Can someone give the counter argument to my initial cynical read of this? That read being: OpenAI has more money than it can invest productively within it's own company and is trying to cast a net to find new product ideas via an incubator?
I can't imagine Softbank or Microsoft is happy about their money being funneled into something like this and it implies they have run out of ideas internally. But I think I'm probably being too reflexively cynical
rich_sasha · 31m ago
Without putting my weight behind them, here's some counterarguments:
- OpenAI needs talent, and it's generally hard to find. Money will buy you smart PhDs who want to be on the conveyer belt, but not people who want to be a centre of a project of their own. This at least puts them in the orbit of OpenAI - some will fly away, some will set up something to be aquihired, some will just give up and try to join OpenAI anyway
- the amount of cash they will put into this is likely minuscule compared to their mammoth raises. It doesn't fundamentally change their funding needs
- OpenAI's biggest danger is that someone out there finds a better way to do AI. Right now they have a moat made of cash - to replicate them, you generally need a lot of hardware and cash for the electricity bill. Remember the blind panic when DeepSeek came out? So, anything they can do to stop that sprouting elsewhere is worth the money. Sprouting within OpenAI would be a nice-to-have.
AnEro · 1h ago
I think that MIT study of 95% of internal AI projects failing has scared off a lot of corporations from risking time in it. I think they also see they are hitting a limit of profitable intelligence from their services. (with the growth in inelegance the past 6–8 months being more realistic, not the unbelievable like in the past few years)
I think everyone is starting to see this as a middle man problem to solve, look at ERP systems for instance when they popped up it had some growing pains as an industry. (or even early windows/microsoft 'developers, developers, developers' target audience)
I OpenAI see it will take a lot of third party devs to take what OpenAI has and run with it. So they want to build a good developer and start up network to make sure that there are a good, solid ecosystem of options corporations and people can use AI wise.
Workaccount2 · 1h ago
The MIT study found 90% of workers were regularly using LLMs.
The gap was that workers were using their own implementation instead of the company's implementation.
AnEro · 58m ago
Yea from what I understand 'Chats' and AI coding are something they already have market domination/are a leader on and are a good/okay product. It's the other use cases they haven't delievered on in terms of other companies using them as a platform to deliver AI apps, which I would imagine would have been a huge vertical in their pitches to investors and internal plans.
These third-party apps get huge token usage with agenentic patterns. So losing out on them and being forced to make more internal products to tune to specific use cases is not something they want to biuld out or explore
dingnuts · 36m ago
AI coding is WAY more mid than HN and influencers like Willison (inb4 he shits up this thread) would have you believe. When I look at what talented engineers I know IRL are doing with it, it seems comparable to the advent of IntelliSense. Hardly the Singularity.
If you believed everything posted here we'd all be on the streets by now
ozgung · 1h ago
I don't think it's about money, they don't invest anything. They gather data about "technical talent" working on AI related ideas. They will connect with 15 of these people to see if they can build it together.
LordDragonfang · 1h ago
It seems almost like... an internship program for would-be AI founders?
My guess is this is as much about talent acquisition as it is about talent retention. Give the bored, overpaid top talent outside problems to mentor for/collaborate on that will still have strong ties to OpenAI, so they don't have the urge to just quit and start such companies on their own.
ks2048 · 1h ago
> OpenAI has more money than it can invest productively
I don't think there is any money given, except travel costs for first and last week.
minimaxir · 3h ago
Sam clearly misses Y Combinator.
Insanity · 1h ago
Yeah, my thoughts where along the same line. Seems like they want to be another Ycombinator but more focused on AI. (Although TBF, I guess AI would also get the most traction at Ycombinator these days, given the hype wave).
bananapub · 1h ago
Did we ever find out why it is he doesn’t work there anymore?
reducesuffering · 11m ago
Was forced to choose between OpenAI and YC by Paul Graham and Jessica. Sama chose OpenAI.
Clearly, dealing with OpenAI doesn't leave any room for fun stuff like YC. Just a hunch.
moralestapia · 1h ago
Indeed.
Exactly what I read between the lines on this.
yde_java · 30m ago
The FAQ items don't expand for me, on Android Vivaldi.
vasilzhigilei · 36m ago
It looks like application submission isn't functioning.
jtfrench · 18m ago
Yeah, clicking "Submit" doesn't do anything obvious, aside from post some arcane errors to the JavaScript Console.
fi-le · 1h ago
Did anyone get confirmation that the form got sent? There is no feedback from pressing "submit" for me.
jtfrench · 17m ago
Same
thornewolf · 40m ago
Same issue
AnEro · 1h ago
Looks like they want to build up and support middle men to do the apps more than them, and act more like a platform or operating system position. Which makes sense giant corporations reporting 95% failed AI projects and the core success cases are specialist companies tuning the platform to a specific problem are successful. Then there are a ton of snake oil AI apps that are over promising under delivering hurting the image of AI's usefulness
This is probably purely a pivot in market strategy to profitability to increase token usage, increase consumer/public's trust more than farming ideas for internal projects.
koakuma-chan · 1h ago
Do you have to be in the US or can they help to get in?
jtfrench · 17m ago
The country selection menu seems to include countries from around the world. It sounds like only the first and last weeks are actually on-site, the rest in async/remote.
linhns · 1h ago
Is it just me seeing this as a talent discovery program?
bilbo0s · 20m ago
It's clearly a talent grab. Where talent = creativity.
