Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

> OpenAI has actual income from actual paying customers. They can just stop the R&D, and they'll be hugely profitable (for a while).

Can they?

For one, as I said, we don't know how much of their losses are from operating their service vs research. But I am going to go out on a limb and say that if even just a single service was operating at a profit, they would have been very eager to tell us. That would, to my knowledge, be a first for any genAI offering and cement them as the clear leaders in the industry. It would also help reinforce the idea that AI is going to be incredibly profitable as that comes under fire. However they seem weirdly coy about their operating figures somehow.

For two, we don't know what those "paying customers" are actually doing. There's been a whole lot of demos and webtoys and "experimenting" and "trials" and pass-through APIs that hastily paste your parameters into some pre-written prompt. But there's been remarkably little actual success stories and useful business applications for it. I couldn't find any company stating they made a profit *using* AI either. I don't think they could stop r&d if they wanted to, because all of these companies testing out chatgpt solutions to problems that it can't actually solve are doing so based on the idea that these things soon enough will be able to do anything. The visible r&d spending is crucial to that.

I found it remarkable how in a recent article I read, the Washington Post, despite clearly trying very hard, couldn't scrounge up anyone to balance the article with some positive news who didn't have to resort to constructs like "I think we will see" and "my expectations are" (https://archive.is/pIOra). It's almost funny how consistently all of the bad news is in present tense and the good news are in the future tense. The constant excuses how about how "it's just the early days" and "we'll see applications for it any days now" will also seem very familiar to anyone who has followed e.g. cryptocurrency news[1].

It may just be that they are earning a lot of money by teaching customers their tech isn't useful for them. The one thing I can find reliably is stories such as an animation company hiring a bunch of "prompt engineers" instead of artists to paint background mattes, failing at making minor revisions of the work and not understanding how animation works and getting canned. This great success, of course, will up (4x) in their next annualized revenue figures :)

[1] Which does bring up a fun comparison: local divisions of McDonals and Hershey's did certainly pay a few thousand dollars (or rather, paid a marketing agency to pay a few thousand dollars) for a "crypto experience" on some crypto "metaverse" platform I don't remember the name of at the height of the crypto/metaverse bubble. A bunch of brands minted NFTs too. However that money was, unsurprisingly, not the start of enormous year-on-year brand spending on the blockchain people claimed it was.

I've learned I can't argue with the wishes and religious fervor that permeates all those who buy into the VC-fueled Silicon Valley bubble. Pets.com probably had some amazing annualized numbers too, if you picked the right day to project from.. so did Enron, AIG, lots of folks...

But this

>Nobody seriously doubts that the AI is here to stay, and that it's going to be hugely impactful.

I can 100% say is 100% false.

At least one person, who has received a graduate level degree in compuer science, and has worked in the industry for more years than I care to say, does not think it will be hugely impactful.

And I know others that have at least voiced similar cynicism. Including some with graduate specializations directly in the field of CNNs/autoencoders/etc.

So, yeah, enjoy the ride. Slightly better auto-complete is nice, but hugely impactful, it is not. Oh, and remember the self-driving taxis? Still waiting...

A difference is that with more traditional investments the entity doing the investment is one that pretty directly stands to benefit from the R&D being done. For example, AT&T investing into developing the transistor, or the US government developing nuclear-resistant networks, as you mentioned. Conversely, VCs are remarkable for just how little they care what the actual technology is. Some even write gloating blog posts about how virtuous they think they are for basing investment decisions solely on how charistmatic they think the founders are and they don't even look at the slide decks or financials.

This makes sense, because at some point the industry realized that their primary way of getting paid is only rarely the technologies actually working out, and more commonly just using their elite connections to find a bigger sucker as fast as possible. This detachment from any of the effects of any of their investments may have some arguable advantages, kodak inventing and then killing the digital camera comes to mind. But it also runs the risk of, say, growing an entire sector around repeatedly wasting a medium sized countries GDP on things that nobody wants or needs and then trying to hype up everyone else to buy it off them for more.