

This is true but you also have to ask what OpenAI is getting out of this deal. They’re not just going to give away stock for nothing, and the US government doesn’t have a policy of helping itself to portions of companies.
So OpenAI thinks it’s getting something for this. Whatever that is, it’s bribing the government to get.




The contribution of AI to greenhouse emissions is tiny compared to the actually significant contributors - like transportation and rearing animals.
And with that 90% of people have stopped reading and thing I’m an AI booster so congrats for still being here.
I also think the utility isn’t going to be for techbros primarily. Software developers can already do the things that LLMs are good at, and are better than LLMs in important areas. But think about writing a 500-line script to extract data from a database and do some simple data analysis on it, then displaying it. Software developers, again, can do that easily (it’d probably take a few hours - more if it’s more complex or if they polish it).
But most people cannot. Yet there are a lot of situations in business or in government which could benefit from being able to say, “show me the average of (X) over the last 10 years, stratified by variables A, B, C.” And AI will do write a script to do it (so the actual computation is not done with unreliable bullshit) with ease. The script will have way too many comments, may well be laid out in a nonsensical way, and may reinvent the wheel stupidly, but in my limited experience of asking the LLM we have at work to do things like this for giggles and because I’m not paying for tokens, it will do it correctly.
I’m not saying to buy the hype, but if you think it’s useless for everything but “making it easier for some techbros” you’re just as immune to evidence as the hypesters are.