Most will submit the app with a dime a dozen ideas. (Or, at internet scale, a dime a few hundred thousand I guess?) No need to even consider those guys.
But it will be a pyramid. There will likely be 20-30 submissions that are at once, truly novel, and "why didn't I think of that!"-type ideas.
Finally, a handful of the submissions will be groundbreaking.
Et voilá. Right there you've identified the guys and gals thinking outside the LLM box about LLMs. Or even AI in general.
Cheer2171 · 1h ago
> "pre-idea individuals"
jsheard · 1h ago
Move over "idea guys", it's the era of the "guy who hypothetically might have an idea at some point".
bilbo0s · 28m ago
I don't know man?
To me, it sounded like, "let's find all the idea guys who can't afford a tech founder. Then we'll see which ones have the best ideas, and move forward with those. As a bonus, we'll know exactly where we'd be able to acquihire a product manager for it!"
MPSimmons · 1h ago
I caught that too. What's a "pre-idea" individual? Someone who... wants the vague _idea_ of a company?
spiderice · 1h ago
No, before that
fkyoureadthedoc · 23m ago
It's the AI guy version of the blockchain guy who had no idea what it was for or what to do with it, but was very hyped on it
babelfish · 51m ago
South Park Commons -1 to 0 program seems conceptually similar
tibbon · 38m ago
I mean, I get it.
I'm highly capable of building some great things, but at my dayjob I'm filled to brim with things to do and a non-ending list of tasks in front of me.
I've built cool stuff before, and if given a little push and some support could probably come up with something useful - and I can implement much of it myself.
Put me in the room with cool people, throw out some conversation starters, shake it up and I'll come up with something.
nickphx · 55m ago
Why not ask the big bag of words to generate "ideas"?
bilbo0s · 33m ago
Just, Devil's Advocate..
but what, exactly, makes you believe this internship program is not an idea generated by the big bag of words?
lif · 2h ago
hmm.. wonder what the most accurate Venn diagram for this is?
scoopdewoop · 1h ago
Capitalists can't solve problems, they can seek out rent and put meters on things. These "builders" and "innovators" are the reason the web you dearly miss is dead.
The entire internet is now structured to sell to you. premium subscriptions for simple things that aren't technical problems, but are instead artificial complexity to monetize your every move. They profit from the fact that its artificially difficult to host your own data, sync your own devices, or connect to each other without an intermediary.
All of this becomes worse with AI stratifying hardware power again. AI is great, but on american capitalists its pearls before swine.
mionhe · 1h ago
If capitalists can't solve problems, who do you suggest can?
no_wizard · 52m ago
The internet and many adjacent technologies were all created and iterated on inside the DoD and other wings of government research.
The world really benefits from well funded institutions doing research and development. Medicine has also largely advanced due in part to this.
What’s lost is the recapture. I don’t think governments are typically the best candidate to bring a new technology to marketable applications, but I do think they should be able to force terms of licensure and royalties. Keeping both those costs predictable and flat across industry would drive even more innovation to market.
What happens instead is private entities take public research and capture it almost entirely in as few hands as possible.
In short, the loss of civic pride and shared responsibility to society has created the nickel and dime you to death capitalism we are seeing in the rise today. Externalization of all costs possible and capture as much profit as possible. No thought to second order effects or how the system that is being dodged to contribute back to gave way for the ability for people to so grossly take advantage of it in the first place
ToucanLoucan · 37m ago
> The internet and many adjacent technologies were all created and iterated on inside the DoD and other wings of government research.
^ This is the secret sauce. For decades the arrangement was exactly that: defense projects would create new technologies, then once those were finished, they were handed to private industry to figure out how to make a $20,000 MIL-spec LCD screen cheap enough and in vast enough quantities that you can buy 3 of them for less than $1,000 while the manufacturer, distributor, and retailer make a solid profit each. That's not an easy thing to do and it's what corporations have historically been good at. And it makes things better for the defense industry too, because they can then apply those lessons to their own hardware where appropriate. Win/win.
But we don't fund research anymore, or at least not that sort of it. Or perhaps there's just not much else to find. I think it's a bit of both. But in any case nothing new is getting made which is why technology feels so dull right now. The most innovative products right now are just thinner, dumber, lighter versions of things we already have, and that's not nothing but it isn't very interesting either.
scoopdewoop · 56m ago
Labor, FOSS... can you not imagine anything besides wealthy people creating artificial scarcity to force others to work for them?
Edit: if you don't think this is true, look at the history of truly any country and see what happens when subsistence farmers and indigenous communities refuse to work for capitalists
scoopdewoop · 43m ago
BRB, waiting for capitalists to solve the housing and healthcare crisis, shouldn't be long...
