplexity for that. The fact that it always cites its sources is great. And it has a search bar widget for android, and search bar integration for firefox so its pretty easy to use.

> XAI

Kind of insulting to lump google in with XAI? Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?

> Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?

xAI doesn't have "content moderation" around adult content, so that usage is quite popular.

That is a lot of people ending up on a list... Gross.

Yep I use Grok and Claude mainly, Grok is integrated into x.com and Teslas so so potentially hundreds of millions of people.

That's a lot of people having an inferior product and lack of choice being forced down their throats.

They wasted their first mover advantage by focussing on what amounts to building toys for consumers like Sora instead of actually useful products that go beyond simple chat bots.

I think they are in serious trouble, especially with the size of their cash burn. Their planned IPO could easily turn out to be their WeWork moment where the bottom suddenly falls out on the valuation if they cannot make their operation look more like a real business before investors lose confidence.

Agreed. They are pretty close to distress IMO. This cash-injection gets them to where, an IPO? I dunno, people might be spooked by then.

Will be interesting to see.

What happened to AI accelerated novel materials science and medicine? Meh let’s do TikTok slop instead ?