[a_humean]

Openai isn't even close to too big to fail. Bank of America fails the entire banking system collapses and the entire real economy grinds to a halt. If GM fails hundreds of thousands lose their jobs and entire supply chains collapse. If power utilities fail then people start actually dying within hours or days.

If OpenAI fails nothing actually important happens.

[ungreased0675]

When their product is embedded at the OS level in every Windows 11 computer, would that be too big to fail?

[clbrmbr]

Yet. But we are getting close to an event horizon, once enough orgs become dependent of their models.

Open source models are actually potentially worse. Even if OAI is not TBTF because of the competition, we have a scenario where AGI sector as a whole becomes TBTF and too big to halt.

[yunwal]

I mean, there's about a hundred thousand startups built on top of their API. I'm sure most could switch to another model if they really needed, but if copyright is an issue, I'm not sure that would help.

[Andrex]

If you've plugged your whole business into OAI's snake oil, you're an early adopter of technology and you'll likely be able to update the codebase appropriately.

The sooner SCOTUS rules that training on copyrighted material is infringement, the better.

[yunwal]

> you'll likely be able to update the codebase appropriately

Update the codebase to what exactly? Are there generative AI companies not training on copyrighted material that achieve anything even close to the results of gpt4? I'm not aware of any

[whimsicalism]

you cannot erase that much value and say "nothing important happens", market cap is largely a rough proxy for the amount of disruption if something went under

[Thrymr]

I do not think the situation is remotely comparable to the possibility of the banking system collapsing. Banks and other financial institutions exert leverage far beyond their market caps.

[whimsicalism]

But they are also extremely substitutable because they deal in the most fungible commodities ever made (deposits and dollars).

[layer8]

The good thing about AI is that it is substitutable by humans.

[dralley]

"whose" money matters here. It's VC money, mostly. Well-capitalized sophisticated investors, not voters and pension funds.

If Microsoft loses 30 billion dollars, it ain't great, but they have more than that sitting in the bank. If Sequoia or Ycombinator goes bankrupt, it's not great for lots of startups, but they can probably find other investors if they have a worthwhile business. If Elon loses a billion dollars, nobody cares.

[whimsicalism]

It is VC money pricing in the value of this enterprise to the rest of society.

More over, if capital markets suddenly become ways to just lose tons of money, that hurts capital investment everywhere, which hurts people everywhere.

People like to imagine the economy as super siloed and not interconnected but that is wrong, especially when it comes to capital markets.

[lolc]

In the case of OpenAI it's potential value that investors are assessing, not value. If they folded today, society would not care.

And as for the whole idea of "company value equals value to society", I see monopolies and rent seeking as heavy qualifiers on that front.

[whimsicalism]

I agree with both of those points, it is a very rough proxy. (edit my original) Future value is still important though.