The walls continue to close in on OpenAI. The company recently raised an additional $10 billion in funding, bringing its valuation one small step closer to $1 trillion.
But actually making any money continues to be an enormous challenge for the ChatGPT maker. The company’s panicked executives have made it abundantly clear that distracting “side quests” must be abandoned, while doubling down on both enterprise and coding. The purported goal is to stuff all of its offerings into a single “super app,” taking a page out of xAI CEO Elon Musk’s playbook.
These aren’t empty words by OpenAI execs. First, news emerged this week that the company is killing its disastrous Sora video AI slop app, lighting what was supposed to be a groundbreaking $1 billion deal with Disney on fire.
Now, the company is axing its spicy “adult mode” chatbot, as the Financial Times reports, once again highlighting how much pressure the company is under as competitors aren’t just catching up, but snatching up precious paying customers from right under its nose.
According to the FT, OpenAI has since confirmed that the chatbot, which CEO Sam Altman characterized as “erotica for verified adults” in an October tweet, is on hold indefinitely. The company claims it wants to buy itself more time to figure out the long-term effects of hosting such a bot.
That’s perhaps for the best, given the ongoing discussions surrounding AI psychosis, a troubling trend that has caused an alarming wave of mental health crises as the tech coaxes some users into spirals of paranoid and delusional behavior.
OpenAI first openly discussed opening the floodgates for “mature apps” last fall, wtih Altman promising to “treat adult users like adults.”
Altman also claimed in his October tweet that OpenAI had been able to “mitigate the serious mental health issues,” despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary.
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that company advisors had grown wary of the feature and the many potential risks of letting OpenAI’s already-hooked customers engage in intimately-charged conversations.
“AI shouldn’t replace your friends or your family; you should have human connections,” one former senior employee told the FT.
There had already been signs that the company was considering that feedback.
“We’re pushing out the launch of adult mode so we can focus on work that is a higher priority for more users right now, including gains in intelligence, personality improvements, personalization, and making the experience more proactive,” OpenAI wrote in a March 9 statement. “We still believe in the principle of treating adults like adults, but getting the experience right will take more time.”
The company has also been trying to nail down an effective age restriction model, which according to the WSJ has run into major problems. According to the newspaper’s sources, the tech had an error rate of north of ten percent, which could’ve effectively allowed millions of underage users to access explicit chatbots. (OpenAI told the FT that its “age prediction system performs in line with industry standards.”)
The decision to give up on smut suggests the company is chasing more feasible business strategies as it continues to burn billions of dollars every quarter. Given its plans to invest $600 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years, the gulf between its revenues and comparatively astronomical expenses is set to continue to grow.
And that may not set the company up for success as it gears up to go public, allowing unprecedented scrutiny of its finances.
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