Google – The Red Pen of Doom

Top 7 reasons why OpenAI is doomed doomed DOOMED

October 19, 2024Posted in 7 Media Strategy SaturdayTagged ai, artificial general intelligence, artificial-intelligence, chatgpt, Google, hype, meta, Microsoft, notebooklm, nvidia, OpenAI, the matrix, the singularity, the terminatorLeave a comment

I come to praise OpenAI, not to bury it. Yet many experts are saying reality is catching up to the hype train.

It didn’t take a server farm full of NVIDIA cards for me to come up with seven reasons to agree with the skeptics. Unless they invent Skynet (Artificial General Intelligence) and take over the world, I believe OpenAI will get bought out or buried by the competition.

7. Live by the Hype Train, die by the Hype Train

Startups need buzz more than anything. More than money and more than talent. Because without free press and hype, a startup can’t attract investors, brainy employees, and clients.

OpenAI got billions worth of buzz once it released ChatGPT.

Now the Hype Train is turning on it. You want proof? Here’s proof: the godfather of AI, when he recently received his Nobel Prize, took the time to dunk on the company’s CEO.

The other part of buzz is risk versus reward, dream versus nightmare. The dream of OpenAI is Artificial General Intelligence, an AI as smart as humans that then becomes exponentially smarter.

The nightmare of OpenAI critics is … Artificial General Intelligence, since it could grow out of control, Skynet style.

Many AI experts say reaching this point means the machines take over and either enslave us or end humanity. Some experts don’t say this is hypothetical, but inevitable.

Not cool, do not like, 0/10.

OpenAI did not help counter this messaging when all kinds of employees and co-founders left, saying they worried about the guardrails at OpenAI coming off.

What happens when two Hype Trains, one positive and one negative, collide at high speed? I believe it’s how Scotty powers the warp engines and it is not pretty.

6. No longer unique

A year ago, if you said OpenAI would switch from non-profit to profit, I would line up with everybody else to buy stock.

Today, everybody and their Golden Lab has competing products. Google has Gemini and Gemma. There’s Falcon, Claude, Phi-3, and DBRX.

Facebook (aka Meta) has I Have No Idea What Silly Name Zuck Chose.

I could throw out two dozen random names and you wouldn’t know which ones I’m making up, not because I’m a genius at inventing tech-bro names, but because THERE ARE SO DAMN MANY.

Plus, there are all kinds of open models and non-profit efforts. The barrier to entry is so low, college kids with a spare weekend can make their own AI shebang and share it with the world on GitHub or whatever. A random man just created a free AI that takes your resume and applies to jobs for you.

There is no secret sauce. OpenAI doesn’t have a patent or monopoly on this tech and never will.

And these competitors aren’t universally obsessed with Artificial General Intelligence, so they don’t have natural opposition from people and institutions that are kinda sorta worried about our robot overlords, Skynet, or the next bad Matrix sequel starring us instead of Keanu Reeves.

5. High costs, low profits.

It takes the energy of a thousand suns to train these AI’s, then the energy of ten thousand suns to run them. They’re talking about restarting a reactor at Three Mile Island to help power this stuff, I kid you not.

Even after raising billions of dollars, OpenAI needs to raise billions more to keep going. They haven’t turned a profit and won’t for years, if ever, unless something big changes.

Here are the numbers: they’re expected to burn $7 billion in 2024. The company expects to run up $44 billion in losses between 2023 and 2028 before turning a profit in 2029.

That’s a long time to wait. A lot of things can happen before then.

4. Massive competition

Until they turn a profit or go public, OpenAI will spend all kinds of time and energy keeping the lights on, giving scrappy competitors and tech giant alike a big fat opening to swoop down and eat their lunch. You know, like a bird spotting a man trying to each a sandwich on the beach.

Already, you have dozens of alternatives to OpenAI’s products, and new ones will keep popping up. There’s no incentive to go small here. People will swing hard, looking for home runs.

How do you win the AI race? Money, creativity, and products that people actually spend cash to use. But mostly money, because you need piles AI cards and mountains of electricity to train new AI’s and run them.

Money is also how you pay the salaries of the most brilliant AI talent on the talent. There’s a limited supply, and these brilliant people are not magically stupid when it comes to comparing two numbers and figuring out which one has more zeroes behind it.

The brain drain already started, with key people who founded OpenAI already gone, and many already working for competitors.

3. Swallowed by a tech shark

Microsoft and NVIDIA have multiple avenues to dominate AI, if they want. And they do want it.

One method: pour an overwhelming amount of money and talent into the AI arms race, swamping OpenAI.

Or they could do the simpler thing: Write checks to buy every startup they can.

