I love Cal. I really, really take his thoughts on many things to heart for well over a decade now.
I think he's being a bit harsh here. And there are some confounding factors why.
Yes, we have an AI bubble. Yes there's been a ton of hype that can't be met with reality in the short term. That's normal for large changes (and this is a large technological change). OpenAI may have some rough days ahead of it soon, but just like the internet, there's still a lot of signal here and a lot of work to still be done. Going through Suna+Sora videos just last night was still absoutely magical. There's still so much here.
But, OpenAI is also becoming, to use a Ben Thompson term, an aggregator. If it's where you go to solve many problems, advertising and more is a natural fit. It's not certain who comes out on top of the space (or if it can be shared), but there are huge rewards coming in future years, even after a bubble has popped.
Cal is having a very strong reaction here. I value it, but I wish it was more nuanced.
LLMs are only valuable to me at the moment explicitly because ads are not part of the scene. Maybe for a while others will use it, but it will be on the exact same treadmill as anything else ad-based: you will become the product, any recommendations are worthless trash, and it is oriented to show as many ads as possible, rather than providing useful content.
Ads destroy... pretty much everything they touch. It's a natural fit, but a terrible one.
I think he's being a bit harsh here. And there are some confounding factors why.
Yes, we have an AI bubble. Yes there's been a ton of hype that can't be met with reality in the short term. That's normal for large changes (and this is a large technological change). OpenAI may have some rough days ahead of it soon, but just like the internet, there's still a lot of signal here and a lot of work to still be done. Going through Suna+Sora videos just last night was still absoutely magical. There's still so much here.
But, OpenAI is also becoming, to use a Ben Thompson term, an aggregator. If it's where you go to solve many problems, advertising and more is a natural fit. It's not certain who comes out on top of the space (or if it can be shared), but there are huge rewards coming in future years, even after a bubble has popped.
Cal is having a very strong reaction here. I value it, but I wish it was more nuanced.