It's a highly risky bet, but not fundamentally unreasonable. One might believe that Ilya's research was genuinely critical to OpenAI's current situation. If one takes that premise, three potential corollaries follow: (1) OpenAI will struggle to produce future research breakthroughs without Ilya; (2) OpenAI will struggle to materially move beyond its current product lineup and variations thereof without said future research breakthroughs; (3) a startup led by Ilya could overcome both (1) and (2) with time.

An alternative sequence of reasoning places less emphasis on Ilya specifically and uses Ilya as an indicator of research health. Repeat (1), (2), and (3) above, but replace "Ilya" with something like "strong and healthy fundamental research group". In this version, Ilya's departure is taken as indication that OpenAI no longer has a strong and healthy fundamental research group but that the company is "compromised" by relentless feature roadmaps for current products and their variations. That does not mean OpenAI will fail, but in this perspective it might mean that OpenAI is not well positioned to capture future research breakthroughs and the products that they will generate.

From my perspective, it's just about impossible to know how true these premises really are. And that's what makes it a bet or gamble rather than anything with any degree of assurance. To me, just as likely is the scenario where it's revealed that Ilya is highly ineffective as a generalist leader and that research without healthy tension from the business goes nowhere.

Add that the tracks have not even been built &trains purchased and we are back at google old railway craze/bubble!

Do YOU want to miss out being a share holder on this new line that will bring immeasurable wealth ?? ;-)

Imagine being in a position where you can spend $1B on a high risk gamble, unconcerned if you lose it all, all in pursuit of more wealth.

Simultaneously too wealthy to imagine and never wealthy enough. Capitalism is quite the drug.

Me after watching channel5 I think some of it should go to poor people instead of billion dollars roulettes only. Thought the problem is with even richer corporations I feel and financial derivatives and not fully here.

I don't have anything to add, but want to say – that is a great analogy.

except in this case, the train driver from the original train was "sacked" (some believe unfairly), and decided to get their own train to drive. Of course, the smoothness of the ride depends on the driver of the train.

Even with the best train driver, the ride won't be any good of the track is shit and the rolling stock is falling apart.

I think this analogy is starting to go off the rails.

Sounds like it's destined to be a looooong train with many carriages. ;)

The problem is a content to train LLMs (I assume that Ilia will continue this line or research). Big content holders are already raising moats and restricting access or partnering with a single existing LLM corporation. And also time, because all this involves a lot of hardware. Any subsequent competitor will have to scale higher and higher wall just to catch up (if the LLM progress doesn't stall and get into diminishing returns).

Isn't that what happened to Evergrande

Evergrande imploded because of massive amounts of debt that they had been rolling for years. Continually rolling this massive debt was working till property demand slowed and their revenues couldn't keep up adequately to qualify them to issue new debt.