Gating access is also a clever marketing move:

Option A: Release it but run out of capacity, everyone is annoyed and moves on. Drives focus back to smaller models.

Option B: A bunch of manufactured hype and putting up velvet ropes around it saying it’s “too dangerous” to let near mortals touch it. Press buys it hook, like, and sinker, sidesteps the capacity issues and keeps the hype train going a bit longer.

Seems quite clear we’re seeing “Option B” play out here.

It knew how to be the market leader and first to market with big launches. It’s now struggling to navigate a world where in more and more areas it’s falling behind. The big early misses on GenAI seem to have accelerated that.

A ton of momentum from earlier years keeps it moving, but that playbook only lasts so long.

It’s scary how easy it is to fool these models, and how often they just confuse themselves and confidently march forward with complete bullshit.

Got it.

All the promises of amazing things in general work never happened. Companies consistently say they’re seeing no ROI. The AI crowd now hard pivots to cyber and, right out of the Palantir playbook, runs with the “our stuff is so amazing we can’t talk about it, but trust us bro” move that isn’t really fooling anyone.

Meanwhile the folks let in on the “secret” are those that also desperately need for the hype to continue to protect their own positions in this game.

Look forward to a model upgrade but the hype fluff games are getting old. Watching OpenAI completely crash out of pole position on the hype train though has been at least amusing.

Altman describes his shifting views as genuine good faith evolution of thinking. Do you believe he has a clear North Star behind all this that’s not centered on himself?

“We literally couldn’t find anyone in our pool of hundreds of institutional investors to take these shares“

This doesn’t bode well for an IPO. The market is smelling a stinker.

Get your popcorn ready for a mad scramble to salvage investments if indeed the shark has been jumped.

Github CoPilot is decent but the rest of the copilot ecosystem is a hot mess. It’s not surprising MSFT is struggling to monetize AI.

I doubt customers have much standing here. They were free to not buy items if they didn’t like the price. And I do believe Costco will use this to lower prices vs just pocketing the money.

And in that reality one can’t just magically spend a bunch more on some fancy new thing, especially when said fancy new thing isn’t retuning value. So “token limits” and cost controls on B2B is entirely expected here.

And yet every attempt to extract even minimal ad revenue has been canned to date as something nobody wants with AI providers retreating in failure.

I don’t doubt that there’s “some” ad revenue to be had but there’s little evidence that ads are going to save the day here.

One of the challenges here is that a lot of folks simply weren’t around then and haven’t seen what happens when everything implodes overnight. Those that have experienced it know what that looks like and know it will happen again.