OpenAI Will Own Some Users
Thrive Holdings, portable toilets, OBR URL guessing, cat bond incentives, buffer ETFs and bioengineered meat.
We have talked before about the business model that Sam Altman proposed for OpenAI in 2019, which was (1) build an artificial superintelligence, (2) ask it how to make money and (3) do that. “We will create God and then ask it for money,” as I put it.
What would the AI say? Well, when we talked about it in October, OpenAI was apparently getting into advertising, affiliate shopping links and porn, and I joked that that is what a large language model trained on the internet would come up with. But a more first-principles answer would be something like this: “I am a superintelligent AI, constructed to be a bit smarter than the smartest human in every domain of human knowledge. The way I can make money is: in all of the ways. I will start a biotech company and discover the best drugs. I will start an accounting firm and do the best audits. I will start a publishing house and publish the best books, which I will write myself. I will start a pest-control company and hire the best exterminators, schedule them in the most efficient way and do advertising and pricing with perfect efficiency, though I will need humans to kill the bugs. Certainly I will start an electronic proprietary trading firm. All the ways that humans make money, I will do, just better than them.”1