Focus or the lack thereof
OpenAI's pursuit of AGI has turned it into a platform that is good for nothing
When advising startups, the standard advice is to focus on the narrow opportunity at first. Establish a beachhead which acts as a foundation and then expand from there. The best way to fail is by trying to build a product that pleases everybody.
Enter Sam Altman.
Perhaps because of his name, he wanted to create the alternate man, which he dubbed Artificial General Intelligence.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI)—sometimes called human‑level intelligence AI—is a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.
Source: Wikipedia
Most code is written to operate in a specific area. Photoshop can do everything relating to images, but it can’t even work on videos, let alone write prose. Software packages have been great at doing specific pieces of work, but there is no software package that can do it all. By contrast, a human can learn to code and manage HR. A human can work across contexts and understand the specific requirements of that area and excel at it.
The moment GPTs were able to regurgitate words across a variety of areas, Sam Altman became obsessed with the idea of creating AI that could work like a human. Buoyant from the hype he was receiving after the release of ChatGPT, he claimed AGI would be possible by 2025. Much like Elon Musk, that date has become a moving target.
Why AGI?
In his mind, that was the best way to usurp the incomes of many people and corner that money for himself.
His focus turned from pushing the boundaries of research to turning OpenAI into a for-profit entity. He estranged and got rid of all of the research minds that produced everything at the company. Ilya Sutskever had a falling out after trying to push Sam Altman out of the company and left thereafter to start his own venture. Mira Murati and John Shulman left to start Thinking Machines Lab. Andrej Karpathy, who at Stanford played a critical role alongside Fei Fei Li to usher in visual recognition, left to start his own venture.
The vision has broadened while the bench strength has narrowed.
When you set out to please everybody, you please nobody. The pursuit of AGI has delivered precisely that.
I used Gemini last week, and it smokes OpenAI. Google is really flexing it with their search and Docs integration. Anthropic has become the gold standard for coding. OpenAI, in the meantime, has turned into a bullet machine.
Ask anything, and it will deliver 35 bullet points, which has given birth to a new term, AI Slop.