The people behind openai specifically are not hippie CEOs though. Usually the hippie CEOs spawn up independently, kind of from their own bubbles. Openai came out of the same hyper-growth venture capital world as facebook, airbnb, ycombinator, and others. And it's not that it was made by some founders that then went through accelerator programs, it was founded and pre-funded by those executives. That's why it's so weird that people are celebrating that aspect of it.

Yes, that's the principle that companies like openai run on though. For them there is no such thing as a "struggle to see how they would need more".

That's not true at all. You.com's chat is very strong, more than comparable to chatgpt, and it is even more open, as in you don't need to provide a phone number to use it. Plus there are other models like Bloom and so on that are far more open, as in you can download them and run them yourself and integrate them into other software.

They need investor exposure infinitely, or more accurately they need marketing infinitely. Not that they actually need it, but they would pursue it near-infinitely.

This isn't an immature company, it's run by some of the most experienced hype machines and aggressive investors around. These are some of the people who helped explode facebook, airbnb, reddit, and more. They have no ideology, or, their ideology is continual growth at any cost.

I don't get why people not only let them publish so much propaganda about their companies, but in many cases even actively promote them and talk well of them.

There is no end to how much money they need. How often have the richest people in the world said they don't need more? They get into that position by never having enough.

It is and they are very good at it. It makes it tough to try to judge how close the actual dangers are, and if and to what extent they are there.