OpenAI Has New Focus (On the IPO)
om.co67 points by aamederen 3 hours ago
67 points by aamederen 3 hours ago
From the article: "You can see that in the recent iterations of ChatGPT. It has become such a sycophant, and creates answers and options, that you end up engaging with it. That’s juicing growth. Facebook style."
This is something I relalized lately. ChatGPT is juicing growth Facebook style. The last time, I asked it a medical question, it answered the question, but ended the answer with something like "Can I tell you one more thing from your X,Y,Z results which is most doctors miss ? " And I replied "yes" to it, and not just once.
I was curious what was going on. And Om nails it in this article - they have imported the Facebook rank and file and they are playing 'Farmville' now.
I was already not positive of what OpenAI is being seen as a corporate, but a "Facebook" version of OpenAI, scares the beejus out of me.
The output is also very manipulative in order to keep you using it. They want you to feel good. I don't use ChatGPT at all anymore, as it is misleading too badly. But it will work for masses as it worked with Facebook/Instagram etc.
My problem with this is less that it's perpetual engagement, but that I use ChatGPT for direct programming outputs, like "go through a geojson file and if the feature is within 150 miles of X, keep and record the distance in miles". Whether it gives a good answer or not, the suggestion at the end is a synthesis of my ChatGPT history, so it could be offering to rewrite a whole script, draw diagrams, or bring in past questions for one franken-suggestion. This is either the wrong kind of engagement for me, or maybe "teaching" me to move my full work process into the chat. I've asked it many times to give concise answers and to not offer suggestions like this, but the suggestions are really baked in.
I don't have a problem with the suggestions. Google search does the same at the end of searches.
It does very often suggest things I want to know more about.
Suggestions are absolutely fine. But this is baiting. Chatgpt could have easily given me that information without the bait. And I would have happily consumed it. And maybe if it did it once, it was fine - but it kept on doing it - bait after bait after bait.
The objective was to increase the engagement "metrics" clearly. The seems to me as if the leadership will take all 'shortcuts' required for growth.
This seems overly cynical.
Firstly, tl;dr; is a very real thing. If the user asks a question and the LLM both answers the question but then writes an essay about every probable subsequent question, that would be negatively overwhelming to most people, and few would think that's a good idea. That isn't how a conversation works, either.
Worse still if you're on a usage quota or are paying by token and you ask a simple question and it gives you volumes of unasked information, most people would be very cynical about that, noting that they're trying to saturate usage unprompted.
Gemini often does the "Would you like to know more about {XYZ}" end to a response, and as an adult capable of making decisions and controlling my urges, 9 times out of 10 I just ignore it and move on having had my original question satisfied without digging deeper. I don't see the big issue here. Every now and then it piques me, though, and I actually find it beneficial.
The prompts for possible/probable follow-up lines of inquiry are a non-issue, and I see no issue at all with them. They are nothing compared to the user-glazing that these LLMs do.
Have you used ChatGPT lately?
What you describe is not quite what they are doing, they are adding nudges at the end of the follow-up question suggestions. For instance I was researching some IKEA furniture and it gives suggestions for followup, with nudges in parenthesis "IKEA-furniture many people use for this (very cool solution)" and at the end of another question suggestion: "(very simple, but surprisingly effective)". They are subtle cliffhangers trying to influence you to go on, not pure suggestions. I'm just waiting for the "(You wouldn't believe that this did!)". It has soured me on the service, Claude has a much better personality imo.
Then just write the extra paragraph rather than bait?
Bait what exactly ? Getting the user to type "yes" ? Great accomplishment.
Sometimes I want the extra paragraph, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I like the suggested follow up, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have half an hour in front of me to keep digging into a subject, sometimes I don't.
Why should the LLM "just write the extra paragraph" (consuming electricity in the process) to a potential follow up question a user might, or might not, have ? If I write a simple question I hope to get a simple answer, not a whole essay answering stuff I did not explicitly ask for. And If I want to go deeper, typing 3 letters is not exactly a huge cost.