Microsoft already partners with OpenAI and provides a ton of funding and server time.

NVIDIA makes the essential tech that fuels AI, and they recently announced their own AI model, fueled by the high-end cards that run most of this tech. Cards that are in short supply.

Microsoft’s market cap is $2.3 trillion, while NVIDIA is worth $3 trillion.

OpenAI feels great when it raises $6 or $7 billion from investors to continue operating.

NVIDIA or Microsoft could go hard and spend $100 billion or more to scoop up the top talent, then buy every AI card and server farm in sight. Do you think Wall Street would punish them for that? Nah. Their stock would go up, not down. You could plan ahead and sneakily finance the effort on the stock bounce, if you wanted to flex the size of your evil financial brain.

Also, people respond to incentives. What are the incentives here?

As CEO of a for-profit, Sam Altman will get all kinds of stock options and ways to cash out if the company (a) goes public or (b) gets bought out. He isn’t incentivized for a long, hard battle with deep-pocketed competitors. The natural thing is to cash out, take his billions, and buy his own tropical island. Get a tan and draw up his dream for a new startup on cocktail napkins as they bring him endless strawberry margaritas on the beach.

Same thing with other bigshots at OpenAI who’ll get equity. What outsiders will see as a big loss and the end of the old independent company won’t be losses for them at all. It’ll be like winning the lottery times ten.

2. Better avenues for profits

Getting corporations and regular people to pay monthly fees for the latest and greatest OpenAI products isn’t a license to print money. Users are down after the hype wore off, and it’s not paying the bills.

There are better, bigger markets that other companies will dominate.

Every country in the world has a military and sees what’s happening in Ukraine, and they will spend more and more cash for drones. Not just quadcopters like you can buy from Costco, but water-based drones, ground drones, long-range drones, and seven things we can’t imagine today.

All kinds of AI will keep getting integrated into all kinds of drones and phones and tech built by all kinds of corporations, and they’re all going to make bank. Neural chips are getting cheap and getting into everything from PC’s to refrigerators.

And there’s a huge market for using AI in health care and industries that don’t involve typing words into a chat box. Analyzing MRIs and ultrasounds, checking geological samples for signs of gold or oil, unfolding proteins that might be the next big drug. You name it, there’s probably a version of AI that can make things better, faster, and/or cheaper. This is the good side, the non-Skynet/Matrix hope for this tech.

It’s just that OpenAI isn’t big enough, or diverse enough, to get into all these markets. It’s not like Microsoft where everybody’s using the same operating system, or Google dominates the search engine market, and they can use that to leverage other products.

1. Superior products keep popping up

Every week, new AI products show up. Some are direct competitors to flavors of ChatGPT, and others are quite different.

Here’s just one example: NotebookLM is probably the best application of AI that I’ve seen, and I’m using it far more than ChatGPT now, because I ran out of ideas for silly poems about my dog.

All the chatbot AI’s have trouble interacting with specific material, which is what a lot of folks want and need. Some can now surf the web, live, for material and new info. Others are limited to the internet as of 2022 and such. If you want an AI to analyze your material, there are wonky plug-ins and such, but they all pretty much stink.

NotebookLM goes right at this problem.

Want to analyze a 300-page book as a PDF? Go wild.

How about an image and a link to a website and up to 50 total things? Yes. You heard me. Up to 50 bits of material, including links and books. Go for it.

People keep worrying about AI taking away the jobs of writers, and I don’t see that yet, because AI’s are meh at writing. What they are great at is analyzing and summarizing things, which is where NotebookLM blew my mind.

It’ll create a timeline, a FAQ, a study guide, whatever you like from the material you provice.

It’ll even create a full podcast, with the push of a button. I kid you not. These podcasts don’t feel like AI at all.

Here’s a podcast based on a single paragraph of text. OMGWTFBBQ.

This kind of thing is the future. I mean, ChatGPT is a neat trick, and can do interesting things like compose silly poems about my two dogs after I told it a few facts. Not profitable.

I believe new, fresh takes on AI, like NotebookLM, will be far more useful and aimed at specific needs than flavors of ChatGPT. They’re popping up every day and won’t stop for years.

And that’s the top reason why I think OpenAI will get bought up—by Microsoft or maybe Google—if it’s not buried by the competition first.

What words get shared on social media – and what doesn’t?

April 26, 2014August 3, 2021Posted in 7 Media Strategy SaturdayTagged blogs, facebook, Google, LinkedIn, neil patel, quicksprout, science, Social media, the series of tubes, Twitter, web sites7 Comments

ublicity and marketing, including social media, is like the Wild West.

