This approach makes a lot of sense. Advertising is a marketplace and this is a great way to bootstrap advertising inventory. Its inevitable they will allow advertisers to manage ad spend directly through OpenAI but right now the product is too new to capture meaningful ad budget. This way they can begin testing delivery and develop proof points around ROI and build towards larger ad spend directly.
Clearly the Meta execs they hired are about as useful as most 3-letter exec titles because, wow, did OAI miss the boat again. Personally I'm glad they've made as many missteps as they have, but quite the amateur move to not seize the market opportunity and keep it holistically for themselves. They took nothing from Google's paved road of incumbency in this segment.
Again, personally, I'm glad at yet another miss by Altman. But to claim ChatGPT is too new? Apparently hundreds of millions of users doesn't cut it these days. And if anyone thinks OAI has been anything remotely "strategic" around their product, well... Then you must enjoy shooting darts in the dark.
This appears to be more like a toxic rant than a reasonable argument.
> quite the amateur move to not seize the market opportunity and keep it holistically for themselves
What does this even mean? There are so many businesses, especially in the advertising world, that first start white-label reselling so that you can scale up super easy and quickly. Then once market is captured, you integrate everything. This is a common adtech playbook, and the Meta execs know that as well.
And I say this as someone who founded & exited their own adtech platform.
I would not recommend OpenAI to start developing an RTB platform right now at all. Just first prove there is a market and the value is there.
> They took nothing from Google's paved road of incumbency in this segment.
Google bought / acquired themselves into the online adtech market mostly. Yes they have adwords, which was only really becoming something a decade after Google launched, which they paired with their acquisition of half the adtech giants (DoubleClick, Invite and AdMeld). So yeah, not a great example.
> I'm glad at yet another miss by Altman. But to claim ChatGPT is too new? Apparently hundreds of millions of users doesn't cut it these days.
> This appears to be more like a toxic rant than a reasonable argument.
Thank you for your subjective analysis.
> What does this even mean? There are so many businesses, especially in the advertising world, that first start white-label reselling so that you can scale up super easy and quickly. Then once market is captured, you integrate everything. This is a common adtech playbook, and the Meta execs know that as well.
This would be interesting if any of it were true in the case of OAI. They haven't captured the market and they don't appear as if they will. They're at the losing end of Anthropic and Google right now. The Meta execs OAI has don't understand the game today, in my opinion based on their approach.
> And I say this as someone who founded & exited their own adtech platform.
> I would not recommend OpenAI to start developing an RTB platform right now at all. Just first prove there is a market and the value is there.
So OAI, their financials, their business models, their number of customers and their competition all aligned with your exit in adtech? Somehow I doubt it, but feel free to share.
> Google bought / acquired themselves into the online adtech market mostly. Yes they have adwords, which was only really becoming something a decade after Google launched, which they paired with their acquisition of half the adtech giants (DoubleClick, Invite and AdMeld). So yeah, not a great example.
Actually, it is a good example. Because when Google did this they had zero competition. Now Google is the competition. So, yeah... In line with the new reality. You don't get to compare OAI with Google 20+ years ago.
> This is just a useless attack for no reason.
No, it's reality for a lot of us. Altman is tied to a lot of unsavory players. If you want to apologize for these types of people then feel free to be their cheerleader. The great part of HN is that these comments have and carry market sentiments (all across the board). I could say your comments are useless, out-of-touch, founder drivel... But I haven't.
> product is too new to capture meaningful ad budget
I disagree entirely. As someone who works in advertising every single company I've talked to would be queueing up to test ads on ChatGPT if they launched a Google Ads like platform.
If ChatGPT doesn't have enough scale to do it, then they shouldn't do ads.
ChatGPT has more web traffic than X, Reddit, Bing... Crazy to say they wouldn't be able to capture meaningful ad budget. IMO partnering on this is a blunder.
It comes together quickly, though. They don't need to learn how to become a company that knows how to sell advertising; they can instead just pay some other entity to do that.
It's OK to not have complete vertical integration. (They probably don't fix their own toilets, either.)
And if it makes as much money as it seems must be possible, then they can just buy one of the advertising partners that are already have plugged into their system and shitcan the rest.
> Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs.
Tagging is another organizational feature that is on our roadmap and has always made sense to me. Right now our organizational model is primarily hierarchical which has obvious limitations.
RE: email integration - We have a pretty robust email integration right now. Neville was always insistent that we shouldn't force people into the app to have a conversation, especially for one-off collaborators who get looped into a chat. They can stay blissfully ignorant of the fact that the conversation is actually happening on emdash if it suits them.
Thanks for the advice. One challenge for us will be how to price-in token based costs, e.g. downstream GPT services. There was an interesting post earlier today on HN related to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186032 which recommended progressive pricing, which I thought was really interesting. On the other hand, the marginal cost of these services is being aggressively driven down by the big players so it may ultimately be safe to provide a fixed cost subscription model.
Have you thought about carving out the token expense? I.e. giving users the option of using their own api key vs you being the middle man for that expense?
This is in the works. We have a prototype integration with Github that supports the deep search use case you mentioned. My favorite anecdote from this was a few weeks ago I was revisiting some work on transactional support in our controller framework and asked assistant "A few months ago I was working on transaction support and had to revert my change. Can you remind me what happened?" and it spit back my original PR, the reversion, and a deep link into the standup video meeting where we discussed the issue. For me, that was the magic moment where I knew this could be something much more than just a chat client.
This is good feedback, thanks. We packed a lot into the product so far and could have spent more time focusing the media assets to distill things better.
Early adopters range in size from 2 people to ~20. As you said, the Catch-22 for larger teams usually have established tool stacks so the (operational) switching cost is prohibitive.
FWIW we are a team of 5 and already find the feature set useful (we're biased, of course). I expect that ~5 is the threshold the organizational and search features become invaluable.
Thanks! One of the benefits of dogfooding our product everyday is that we invest a lot in working out the everyday kinks in addition to the marquee features.
I should introduce the rest of the crew. We're a team of builders who have worked together for the better part of the last decade. Neville and I were early engineers on Facebook Ads. Neville later founded Rimeto, which was acquired by Slack. Fred has held various roles driving growth and was an early employee at Facebook, Doordash, and Rimeto. Nick jumped into startups right out of college, joining Rimeto and now diving back in with us at emdash.
In particular, I appreciate that you assign value to the consequences and not the decision itself. Anytime junior engineers on my team would complain about "shitty code" I'd assure them that someone would be complaining about their code in a few years.
Having the context or, better yet, responsibility for the past decisions is great for developing a pragmatic approach to software design AND empathy for other software engineers.
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