> "Can I tell you one more thing from your X,Y,Z results which is most doctors miss ? "
That's actually gross and would result in an immediate delete from me.
Well they are realizing they just can't compete in terms of raw productivity gains with Anthropic, their moat is in their brand and user base (and government contracts, I suppose, at least while Trump is still in office--although a few years of setting up the architecture might be enough to cement it there).
Ironically, I found the recent models engage a lot less in sycophant behavior than in ChatGPT 4 days.
Maybe it's the way I prompt it or maybe something I set in the personalization settings? It questions some decisions I make, point out flaws in my rationale, and so on.
It still has AI quirks that annoy me, but it's mostly harmless - it repeats the same terms and puns often enough that it makes me super aware that it is a text generator trying to behave as a human.
But thankfully it stopped glazing over any brainfart I have as if it was a masterstroke of superior human intelligence. I haven't seen one of those in quite a while.
I don't find the suggestions at the end of messages bad. I often ignore those, but at some points I find them useful. And I noticed that when I start a chat session with a definite goal stated, it stops suggesting follow ups once the goal is reached.
Gemini does the same thing. For every question it looks to extend the conversation into natural follow-up questions, always ending a response with "Would you like to know more about {some important aspect of the answer}?"
And...I don't see it as a bad thing. It's trying to encourage use of the tool by reducing the friction to continued conversations, making it an ordinary part of your life by proving that it provides value. It's similar to Netflix telling you other shows you might like because they want to continue providing value to justify the subscription.
> Gemini does the same thing. For every question it looks to extend the conversation into natural follow-up questions, always ending a response with "Would you like to know more about {some important aspect of the answer}?"
If the aspect of the answer is important, wouldn't it be better just not to skip it?
> And...I don't see it as a bad thing. It's trying to encourage use of the tool by reducing the friction to continued conversations, making it an ordinary part of your life by proving that it provides value.
To me, it just adds friction. Why do I have to beg and ask multiple times to get an answer they already know I'm looking for but still decide to withhold? It's neither natural nor helpful. It's manipulative.
> It's similar to Netflix telling you other shows you might like because they want to continue providing value to justify the subscription.
It's not the same, because Netflix doesn't hide important movie sequences from you behind a question "If you like, I can show you this important scene that I just fast forwarded."
Groan. This is performative outrage and it's just boorish. The other person noted that ChatGPT uses bait-type continuations (Gemini and Claude do not), and sure that is a problem, but your reply is just noise. Beg? Christ.
There is utterly nothing wrong with AI engines offering continuation questions. But there's always something for people to whine about.
Humans do not want to ask a question and get a book in response. They just don't. No one, including you, wants such a response. And if you did get such a response I absolutely guarantee, given this performative outrage, that you'd be the first to complain about it.
I’m surprised they’ve been so puritan in their approach to content frankly.
If they made ChatGPT flirt with the user, they would send engagement through the roof. Imagine all the horny men that would subscribe to plus when the virtual girl runs out of messages.
There’s a strong chance the IPO window has passed. I just don’t see investors willing to jump in here given all the questions about the financial viability of AI.
The bulk of those investing now are broadly just pumping cash into the fire to keep their prior investments from going to zero.
We have hit a mass deceleration of what the current tech can do with transformers. The tech is also on a path to hyper-commoditization which will destroy the value of the big players as there zero moat to be had here. Absent a new major breakthrough it looks like we’re well on our way into the “trough of disillusionment” for the current AI hype cycle.
Will be interesting to see how all this plays out, but get your popcorn ready.
> There’s a strong chance the IPO window has passed
Ha, i'll take the other side of that bet. I'm not sure why you think they couldn't possibly IPO and you don't really specify why in your post.
Having been in the capital markets for 20 years, now is one of the better times to IPO and I'd bet that both OpenAI and Anthropic will IPO within 12 months.
There are lots of games you can play like releasing a small 10% float) if you are worried about not enough buyers.
