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by ericjang 1857 days ago
I would take a more charitable view on their move here.

AGI research is risky from a R&D standpoint (for obvious reasons), and also tricky from a business strategy and product development standpoint. There isn't a mature business playbook of how to monetize this technology, and although they probably have some ideas, their GPT-3 API pilots have suggested that outside entrepreneurs and programmers can come up with a larger search space of potential use cases then OpenAI can come up with themselves (in the same way that AWS users create more diverse products than Amazon can envision).

It's not an admission that they can't deploy capital - it's that they see an untapped resource of creativity that they can cheaply profit from, rather than building things in-house. The would rather grow the whole pie than try to grow their own slice. It's in a similar vein to how Taiwan Semiconductor lets other companies build on top of their platform and foster trust by never competing with them. In turn, they get to partner with more companies.

If they had pivoted entirely to a 100% investment firm, I would agree with you. But it looks to me from this announcement that they have built some fundamental technology and would like others to figure out the best way to monetize it, and they want to focus on new fundamental technology. An investment fund will align incentives with entrepreneurs building on top of GPT-3.

1 comments

Then why can't we get access to their API?