Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

The trick is to use AI to do things it would take you five lifetimes to learn. It's a tool to lower opportunity cost, financial capital, and human capital. That gives anyone leveraging it a much bigger platform, and the ability to dream big without resources.

If you can become your own "studio", you're the indie artist of the future. You don't need Disney or Universal Music backing.

Anyone can step up and do this. The artists being threatened can use these tools to do more than they've ever done by themselves.

If we're talking about doing everything well, I think that's true. However, if I want to create my own personal "word calculator," I could take, for example, my own work (or Hemingway, or a journalist) and feed an existing OSS model my of samples, and then take a set of sources (books, articles, etc), I might be able to build something that could take an outline and write extended passages for me, turning me into an editor.

A company might feed its own help documents and guidance to create its own help chat bot that would be as good as what OpenAI could do and could take the customer's context into the system without any privacy concerns.

A model doesn't have to be better at everything to be better at something.

"April 3, 2023 - Real Humans Can’t Tell the Difference Between a 13B Open Model and ChatGPT

Berkeley launches Koala, a dialogue model trained entirely using freely available data.

They take the crucial step of measuring real human preferences between their model and ChatGPT. While ChatGPT still holds a slight edge, more than 50% of the time users either prefer Koala or have no preference. Training Cost: $100."

Some snippets for folks who came just for the comments:

> While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months.

> A tremendous outpouring of innovation followed, with just days between major developments (see The Timeline for the full breakdown). Here we are, barely a month later, and there are variants with instruction tuning, quantization, quality improvements, human evals, multimodality, RLHF, etc. etc. many of which build on each other.

> This recent progress has direct, immediate implications for our business strategy. Who would pay for a Google product with usage restrictions if there is a free, high quality alternative without them?

> Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet’s worth of free labor. Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.

> And in the end, OpenAI doesn’t matter. They are making the same mistakes we are in their posture relative to open source, and their ability to maintain an edge is necessarily in question. Open source alternatives can and will eventually eclipse them unless they change their stance. In this respect, at least, we can make the first move.

[0]: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...