100% agreed. There's so much locked up appetite for IPOs, both from the tech crowd and the general public. There have been very few quality IPOs since COVID frankly.
I'll wager that the IPO market can actually absorb all three of these that yes, are the size of the last 10 years combined. The trading market itself is larger, as are values, and valuations.
I assume that to maximize value you see a standard lock and roll play here. The S-1 will declare the 10% release, with commentary about future (6 or 12 months) another 5%. Plus don't forget institutional. There's ample space here, even before the Nasdaq 100 changes that are probably coming into play. If those come into play then inflows accelerated, as did valuations.
There’s a strong chance the IPO window has passed. I just don’t see investors willing to jump in here given all the questions about the financial viability of AI.
You must be living on a different planet than me. Enterprises are just now seeing that these technologies can actually have an impact, and the companies do not have a discretionary cost cap the same way consumers/hobbyists do, so they will pay based on value.
Unless the play is the fleece retail investors
True, although even here there likely aren’t enough retail suckers to go around given the amount of initial investment folks need to cash in. Thats the challenge when you have so much crazy pre-IPO cash pumped in.
After you float you still need to sell all those shares at the valuations you want to exit. If they floated say 10% of shares to go public and the price tanks everyone else trying to exit loses their shirt so it’s not a magic exit for the early investors.
The size of these companies make be doubtful of retail being able to fund them. There being enough retail investors with enough liquid funds who are willing to jump on this.
Lot of retail is in various funds. So those doing active management to scale of this is questionable. And then you most likely also have downward pressure for those that try to bet against these IPOs...
Boomers are the perfect suckers at this point
My boomer mom is the kind of person who just heard about AI and would get IPO fomo
there arent enough retail investors in the world to buy this ipo
but they will get a lot of flow from sovereign wealth fund and pensions
you might wonder why anthropic spend time in australia, a country with less economy than canada and almost no industry at all? likely because it has very big pension fund pool to buy their ipo
Retail investors do just fine fleecing themselves on their own
The term fleecing means „there’s nothing left here, jump ship”. Do you really believe they’re going public to cash out this early in the game?
Have you seen how Tesla stock is valued? Investors are notoriously retarded, they will absolutely buy stocks for memetic value, financial viability be damned.
I won't buy into it, but I actually think it will go strong, even as OpenAI finances keep deteriorating.
I would expect a lot of smart money to flow out of the Nasdaq-100 trackers in anticipation of this grift.
nasdaq listings can be rough, not sure if anyone remember fb ipo
but how else will they own spacex, openai, anthropic, nvidia, in such concentration
ChatGPT seems to have become a LinkedIn lunatic. I just asked Opus and ChatGPT to explain bitonic sort:
Opus: Let me build an interactive explainer for bitonic sort (builds diagram/no nonsense)
GPT:
"This algorithm feels weird but once you see it it clicks"
(Emoji) The Core Idea ...; (Emoji) High-Level Flow ...; (Emoji) Superpower ...; (Emoji) Why You Should Care;
"If you want, I can: ... (things it wants me to do next)"
One thing odd, maybe just to me, is why OpenAI has been stuffing its ranks with former Facebookers who are known to juice growth, find edges, and keep people addicted. They have little background in getting enterprises to buy into a product. Simo herself ran the Facebook app. That organization’s genius is consumer engagement: behavioral hooks, dopamine loops, the relentless optimization of the feed. You can see that in the recent iterations of ChatGPT. It has become such a sycophant, and creates answers and options, that you end up engaging with it. That’s juicing growth. Facebook style.
People say OpenAI is burning money and is on the verge of collapse. The same people will say OpenAI building an ads business on ChatGPT is "enshittifcation". These people are quite insufferable, no offense to the many who are exactly as I described.
So that’s why I am getting clickbaity last sentences in every response now at ChatGPT.
Things like ”If you want, I can also show a very fast Photoshop-style trick in Krita that lets you drag-copy an area in one step (without copy/paste). It’s hidden but extremely useful.”
