"haven't actually done much" being popularizing the chat llm and absolutely dwarfing the competition in paid usage
It's easy to forget what smart, connected people were saying about how AI would evolve by <current date> ~a year ago, when in fact what we've gotten since then is a whole bunch of diminishing returns and increasingly sketchy benchmark shenanigans. I have no idea when a real AGI breakthrough will happen, but if you're a person who wants it to happen (I am not), you have to admit to yourself that the last year or so has been disappointing---even if you won't admit it to anybody else.
The person you're responding to is correct that OpenAI feels a lot more stagnant than other players (like Google, which was nowhere to be seen even one year and a half ago and now has the leading model on pretty much every metric, but also DeepSeek, who built a competitive model in a year that runs for much cheaper).
Correction: Google had the leading model for three weeks. Today it’s back to the second place.
o3-mini wasn't even the second place for non-STEM tasks, and in today's announcement they don't even publish benchmarks for those. What's impressive about Gemini 2.5 pro (and was also really impressive with R1) is how good the model is for a very broad range of tasks, not just benchmaxing on AIME.
Also “what I would expect from a professional philosopher”, is that your argument, really?
What’s wrong with my argument? You questioned the performance of the model on non-STEM tasks, and I gave you my impression.
To have an idea about how good a model is on non-STEM tasks, you need to challenge it on stuff that is harder than this for LLMs, like summarization without hallucination or creative writing. OpenAI's nonthinking model are usually very good on these, but not their thinking models, whereas other players (be it Google, Anthropic or DeepSeek) manage to make models that can be very good at both.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/openai-is-reportedly-devel...
The play now seems to be less AGI, more "too big to fail" / use all the capital to morph into a FAANG bigtech.
My bet is that they'll develop a suite of office tools that leverage their model, chat/communication tools, a browser, and perhaps a device.
They're going to try to turn into Google (with maybe a bit of Apple and Meta) before Google turns into them.
Near-term, I don't see late stage investors as recouping their investment. But in time, this may work out well for them. There's a tremendous amount of inefficiency and lack of competition amongst the big tech players. They've been so large that nobody else could effectively challenge them. Now there's a "startup" with enough capital to start eating into big tech's more profitable business lines.
If this starts looking differently and the pace picks up, I won't be giving analysis on OpenAI anymore. I'll start packing for the hills.
But to OpenAI's credit, I also don't see how minting another FAANG isn't an incredible achievement. Like - wow - this tech giant was willed into existence. Can't we marvel at that a little bit without worrying about LLMs doing our taxes?
I'm bullish on the models, and my first quiet 5 minutes after the announcement was spent thinking how many of the people I walked past days would be different if the computer Just Did It(tm) (I don't think their day would be different, so I'm not bullish on ASI-even-if-achieved, I guess?)
I think binary analysis that flips between "this is a propped up failure, like when banks get bailouts" and "I'd run away from civilization" isn't really worth much.
Why would anyone use a social network run by Sam Altman? No offense but his reputation is chaotic neutral to say the least.
Social networks require a ton of momentum to get going.
BlueSky already ate all the momentum that X lost.
ChatGPT images are the biggest thing on social media right now. My wife is turning photos of our dogs into people. There's a new GPT4o meme trending on TikTok every day. Using GPT4o as the basis of a social media network could be just the kickstart a new social media platform needs.
GPT 4o and Sora are incredibly viral and organic and it's taking over TikTok, Instagram, and all other social media.
If you're not watching casual social media you might miss it, but it's nothing short of a phenomenon.
ChatGPT is now the most downloaded app this month. Images are the reason for that.
For UX The GPT info in the thread would be collapsed by default and both users have the discretion to click to expand the info.