Sam Altman says industry is wrong on OpenAI's competition, it is not from Google

Comments

Comment by lunias 1 day ago

I don't trust Sam Altman. I'm surprised that anyone does.

Comment by cainxinth 1 day ago

He has this tactic that I really dislike. After hearing a question he pauses a tremendously long time, as if deeply pondering it, but then spits out what is clearly just the company line, but he speaks haltingly as if he’s trying to get out something complex and important.

Comment by poguemahoney 1 day ago

No one trusts Sam Altman. The trouble is that the media remains in it's neutral reporting mode that gives anyone that achieves a title the benefit of what that would normally entail and unwarranted benefit of the doubt on everything they have obviously done as if it were a criminal court but with no possibility of ever actually consulting its jury.

Comment by interstice 1 day ago

I have a Personal Theory(tm) that modern media in general has far too little value or accountability for something that has such a massive amount of leverage.

Comment by lesuorac 1 day ago

I think you may have missed the part where mainstream media is no longer actually mainstream for that reason.

Honestly for the best. Fox is never going to tell you when there's water main work on your street. A local paper might.

Comment by ulfw 1 day ago

His board didn't.

Comment by dzonga 1 day ago

when your stuff is world class - you say your competition is google, we're gonna eat their search market share, have intelligent ads more targeted than google search ever could since people feed very personal info on chatgpt.

now that google is leading - you say google is not our competition so you stop being compared to google & so you can raise globs of money on a false premise

Comment by DANmode 1 day ago

Google was their competition,

is likely the closest version to their internal sentiment.

Comment by solumunus 1 day ago

Google is leading how? By what metric? They’re potentially well positioned but they are currently doing poorly as far as I can tell. None of their offerings are the most popular option.

Comment by shaftway 1 day ago

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard allows you to do your own blind A/B testing, but they aggregate user choices.

Looks like Google is in first place in the vast majority of the metrics, not far behind in the rest, and ahead of OpenAI in every category.

Comment by credit_guy 1 day ago

It's a bit unfair. ChatGPT has a version that is so expensive that it appears nobody on that leaderboard used it [1]. It is called ChatGPT 5 Pro and its priced at $120/1M tokens. Claude Opus 4.5 has a price of $25/1M tokens [2]. Gemini 3 Pro is $18/1M tokens (assuming more than 200k tokens) and Sonnet 4.5 is $22.5/1M tokens (same assumption). I would expect that ChatGPT 5 Pro would be better than any of these other models, but I have no way of testing.

The next most expensive OpenAI model is ChatGPT 5.1, which costs only $10/1M tokens, so significantly cheaper than all its competitors. It seems to me that's fair for this model to come on the 3rd or 4th place, given that.

[1] https://openai.com/api/pricing/

[2] https://www.claude.com/pricing#api

[3] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing

Comment by solumunus 1 day ago

Having marginally better models is not winning the race. Their models are good but their products are bad, or at least not the best. They aren’t winning in adoption and this is currently a market share battle.

I can argue that Firefox is marginally better than Chrome but that doesn’t mean Firefox is winning the race does it?

Comment by DANmode 1 day ago

First-mover advantage.

Comment by charlieyu1 1 day ago

I mean anyone who has used any AI products of Google can agree they are horrible

Comment by labrador 1 day ago

I've lost all confidence in OpenAI as a going concern

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by vivzkestrel 1 day ago

rule 1 of discreet warfare: never tell your enemy that you are the enemy

Comment by blitzar 1 day ago

Google: I have the high ground ...

Comment by KptMarchewa 1 day ago

They are a money-losing startup. One that loses money on the core product. Yet they act like even less focused big tech company. Those usually have money printing machines, and can waste untold billions like facebook spend on VR.

Comment by ChrisArchitect 1 day ago

OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121870

Comment by SilverElfin 1 day ago

Are you a bot? If not, how do you manage to instantly find all the related discussions?

Comment by ChrisArchitect 1 day ago

Not too instant.

One of the biggest HN threads of the last week.

Part of it comes from wondering what sources these blog-spammy news sites are getting their story content from.

Comment by SilverElfin 1 day ago

I’m just curious how you manage to post related discussion links so consistently. Is it not automated?

Comment by atvrager 1 day ago

There's several hours of time lag between the article being posted and OP replying (as I write, 13 hours when the article was posted, 8 hours when OP linked something) -- you and I must have very different definitions of instant!

Comment by SilverElfin 1 day ago

I don’t like or trust Sam Altman, but I do find it disappointing that the megacorps like Google have enough capital and access to customers to just copy their products and win. It feels like our society is broken if there isn’t a way for the smaller companies to win.

Comment by cryptos 1 day ago

That is not quite true. Google did much of the research OpenAI used to build ChatGPT. It is just that OpenAI came up with the first popular mainstream AI tool.

Just look what Google does with its Tensor Processing Units ... they are developing AI chips for a decade now!

Comment by halJordan 18 hours ago

Funnily enough, paying attention is all people need to do either.

Comment by s1mplicissimus 22 hours ago

Agreed with the sentiment, but calling OpenAI a "smaller company" after it's just been infused with multiple hundreds of billions, is a bit of a stretch

Comment by gaigalas 1 day ago

> Altman argued that future AI competition will be won through devices

What this really signals is the intention (which might be sincere or not) of getting some sort of OEM deal with some device manufacturer.

And yes, if the path to profitability is in shipping devices with OEM AI features, Microsoft and Google are clearly ahead.

It seems all venues to profitability are offensive to OpenAI current users. Ads, OEM, etc. This is a problem for them.

And yes, Apple can include lots of undesirable things in their products and still keep their cult following, that's why he mentions them.

Comment by econ 1 day ago

You want to restrict applications as much as possible without hindering their function. An assistant is only annoying if it can't actually do anything. If the hardware doesn't follow some cosy deal the user can swap out the API when they like, you would have to compete for real and forever.

Comment by gaigalas 1 day ago

Users can swap their search engines freely on all browsers but they often don't want to.

Comment by ulfw 1 day ago

Because there is simply no need to. If there was one significantly better overall than Google (and not just a little better or better in just certain niches) people would switch.

Comment by ricardonunez 20 hours ago

Even if the products are better people don’t switch. Google organic has been a spam cesspool for a while with a few layers on top of ads and people don’t switch. I know some people that use Bing because it is the default of windows and they don’t switch.

Comment by joshstrange 1 day ago

> What this really signals is the intention (which might be sincere or not) of getting some sort of OEM deal with some device manufacturer.

I assumed they were talking about their partnership with Jony Ive/IO and an internal hardware product, not partnering (not that they won't do that as well).

Comment by gaigalas 1 day ago

If you truly believe you have a revolutionary device, you don't need to advertise before its time. You wait in secret, and launch it in a big surprise.

I smell bullshit, and some kind of partnership in which OpenAI provides model access and some third party hardware manufacturing. I could be wrong though.

Comment by alephnerd 1 day ago

This news only came out after The Information leaked that OpenAI is working with Luxshare to begin manufacturing a consumer product [0] a couple months ago.

[0] - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-raids-apple-h...

Comment by ulfw 1 day ago

Wasn't the whole weird Johny Ive and Sam Altman cuddling imagery and announcement their public announcement of a 'device'?

Comment by alephnerd 1 day ago

Not officially. It was implied, but it wasn't hard data about their seriousness in comparison to subsequent hiring as well as their enlisting of Luxshare as a vendor.

Comment by ulfw 1 day ago

What do you mean by not officially? They talk about hardware in the announcement. https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/