Every single chat now has it. Not only the conversational prompt with “I can continue talking about this”, but very clickbaity terms like: almost nobody knows about this, you will be surprised, all VIPs are now using this car, do you want to know which it is? Etc
I find -again- Claude (web) here outstanding & very comfortable:
In most of my discussions throughout the day, it doesnt ask any "follow up" questions at the end. Very often it says thingslike: "you have two options: A - ..... and B - while the one includes X and the other Y..."
But this is was OP underlined: Claude is popular amongst businesses, most "non-tech" people dont even know that it exists.
Same here. “Do you want the one useful tip related to this topic that most people miss? It’s quite surprising.”
If it were so useful, just tell me in the first place! If you say “Yes” then it’s usually just a regurgitation of your prior conversation, not actually new information.
This immediately smelled of engagement bait as soon as the pattern started recently. It’s omnipresent and annoying.
You can tell it not to do this in your personalized context.
The model doesn’t always obey it, but 80% of the time it’s worked for me.
Yes, ChatGPT just recently started to add these engagement phrased follow-ups; “If you want, I can also show you one very common sign people miss that tells you…”
This and also constantly saying stupid things like “yes that is a great observation and that’s how the pros do it for this very reason!” for a specific question that doesn’t apply to anything anyone else is doing
This is not just OpenAI though. I don’t think this is new in general for these AI chat apps. Claude at the very least asks a question as the last part of its responses I believe every time.
AI is ubiquitous to the point where it's permeating almost every desk job in the world. Even those who don't work are using AI to help them find work, research health problems, ask questions about their daily life. I can't think of anything else since the invention of the internet that has had this much of an impact on people's lives.
People will have to pay for this. I don't see it being free for long other than a few chats a day. If most people in the world are paying 10-200 bucks a month then AI companies will make money, and I doubt they will need to rely much on ads at all.
Anecdotally I know approximately zero 'normal' (non-tech) people who are intentionally using generative AI, several who have been badly misled by Google's AI summaries, and quite a few who are vehemently anti-AI (usually artists and writers).
(Except when mandated by their employers, which nobody is happy about or finds particularly useful.)
Every single person I know outside of my profession is using it, including all relatives of all ages. Even if it's at the top of the google search results :)
On the other hand, costs are getting lower with time.
Sort of how now I have an unlimited 5G data plan for like 10 dollars, and in 2011 I didn't even have Internet on my phone. This is happening also with AI.
100%. It’s about to become the sleaziest used car salesman the internet has ever seen.
The worst are the ones who say things like “OpenAI only has 5% paying users!” As if that’s a really bad number. That is the same ratio YouTube, the world’s largest media company, has. And ChatGPT has like 800m users after only a few years of existence.
And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram…
Some people are really rooting for the downfall of OpenAI that will simply not happen, and their rage makes them utterly unreasonable.
The quoted revenue numbers seem insane, but I guess it's the result of corporate deals where every developer seat is hundreds of dollars a month?
My job has been publicly promoting who's on top of the "AI use dashboard" while our whole product falls apart. Surely this house of cards has to collapse at some point, better get public money before it does.
At least I’m not alone.
My company has a vibe coded leaderboard tracking AI usage.
Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year.
Could you both name and shame?
Name pretty much any company. Every one of my friends have said their company is doing this. Across 3 countries mind you. Especially if they already use microsoft office suite. Those folks got sold copilot on a deal it seems.
OpenAI needs to focus on how Claude is leaving them in the dust for LLM assisted coding.
In general "stickyness" among developers isn't that high, the way it is for consumers. Or the insane stickyness in "big boy contracts" government, accenture, etc,.
So I feel like the company which does these huge contracts will at the end eat up the coding business for nothing. The only way to avoid that is for anthropic to build up a huge IP lead in the code agent space. That is too difficult in my opinion. Because its hard to get exclusive access to code itself, the data advantage is not going to be there. Compute advantage is also difficult. And it's very difficult to hold on to architectural IP advantages in the LLM space.
