Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?

epsteingpt 1 day ago

The sort of obvious answer is the same reason McKinsey hasn't taken over the Fortune 500 despite consulting and having deep knowledge of the operations of most of those companies.

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

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

There are trillions of company ideas in those tokens, just like there are trillions of shots in the fans head watching the basketball players.

Takes years, patience, capital and the right mindset to get to the point to even take the shot.

utopiah 1 day ago
McKinsey does not offer actual strategical advice, they offer scapegoats and insurance that when shits does hit the fan, the client will not be the one sent to prison.
The glossy magazines read by C-suite is the slick marketing part, not the actual product.
- linkregister 1 day ago
  McKinsey has multiple consulting verticals, including mechanical engineering, design, employing real professionals for actual work in addition to their traditional business consulting and advising.
  I think this comment was just a popularist repetition of discourse from social media. In other words it's a "tiktok ahh take".
  - bagacrap 1 day ago
    I know a lot of people who work or have worked at Accenture. Is that close enough to McKinsey and far enough from social media? Because I have come to a similar conclusion after many long conversations about how the sausage is made.
    GP is more cynical than I would have put it, but I think it's directionally correct; it's an easy way for the C-suite to demonstrate "due diligence" on any decision.
    wolvoleo 1 day ago
    I've never heard of McKinsey (I'm not in the US though) but we have a lot of Accenture consultants running around at work. They're generally a waste of space, just like the Deloitte ones we have too.
    kingkongjaffa 11 hours ago
    Accenture and Deloitte are tier 3 or tier 2 consultants. McKinsey, Bain and BCG are tier one. Generally hired for different things (strategy consulting vs implementation)
    wolvoleo 10 hours ago
    Ah ok. It makes sense, because I'm very close to implementation.
    It annoys me because these guys never tell us anything we don't know and they are just in the way because they want to butt into everything to prove their value.
    It feels like management doesn't trust us either. Though the reason they're there is more kickbacks and old boys network corruption. Our previous department head got a high paying job at Deloitte.
    satnhak 1 day ago
    From my limited experience of working with McKinsey people, I would describe it as a Fortune 500 C-Suite incubator. The hire smart people, they are very well connected and the goal is to rise the ranks and get a CEO position in a multinational. I was told by a very senior ex-McKinsey consultant that their main role is to get people promoted (regional CEO to central board for example). The projects are essentially a vehicle for an individual to move up. Their network is phenomenal. I wasn't very impressed with what i saw productivity wise, but they are polished and the point is not to impress the lower downs.
    Accenture are mostly a bunch of low level talentless grunts. There are a lot of them. If you're hiring Accenture then you are in trouble in more ways than one.
    biggoodwolf 1 day ago
    It's the same. Source: know people on both sides, hiring the engagement or providing it. Mickey, BCG, Bain, Accenture etc...
    sailfast 1 day ago
    McKinsey and Accenture are not the same. Brand-wise that’s Ferrari vs. Lexus.
    SgtBastard 21 hours ago
    Lexus has the quality of Toyota behind it, so the analogy doesn’t quite hold.
    What has the veneer of sophistication but is actually garbage quality…
    Ferrari vs Alfa Romeo, perhaps?
    kingkongjaffa 11 hours ago
    > Accenture
    Not really the same thing as McKinsey, Bain, BCG.
    chasd00 1 day ago
    Accenture and McKinsey are very different. You can't draw any conclusions about one from knowing the other.
    pembrook 1 day ago
    No they're not.
    McKinsey would like you to think otherwise of course. They paint a brand image of only doing high-end C-suite strategy work, but ultimately thats a vanishingly small part of the business. Their bread is buttered (just like Accenture) on labor heavy implementation gigs.
    Fundamentally, the business of billing out human hours is the same, as are the the incentives. Doesn't matter if its a strategy consulting firm in NYC or an advertising agency in Nepal.
    They will all inflate scope, inflate titles/rates, hire mostly cheap new grads, and slowroll-and-expand any engagement.
    And they will all take ANY work you give them, regardless of in-house expertise (which they rarely have, given the goal is to pay employees as little as possible to capture margin).
    The advertising agency in Nepal will claim to offer strategy consulting to your C-suite, just as McKinsey NYC will happily churn out a powerpoint deck about advertising in Nepal if you're willing to pay them.
    Hence why professional services firms all trade at low multiples. It's an undifferentiated commodity business of re-selling human labor in project-based chunks.
    multisport 1 day ago
    Palantir is a professional services firm, at trades very high,
    pembrook 1 day ago
    Their valuation comes from the Saas side of the business.
    In fact, the bear case on Palantir is always that it's actually a consulting firm masquerading as a Saas firm.
    munk-a 1 day ago
    I think it's fair to say that a large portion of their valuation comes from their political ties lending an air of invincibility. If Palantir came under scrutiny it's guaranteed that neither JD Vance nor anyone else Thiel could mobilize would remain silent and let it happen.
    sailfast 1 day ago
    They ARE a consulting firm masquerading as SaaS.
    They happen to have a SaaS product, but you cannot use it without paying up front for huge amounts of pro services. The SaaS product doesn’t work on its own. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s not magic software either.
    antonvs 1 day ago
    They’re not consultants, they’re forward deployed engineers!!
  - sosull 1 day ago
    Personal experience: they get fifty bodies on a two-person job. The work is fine, but not good enough to learn from. Which actually makes sense if you think of their company as a machine that can adapt to whatever problem.