Just about anybody can call themselves a Social Media Ninja (although they shouldn’t) and get away with it, especially if they used the right jargon. Crazy ideas don’t sound crazy when nobody really knows anything in this new frontier.

Social media is still related to publicity and marketing, and even in that old business, the saying was, “Half of all advertising gets wasted. But nobody knows what half.”

Although there’s certainly good practice and bad ideas, there’s always been more art than science to the field. You can’t predict what will work or say, “We’re going to make this viral” and have it happen. Doesn’t work that way.

PETA does it best: they assume most things will fail, which is true. They swing for the fences and try all sorts of wild ideas and PR stunts, because 99 of them can flop if only one of them goes viral. PETA knows you can’t plan viral.

Now, I like the art AND the science, the theory and the practice. You can’t run everything by the numbers, because good numbers are hard to find, and it’s expensive, and you surely can’t run a bunch of numbers and say, “See? This thing will blow up because, you know, science.” Doesn’t work. But you can, and should, grab data where possible and use that to point in the right direction.

So it gave me great joy to see Neil the Patel come through with another great infographic about which words get shared on social media — the Book of Face, the Twitter, Goople+ and even that thing called LinkedIn — and which words get buried. Useful stuff.

The Surprising Words That Get Content Shared on Social Media

Bulletproof skin and other insane inventions

December 7, 2013August 3, 2021Posted in 1 Survival SundayTagged anti-bear suit, bulletproof skin, crazy inventions, Ewok, Google, Kevlar, Spider silk, Twitter2 Comments

This isn’t science fiction, or something dreamed up by Stan Lee back in 1962.

An artist teamed up with scientists to (1) weave artificial spider silk, (2) grow real cells around that scaffold then (3) look for firearms.

So what happened when Bulletproof Skin 1.0 got shot by a low-powered .22 bullet?

Yeah, it bounced off.

A full-powered .22 pierced the skin, though she thinks doubling the strength of the spider silk weave would buttress the skin and make it tough enough.

Science is magic.

Then there’s this CEO, who sells stab-proof vests and stands behind his product by letting an employee, or a dude who really hates him, hit him with a metal baton, slash him with a box-cutter and stab him with a knife.

http://youtu.be/PXo08F7yFTg?t=2m20s

But for full-on crazy, you need to see the Canadian man who’s been trying to build an anti-bear suit for years. He lets himself get hit by logs, Ewok-style, and thrown off cliffs, hit by cars, whacked by a gang of men with baseball bats, all to demonstrate the strength of his latest version of the suit.

You can’t make this stuff up. And because I can: 41 other brilliant (or insane) inventions from around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e5XVxktqrk

This is not a photo, I kid you not

December 5, 2013August 3, 2021Posted in 5 Random ThursdayTagged Arts, camera, Digital single-lens reflex camera, Google, Great Britain, Nikon, Nikon D3200, photography4 Comments

Listen: I know enough about photography to be dangerous. (See related posts: The Nikon D-50 of Infinite Beauty and Pieces of the World)

HOWEVER: shooting great photos with a Nikon of Infinite Beauty is insanely simple compared to what this man did with an iPad, his finger and talent on loan from the gods.

The artist is Kyle Lambert of the United Kingdom.

SAFETY DANCE by Men Without Hats is insanely classic

November 18, 2013August 3, 2021Posted in 2 Music Video MondayTagged Adam Ant, Die Antwoord, Google, Jill Marr, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Men Without Hats, Music video5 Comments

This has every element you could possibly want from an ’80s music video:

(1) a thumping synth beat,

(2) a lead singer with a vague accent (Montreal!) who looks like Adam Ant’s less insane cousin,

(3) some kind of ren-fair Hobbity goodness instead of the usual music video of the band preening while they lip-synch and pretend to play instruments,

(4) the best band name I’ve heard in forever, PLUS

(5) as a special bonus packed chock full of irony, nobody, not even the friends of the lead singer who professes his love for dancing, can dance a lick.

I won’t include all the lyrics, because they’re not that complicated or subtle. There’s nothing to interpret here.

HOWEVER: It’s worth dissecting the four lines everybody knows.

We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
‘Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance
Well they’re no friends of mine

Those lines are so easy to remember because they’re well-built, structurally. The first two lines start the same — “We can” — and have seven syllables exactly. The singer isn’t talking about himself, but “we,” and he gets the audience involved more by making you think of “your friends.”

All the ideas come together. You’ve got three lines of setup for the payoff in the fourth line. It’s short, it’s simple and instead of using rhymes (none of these lines rhyme), the singer links the lines together using concepts and repetition. A nice little interweaving that pays off.

