[jack_riminton]

$1Bn pre launch funding + Softbank = not a good omen

[Workaccount2]

I don't know much about softbank, but my brain strongly associates them with bad bets, failure, and losing money.

[yamakadi]

Add to that weak cell coverage, exorbitant fees, and a privacy nightmare of jumbled up offerings (Yahoo! Japan, PayPay, Line, Telecom, ISP services, etc.), and you get the full picture.

SoftBank is originally one of the big 3 telecom providers in Japan. We do joke around here about our phone bills increasing anytime Masayoshi Son makes a bad investment.

[jack_riminton]

Too much money skews everything in product development

There's a reason why the iphone team was so small (https://www.theregister.com/2014/03/27/apple_employee_reveal...) you need to be ruthlessly focussed and not pressurised by outside investors or managers who don't know what they're talking about (Softbank)

I'm not sure what the money would be spent on at OpenAI. Maybe they will keep it small, and hyper-focussed. But I worked in VC for a while and VC money was described to me as rocket fuel, you don't want to go dousing it on things before the rocket is built because it stinks and has a tendency to blow things up

[EFreethought]

They invested in Alibaba about 20 years ago, made something like 2000x their investment ($20M to $50B), and have been wrong about everything since.

They were an early investor in WeWork, and paid Adam Neumann to go away instead of throwing him out head first.