    Karrot_Kream 1 day ago
    It's the old handyman vs specialized contractor tradeoff (well really it's a tale as old as time; specialists are much more expensive so you want to minimize their use (see healthcare, legal professionals, etc, etc.)) A plumber is a better plumber than your handyman, a cabinetmaker is a better carpenter than your handyman; your handyman changes 1/3 per hour and is available much more frequently. You make the decision who you want to call based on a multitude of factors.
    SoftTalker 1 day ago
    And the added wrinkle is that you need some expertise yourself to make the decision on who to call. That's why lots of people call electricians to change a wall switch or plumbers to install a new faucet. They end up paying 3x what they needed to because they didn't know a handyman can do those jobs very well, and the electricians and plumbers really don't even want those jobs.
    codebje 1 day ago
    I call an electrician to change a wall switch since an unlicensed handyman making a mistake that starts an electrical fire voids my home insurance.
    Plumbing is fractionally less regulated where I am and I am allowed to change my own taps washers, but a whole tap assembly falls under similar issues as a power switch.
    rrr_oh_man 1 day ago
    You can also start a fire by letting your pan get too hot, but nonetheless you make your own eggs.
    fph 1 day ago
    Because that doesn't void your home insurance, as GP wrote.
    zelphirkalt 18 hours ago
    And in software that is easily done. Write a whole software suite or spend copious amounts of time on configuration of a behemoth software to fit a tiny use case. Or have scope creep. While all you need is a single shell command in a cronjob.
  - noahlt 1 day ago
    In fairness, this take long predates social media. But you're right that it's exactly the sort of midwit take that gets repeated, whether on social media or by word of mouth.
    gopher_space 1 day ago
    The midwit take in this day and age is assuming you need an adversarial relationship with labor. The problem with McKinsey et al is their point of view.
    CPLX 1 day ago
    Does that make it incorrect?
  - prcrstntr 13 hours ago
    I think most people refer to the Management Consulting division when talking about McKisney.
  - potamic 1 day ago
    How big are those verticals? When it comes to management consulting, they enjoy the Big 3 fame, but you don't hear much of them outside of that.
  - class3shock 1 day ago
    Who do you think knows the most about a business? The experts at the leading companies in that business? Or McKinsey? Assuming the sane answer is the experts at the company, why is McKinsey being hired?
- biggoodwolf 1 day ago
  As someone who knows folks that have brought McKinsey in to banks and other companies. This is pretty much the reasoning, not quite for illegality, but say you want to derail another exec's project or put a seal of approval on yours? You bring them in to say what you want said
  - cowlevel 1 day ago
    Why does the other exec fall for it?
    SturgeonsLaw 1 day ago
    They likely understand full well what's happening, but it raises the cost of failure
    "So the third party consultant warned against it, you did it anyway, and it caused these problems?"
    1718627440 18 hours ago
    "The other third party consultant warned against not doing it, as that causes more problems, how could I not done it?"
- chrisgd 1 day ago
  I think their integration work and consulting is second to none. Companies don’t always know how to stack rank growth opps or M&A
  - pembrook 1 day ago
    This is a tell you haven't interfaced with consulting firms much before.
    When you say [insert firm] is [good/bad] at [thing], what you're actually saying is:
    "The team of kids at the firm's Minneapolis office did a good job on this specific project."
    There is no special sauce or "process" that could consistently deliver that outcome given consulting firms are just hourly billing body shops with high turnover that rarely hire true subject matter experts (they don't pay well enough). They have no equity in the advice they hand out, they don't suffer consequences if they're wrong absent doing something illegal, so nothing is ever learned other than how to extract more projects from the next lazy corporate bureaucracy.
    It's wholly dependent on the kids who were staffed on the project and how insecure/eager they were for approval at the time.
    Average tenure at all professional services firms (doesn't matter if its consulting, advertising or accounting) isn't very long, and there's almost zero knowledge sharing between individual offices of the same firm since they are competing for billable hours. So generally it's a crapshoot every time.
    What you can consistently be sure of when hiring McKinsey, is that you are offloading responsibility for decision-making to a 3rd party fictional mirage of 'competence' that everyone pretends is real, so you can claim its not your fault if something goes wrong or is unpopular...and keep your cushy big company executive job.
    wildzzz 1 day ago
    Companies are almost always better off bringing in one experienced consultant that actually knows how to stand up the project and help hire the team to make it happen.
    We used to have a very experienced systems engineer that we'd contract whenever a chief engineer had an idea that gained traction with directors. The systems engineer would help layout the structure and timeline of the project, basically identifying how much money and the types of people we'd need. He'd stick around long enough to get the project to the final design review and then go do something else when we started building stuff. By that point, the PM is deeply involved and the team is cohesive and productive. Maybe it's just a coincidence but every big project we've tried to stand up without his help would struggle tremendously in the early stages.
    pembrook 1 day ago
    It sounds like you're agreeing with my point; good people do good work, the brand name on the invoice billing you for their time is irrelevant.
    That said, I would be highly skeptical of any 'very experienced systems engineer' who took a job at a glorified post-collegiate body shop like McKinsey. At least in the US, given all the opportunities available, it means something has gone horribly wrong (EU/ex-US might be different given it's a dead zone for tech).