Some of my favorite editors OF ALL TIME

November 15, 2013August 3, 2021Posted in 6 Friendly FridayTagged Art, editing, editor, Google, Hyundai, Line editor, Writer, Writers Resources21 Comments

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. So come closer and listen to what I’ve learned from experience: Editors are a writer’s best friend.

Not when they’re patting you on the back, because anybody can butter you up.

They’re your best friend when they take a red pen and blast through your complicated writing pets, when they check your wildest instincts and find order out of the natural chaos that comes from banging on the keyboard to create anything of length and importance.

So it’s wrong to say that every writer needs an editor.

You need more than one, if you want to get serious about any sort of real writing.

It’s like building a house. As a writer, you’re trying to do it all: draft the blueprints like an architect, pour the foundation, frame it, plumb it, siding, drywall, flooring, cabinets, painting–the whole thing.

Every step is important. And getting the right editors is like hiring great subcontractors.

My bias is to think of structure first, because if the blueprints are bad, it doesn’t matter how pretty the carpentry is, and how great the writing is line by line.

This is why every professional architect hires an engineer to do the math and make sure the foundation is strong enough to hold up the house, that the roof won’t blow off and your beams are big enough to handle the load.

So you need different editors for different things. The best possible professional editor for the structure, the blueprints. Then beta readers to look over the whole thing another time, looking for medium-size problems. A line editor to smooth things out and make it all pretty, and finally a proof-reader to take a microscope to the entire thing and make it as flawless as possible.

That sounds like a lot, and most pro editors can wear different hats. But I’m going to argue for dividing it up, because when you’ve been staring at the same thing for weeks, or months, you stop seeing things. A fresh pair of eyes is always smart.

Even though I’ve always had editors, starting way back in college when I was putting out newspapers, there’s a natural inclination for writers to screw this up, to see using editors as some kind of sign of weakness. The thinking goes like this: “Hey, I have (1) a master’s degree in creative writing or (2) have been cashing checks as a journalist for years or (3) am far too talented to need the crutch of a professional editor, which is for wannabes who can’t write their way out of a paper sack if you handed them a sharpened pencil.”

I’d did editing wrong by having friends and family beta read, or asking fellow writers who yes, wrote for money, but cashed checks for doing something completely different.

And it was a waste of time.

Here’s how I learned my lesson, and no, I am not making this up: On a whim, I posted a silly ad to sell my beater Hyundai and romance authors somehow found my little blog that started from that. Pro editor Theresa Stevens got there somehow and I started talking to her, and on a whim did her standard thing to edit the first 75 pages of a novel, the synopsis and query letter. Didn’t think anything of it and expected line edits, fixing dangling modifiers and such.

But she rocked.

I learned more, in the months of editing that entire novel, than I could’ve learned in ten years on my own. It’s like the difference between a pro baseball player trying to become a better hitter by spending six hours a day in batting practice, alone, versus one hour a day in hard practice with a world-class batting coach. I’d pick the batting coach, every time.

As somebody who used to lone-wolf it, let me say this: I was wrong.

And so on this Friendly Friday, I want to plant a big smooch on editors of the world, and encourage writers of all backgrounds and specialties to see editors in a different light. That having an editor isn’t a sign of weakness, but of strength. That it says you’re crazy serious about what you do and not afraid of working with the best of the best rather than a cheerleading squad of yes-men who think your 947-word epic about elves with lightsabers riding dragons is the best thing ever.

That it’s not about you, and doing whatever you want, but about making the finest product you can give to readers.

So I want to give a shout out to Theresa the Stevens, who has taught me much, and Rebecca Dickson, my uncensored female doppleganger, and to great beta readers and editors like Alexandria Szeman, Julia Rachel Barrett, Anna Davis, Mayumi, Donna — because just like a single person can’t be expected to build a beautiful house alone, a smart writer gets help and advice from the smartest people possible.

Find one of those smart people with a red pen.

Hire them, hug them, listen to them, buy them flowers when you succeed. But use them, if you’re serious.

Happy birthday to the Twitter!

March 23, 2013August 3, 2021Posted in 7 Media Strategy SaturdayTagged facebook, Google, Myspace, Online Communities, public relations, publicity, Social media, Social network, Twitter, Zuckerberg4 Comments

A nice little video about the evolution of the Twitter, which is 6.942 bazillion times better than the Book of Face, which will one day go the way of MySpace — and not even powers of Justin the Timberlake will be able to save Zuckerberg’s baby.

I’d throw another “which” in there, but it’d just be piling on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Bl-FpuehWGA

Also: What is the ONE THING you would delete about the Twitter, aside from nuking direct messages from orbit?

Also-also: What is the ONE THING you would add to the Twitter?