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Notes -
Perhaps "astroturfing" is the wrong word but there is a stink of it surrounding the whole organization. See @sarker's "credulous Twitter anons".
More pointedly they seem to be a manifestation of a wider issue in Sillicon Valley where you get charismatic Steve Jobs wannabes whose main product/output isn't "the next big thing" as much as it is playing social games to attract VC investment with the promise of the "the next big thing".
Speaking from inside the industry OpenAI hasn't been pushing the bar forward so much as they have been expanding access. To be fair this can be a lucrative buisiness model, Apple became the powerhouse that it is today by making "tech" accessible to non-techies. But Apple was also pretty open about this being thier model. Nobody expected thier Mac to represent the bleeding edge of computing, they expected it to "just work". Contrast this with openAI where they and thier boosters are promising
the moonimminent fully agentic super-intelligence but when you start peeling back the skin you find that the whole thing is a kludgy mess of nested regression engines with serious structural limitations.Now this is not to say that GPT does not have legitimate potential, the rapid collation of large datasets and Star Trek-esque universal translation both represent genuine "killer apps" that OpenAI is well positioned to deliver on and exploit but thats not what they seem to be pursuing, what they seem to be persuing is breathless Hackernews think-peices written by alleged "techies" who majored in business or philosophy instead of math or computer science and more VC money.
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