Even if you get yourself embedded deep into traditional coding workflows (integrations with VCS, CI, IDEs, code forges, etc), usually SW infrastructure tends to like things decoupled through interfaces. Example: the most popular way to using code agents is the separate TUI application claude code which `cat`s and `grep`s your code. MCP, etc,. This means substitute-ability which is bad news.
I was thinking of ways these companies can actually get the coding business. One idea I had was to make proprietary context management tools that collect information over time and keep them permanent. And proprietary ways to correctly access them when needed. Here lock-in is real - you do the usual sleazy company things, you make it difficult to migrate "org understanding" out of your data format (it might even be technically difficult in reality). And that way there is perpetual lock-in. It even compounds over time. "Switch to my competitor and start your understanding from scratch reducing productivity by 37%, OR agree to my increased prices!". But amazing context management for coding tools is yet to be developed. Right now it is mostly slicing and combining a few markdown files, and `grep`, which is not exactly IP.
"The moat is state"
How does a non-employee get exposure to the OpenAI IPO?
There are some side-bet experiments like $2Mn on Hyperliquid[1], $1Mn on Polymarket[2] which are available to everyone. Unfortunately companies stay private for longer these days and a seat at the big boy table is de facto impossible
[1] https://app.hyperliquid.xyz/trade/vntl:OPENAI
[2] https://polymarket.com/event/openai-ipo-closing-market-cap-a...
simple, just have a private bank relationship
jpm and gs will let you open an account in the us if you have $50m cash
Time to jump ship.
I have noticed 5.3 in xtra high was a turd today. High used to be enough for most of my use cases. xhigh used to surprise me. Now it's incapable of following the very first instructions.
I just hope open source models get as good as last few month's top models before the enshittification has gone too far.
Qwen3.5 (-plus, which isn’t actually open to be fair) is surprisingly decent I’ve found.
Is it just me, or has Om become almost entirely unreadable of late? This post is 80% posturing about the WSJ's ‘narrative’ and 20% vague metaphors about ‘souls’ and ‘spigots’. It’s essentially tech-themed poetry. I appreciate he’s cynical about the AI hype cycle, but there’s absolutely no signal here. Ben Thompson might be equally enamoured with his own voice, but he at least tethers his ego to actual unit economics and a framework you can test. Om is just sharing a mood board and calling it analysis
As I said, from AGI to IPO and everyone will forget and move on.
old article but still relevant. some things don't change
I thought it is against OpenAI interest to IPO, especially now that it has made a deal with the Pentagon. IPO would likely prevent the company from burning money at the current rate and pursue shorter terms profit.
It's not about OpenAI's interest, it is about the current stockholders' ability to divest OpenAI stock on people who don't know what the state of affairs in the AI domain is where OpenAI still has tremendous name recognition. If they don't IPO then they'll lose that window of opportunity, the stock market is super precarious right now and if it should tank the IPO window will close for a long time.
The "I" in AGI stands for IPO.
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Focus on programming since they just bruteforce the type checkers/compilers to find out if their slop was correct the first time.
Basically an illusion. Imagine if they focused on medical tech instead? You cant bruteforce vaccines or radiation therapy
> they just bruteforce the type checkers/compilers to find out if their slop was correct
Have you used an AI coding model at all in the last year and a half? I think your knowledge is pretty outdated now.
Yes, gpt 5.4 always tries to compile/check my c++ code after every prompt. Despite it being in my AGENTS.md to never run builds. Then I have to explicitly mention it, but it will do it again randomly after.
What this means is the training/RL was trained with this workflow ;) But as you can tell, this workflow has no uses outside programming. Its just a hack to make it seem like the model is smart, but in fact its just them performing loops to get it right.
All the models ignore specific instructions most of the time.
It requires follow-up instructions to get it to do what you want.
By the time its farted around and you have farted around reprompting it you could have done the change yourself.