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How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

(www.nytimes.com)
387 points reaperducer | 3 comments | 31 Oct 25 13:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.872s | source
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skeeter2020 ◴[31 Oct 25 15:36 UTC] No.45773265[source]▶
>> figure out how to innovate on the financial model

Does it feel rather Orwellian that the original geeks now seem to be the same people who - forget about claiming technological innovation of as their own - completely discount it and apparently the important thing is now the creativity in funding an enterprise? We don't hear about the breakthroughs from the technologists, but the funding announcements from th investors and CEOs. It's not about the benefits of the technology, but how they're going to pay for it. Seems like a wildly perverse version of wag the dog...

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1. whimsicalism ◴[31 Oct 25 15:56 UTC] No.45773524[source]▶
this is all a function of the media reporting, the change in ‘nerd culture’ has been vastly overreported.

these companies are staffed by spectrum-y nerds that we are being desperately propagandized into thinking are actually frat ‘bros’.

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2. programjames ◴[31 Oct 25 17:45 UTC] No.45774672[source]▶
No, they aren't. Locally, the person with the most esoteric knowledge is probably a weird nerd. It's mostly an accident that they chose to invest time in things typically associated with smarts. But globally, the best wizards got there by making it their profession. So maybe at your middling university, the people who could land a job at a frontier lab were nerdy wannabe frats, but at decent universities like MIT or Tsinghua, they're usually just better in every aspect of their lives. E.g. MIT has "math olympiad fraternities" all the cool kids join.
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3. whimsicalism ◴[31 Oct 25 18:17 UTC] No.45775010[source]▶
I went to a top 5 ranked school globally (~these lists fluctuate) and have been in elite circles since then. I can promise you that even there the autistic nerd fully outcompetes the renaissaince man.