The glossy magazines read by C-suite is the slick marketing part, not the actual product.

The Firm is confederated.

AI is brains. Companies need arms and legs and relationships.

This is silly, these companies are owned and run by some of the most connected and powerful people on the planet, who also own and run dozens of other companies that produce things.

The reality is that employees are also mostly not entrepreneurs, same as consultants.

I don't even know what this means. They choose to hire who they choose to hire, and they can continue to hire as long as they wish. It's like saying that the reason I'm not a marathon runner is because I only own Oxfords and flip-flops, not running shoes.

I have absolutely no idea how this could be the "sort of obvious answer." I'm surprised so many people thought it was worth a response. There's no answer here. Some of these sentences don't even make sense.

That’s especially true if it’s an artificial gold rush that you created yourself.

OpenAi is also spinning up and acquiring companies. DeployCo, Orchestra Bio, io Products Inc.

AI is brains. Companies need arms and legs and relationships.

Do they? Haven't Google and others been proving that wrong for almost 30 years?

> The sort of obvious answer is the same reason McKinsey hasn't taken over the Fortune 500

Sorry, this is not even close to being an answer let alone an obvious answer. The main reason is because 'reality has a surprising amount of detail' (read the excellent blog post if you have). There is a huge difference between doing some analysis, framework, and outlining recommendations on a slide vs. generating business value in the real world. The real world is messy, a complex and dynamic adaptive system, with tons of details where small decisions add up.

Put a feature team in a strong company / startup and put them up against a top consultant on a real world scenario to ship something and generate real world value/uusage and you will get the answer why.

The former Starbucks CEO is a classic example. His infamous interview with Cramer on CNBC is the textbook of what it looks like when some McKinsey consultant gets actually put in charge. It was a total shitshow.

Likely succeeded at pontificating to CEOs via PPT, but actually being CEO? Not so much.

It's a serious bit of hypocrisy posed by OpenAI here, and it's telling that the AI is much more limited that the narrative of 'AGI' would have us believe.

OAI and Anthropic have massive budgets they should be able to expand, were AGI actually AGI.

Also the reputation is not minor, the human can take out loans, or take a withdrawal out from their social capital by telling people that they are AI enabled and selling AI to other (presumably) non-AI people.

It's not all just GPUs and Tokens, it can't be, there needs to be some mixing with other resources in order to bake a value cake. While pure token cakes might be very yummy (for some consumers who like pure slop), by mixing GPUs with human brains, a wider space of yummy hybrid cakes can be explored, which even more consumers would enjoy (those who like partial slop).

Even drug manufacturers need retailers who use their personal connections to gain trust, and who put their criminal record on the line.

AI is brains

Is they though?

Those are very much not the same.

They also serve as a part-time strategy group for the company. The company couldn’t afford that quality of people full time and they wouldn’t have as much experience as at a consultancy. And having temporary people not beholden to a superior might result in more honest reports.

So, it’s not necessarily flimflam. But I do worry a group of people who determine a company’s strategy and rarely stick around to implement it and measure it’s end result.

Oh wait.