ToucanLoucan · 36m ago
I mean they already solved that, they're raking in even more billions. The only issue was their solution was for them, not us.
diggan · 1h ago
Think of all the people who solved problems before/outside of typical capitalism. I guess more of those people wouldn't hurt to have right now to counter-balance the shift to hyper-capitalism that is ongoing.
woah · 1h ago
Incredible opportunity for SF Muni to get subsidized with even more full bus wrap ads for AI coding apps that nobody uses
- OpenAI needs talent, and it's generally hard to find. Money will buy you smart PhDs who want to be on the conveyer belt, but not people who want to be a centre of a project of their own. This at least puts them in the orbit of OpenAI - some will fly away, some will set up something to be aquihired, some will just give up and try to join OpenAI anyway
- the amount of cash they will put into this is likely minuscule compared to their mammoth raises. It doesn't fundamentally change their funding needs
- OpenAI's biggest danger is that someone out there finds a better way to do AI. Right now they have a moat made of cash - to replicate them, you generally need a lot of hardware and cash for the electricity bill. Remember the blind panic when DeepSeek came out? So, anything they can do to stop that sprouting elsewhere is worth the money. Sprouting within OpenAI would be a nice-to-have.
I think everyone is starting to see this as a middle man problem to solve, look at ERP systems for instance when they popped up it had some growing pains as an industry. (or even early windows/microsoft 'developers, developers, developers' target audience)
I OpenAI see it will take a lot of third party devs to take what OpenAI has and run with it. So they want to build a good developer and start up network to make sure that there are a good, solid ecosystem of options corporations and people can use AI wise.
The gap was that workers were using their own implementation instead of the company's implementation.
These third-party apps get huge token usage with agenentic patterns. So losing out on them and being forced to make more internal products to tune to specific use cases is not something they want to biuld out or explore
If you believed everything posted here we'd all be on the streets by now
My guess is this is as much about talent acquisition as it is about talent retention. Give the bored, overpaid top talent outside problems to mentor for/collaborate on that will still have strong ties to OpenAI, so they don't have the urge to just quit and start such companies on their own.
I don't think there is any money given, except travel costs for first and last week.
https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940
Exactly what I read between the lines on this.
This is probably purely a pivot in market strategy to profitability to increase token usage, increase consumer/public's trust more than farming ideas for internal projects.
Most will submit the app with a dime a dozen ideas. (Or, at internet scale, a dime a few hundred thousand I guess?) No need to even consider those guys.
But it will be a pyramid. There will likely be 20-30 submissions that are at once, truly novel, and "why didn't I think of that!"-type ideas.
Finally, a handful of the submissions will be groundbreaking.
Et voilá. Right there you've identified the guys and gals thinking outside the LLM box about LLMs. Or even AI in general.
To me, it sounded like, "let's find all the idea guys who can't afford a tech founder. Then we'll see which ones have the best ideas, and move forward with those. As a bonus, we'll know exactly where we'd be able to acquihire a product manager for it!"
I'm highly capable of building some great things, but at my dayjob I'm filled to brim with things to do and a non-ending list of tasks in front of me.
I've built cool stuff before, and if given a little push and some support could probably come up with something useful - and I can implement much of it myself.
Put me in the room with cool people, throw out some conversation starters, shake it up and I'll come up with something.
but what, exactly, makes you believe this internship program is not an idea generated by the big bag of words?
The entire internet is now structured to sell to you. premium subscriptions for simple things that aren't technical problems, but are instead artificial complexity to monetize your every move. They profit from the fact that its artificially difficult to host your own data, sync your own devices, or connect to each other without an intermediary.
All of this becomes worse with AI stratifying hardware power again. AI is great, but on american capitalists its pearls before swine.
The world really benefits from well funded institutions doing research and development. Medicine has also largely advanced due in part to this.
What’s lost is the recapture. I don’t think governments are typically the best candidate to bring a new technology to marketable applications, but I do think they should be able to force terms of licensure and royalties. Keeping both those costs predictable and flat across industry would drive even more innovation to market.
What happens instead is private entities take public research and capture it almost entirely in as few hands as possible.
In short, the loss of civic pride and shared responsibility to society has created the nickel and dime you to death capitalism we are seeing in the rise today. Externalization of all costs possible and capture as much profit as possible. No thought to second order effects or how the system that is being dodged to contribute back to gave way for the ability for people to so grossly take advantage of it in the first place
^ This is the secret sauce. For decades the arrangement was exactly that: defense projects would create new technologies, then once those were finished, they were handed to private industry to figure out how to make a $20,000 MIL-spec LCD screen cheap enough and in vast enough quantities that you can buy 3 of them for less than $1,000 while the manufacturer, distributor, and retailer make a solid profit each. That's not an easy thing to do and it's what corporations have historically been good at. And it makes things better for the defense industry too, because they can then apply those lessons to their own hardware where appropriate. Win/win.
But we don't fund research anymore, or at least not that sort of it. Or perhaps there's just not much else to find. I think it's a bit of both. But in any case nothing new is getting made which is why technology feels so dull right now. The most innovative products right now are just thinner, dumber, lighter versions of things we already have, and that's not nothing but it isn't very interesting either.
Edit: if you don't think this is true, look at the history of truly any country and see what happens when subsistence farmers and indigenous communities refuse to work for capitalists