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

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

#71
post #45

This looks very fake to me. I might be wrong. Yet, there is no "document" that was leaked, the original source is some blog post. If there is a document, share the document. Shared by "anonymous individual on discord who granted permission for republication"... I don't know. If it was shared by anonymous, why ask for permission? Which discord server?

Coder Radio podcast uploaded the document to the show notes for their latest episode[1]. The first link[2] in the PDF does link to some internal Google resource that requires an @google.com email address.

1: https://jblive.wufoo.com/cabinet/af096271-d358-4a25-aedf-e56...

2: http://goto.google.com/we-have-no-moat

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

#72

So I use ChatGPT every day. I like it a lot and it is useful but it is overhyped. Also from 3.5 to 4 the jump was nice but seemed relatively marginal to me. I think the head start OpenAi has will vanish. Iteration will be slow and painful giving google or whoever more than enough time to catch up. ChatGPT was a fantastic leap getting us say 80% to Agi but as we have seen time and time again the last 20% are excruciat…

Personally, the difference between GPT4 and 3.5 is, pretty immense for what I am using it for. I can use GPT 3.5 for things like summarization tasks (as long as the text isn't too complex), reformatting, and other transformation type tasks alright. I don't even bother with using it for logical or programming tasks though.

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

#74
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charity is only a moat if it’s not profitable.

There's "immediately profitable" and "eventually profitable". Vast compute scale allows collection of customer generated data so the latter is possible, AI as of yet is not the former. So GP point still stands. FAAMG can run much larger immediate deficits in order to corner the market on the eventual profitability of AI.

All this talk that every investment pays off in the end is faulty and dangerous. Many investments don't pan out, 95% of the firms you see in the ticker this decade might be gone, and yet everyone is very confident is underwriting these "losses for future gains" but really it's economies of scale. It doesn't cost MSFT much more to run the GPU than to turn it on in the first place.

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

#76
post #65

dissaproving_drake.jpg: Giving evidence you can match the capabilities of OpenAI approving_drake.jpg: Saying everything OpenAI does is easy

I'm feeling strangely comforted to have pictured the mythological creature before the meme.

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

#77
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> artist whose domain has not yet been disrupted by AI fires artist in favor of AI

Everyone is getting disrupted by AI sooner or later. 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 Univer…

I don't think that will do a whole lot to protect you from the economic harm. If everyone is producing more, the value of the works are reduced. At best, nobody will will make more money, they'll just be working harder to stay at the same place. More likely, there will simply be no room in the market for as many people and most will be out of work.

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

#78
The real moats in this field will come from the hardware industry. It's way too expensive to train these models on general purpose compute. Vertically designed silicon that brings down the unit economics of training and inference workloads are already being designed, in industry and in academia.

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

#79
The memo sounds like spin because it is. The surface argument is equivalent to arguing that no one could sell closed source software because open source exists, and that open source must also be commodotized (oddly, Apple and Microsoft are doing just fine). The implied argument is that Google Research was doing fine giving away their trade secrets and giving negative value to Google because it was going to happen anyway and the secrets are financially worthless anyhow.

Nonsense. There are moats if one is willing to look for them. After all, productizing is a very different thing from an academic comparison. ChatGPT is way out there _as a product_, while open efforts are at 0% on this. You can't lock down a technology*, but you can lock down an ecosystem, a product or hardware. OpenAI can create an API ecosystem which will be difficult to take down. They can try to make custom hardware to make their models really cheap to run. Monopoly? Nah. This won't happen. But they could make some money - and reduce the value of Google's search monopoly.

* Barring software patents which fortunately aren't yet at play.

EDIT: I'll give the memo a virtual point for identifying Meta (Facebook) as a competitor who could profit by using current OSS efforts. But otherwise it's just spin.

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

#80

Cringe, haven’t seen a single Open Source come even close to the ability of Bard, let alone ChatGPT. Seems like wishful thinking to think decentralized open source can beat centralized models that cost 100M+ to train!

I'd agree they aren't close, but they are way better than I expected to see in a short few months. At this rate they'll be approaching "good enough" for me pretty soon. I don't always need a dissertation out of it unless I'm fooling around. I want quick facts and explainers around difficult code and calculations. Been playing with Vicuna-7b on my iPhone through MLC Chat and it's impressive.

I use DDG over Google for similar reasons. It's good enough, more "free" (less ads), and has better privacy.

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