To be fair, deepmind, google brain, others, are are well funded and have been comparatively lackluster (commercially, they are almost certainly doing more legit academic work). And scientists like to do science, it's hard to focus them commercially. Their (openAI's) success suggests good leadership
I have no real idea about the purpose and inner workings of those Google companies, but being a Google-adjacent company is probably not a great predictor for success, because big G needs to eat to sustain the behemoth and there's also too much fat on these companies to be business savvy, so they seem to serve as G hiring pool, or G vacation destination for burnt out G folks.
Also G companies might aim too high even when they try not to? OpenAI can release a shitty chatbot, but a G subsidiary simply can't, they want to solve proteins, aging, cancer, and then maybe we can chat.
How do you know? OpenAI isn't a commercial success, seems really unlikely they're profitable right now given their penchant for freely available and very expensive tech demos. DeepMind could be in the black based on ML optimization of Google's infra alone. Prolly not but it's at least possible.
Well he didn’t really get that money. Sam Altman on his own couldn’t have raised 1 billion for OpenAI. He was the CEO but the money was there already. He was largely parachuted in.
I could understand why someone would buy into Musk’s vision even Gates/Jobs etc. Sam Altman seems like a very ordinary guy without any remarkable attributes.
