Last fall, Sam Altman told us he was about to bring spicy chat — “erotica for adults,” in his words — to ChatGPT.
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That never happened, and now it looks like it never will: Altman’s OpenAI has put those plans on hold “indefinitely,” per the Financial Times.
This is Altman’s second big walkback in the last few days. Earlier this week, the company canned Sora, the briefly popular video app it rolled out last fall. I’ve asked the company for comment.
Both retreats are supposed to be part of a new push at OpenAI to focus the company’s efforts on things that could make money today, as it preps for an IPO at the same time it faces real competition from the likes of Google and Anthropic.
So all this starting and stopping could be viewed as necessary growing pains at a fast-growing tech company — ones that won’t mean anything in the long run, if it delivers on its world-changing ambitions.
Not only that, but Altman told us we should expect this sort of stuff. “Please expect a very high rate of change from us,” he wrote last fall, after hearing from content owners who were outraged to find their stuff on Sora without their permission. “We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly.”
It’s not that companies aren’t allowed to make wrong turns and head up dead ends as they grow up, and even once they’re fully mature. That kind of pivoting is celebrated in tech (and is why very few people are mad that Mark Zuckerberg has stopped telling us the metaverse is the future, or that Google once bought Motorola and decided that was a bad idea a couple years later.)
But “move fast and break things” lands differently when the company doing the moving and breaking isn’t running a photo app or playing around with crypto.
Instead, OpenAI and its competitors say they’re leading us into a world where everything — the way we live and work (or don’t work) and fight wars and everything else — will change in fundamental ways.
And investors have bought this pitch, which means our economy now seems yoked to all this — which means all of us are yoked to it, even if we never touch a chatbot.
Which makes me slightly queasy to see Sam Altman promise dirty chats in October, and then walk away from the plan less than six months later.
Not because dirty chat is obviously absurd. Lots of people in AI think romantic or sexual chatbot conversations are a real use case and could be a real business.
But the reasons it might be a bad idea for OpenAI were pretty obvious from the start. It’s a giant, heavily scrutinized company that wants to be treated as central and indispensable, and it’s only going to get more scrutiny.
If those objections only became real after Altman floated the idea in public, that’s not charming startup experimentation. It’s a sign that OpenAI is still making itself up as it goes. And that would be easier to shrug off if the rest of us weren’t already being told to build our lives, jobs, and businesses around what OpenAI says comes next.
