Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by whimsicalism » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

> Giant models are slowing us down. In the long run, the best models are the ones which can be iterated upon quickly. We should make small variants more than an afterthought, now that we know what is possible in the Maybe this is true for the median query/conversation that people are having with these agents - but it certainly has not been what I have observed in my experience in technical/research work.

GPT-4 is legitimately very useful. But any of the agents below that (including ChatGPT) cannot perform complex tasks up to snuff.

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

#102

Post by hospitalJail » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

tikkun wrote: post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

>Midjourney is more popular (from what I'm seeing) than Stable Diffusion at the moment because it's better at the moment. Midjourney is closed-source.

Midjourney is easier, its not better. The low barrier to entry has it popular, but it isnt as realistic, doesnt follow the prompt as well, and has almost no customization.

SD is the holy grail of AI art, if you can afford a computer or server to run SD + have the ability to figure out how to install python, clone Automatic1111 from git, and run the installer, its the best. Those 3 steps are too much for most people, so they default to something more like an app. Maybe it is too soon, but it seems SD has already won. MJ is like using MS paint, where SD is like photoshop.

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

#103

Post by borski » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

cube2222 wrote: post #83

Some snippets for folks who come 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…

> Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.

There’s also nothing stopping anybody else from incorporating it into their products.

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

#104

Post by toyg » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

tikkun wrote: post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

> Linux won in servers and supercomputing, but not in end user computing

"End user computing" these days means mobile, and mobile is dominated by Linux (in Apple's case BSD, but we're splitting hair) and Chrome/WebKit - which began as KHTML.

The only area where opensource failed is the desktop, and that's also because of Microsoft's skill in defending their moats.

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

#105

Post by whatshisface » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

cube2222 wrote: post #83

Some snippets for folks who come 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…

Meta's leaked model isn't open-source. I can found a business using Linux, that's open-source. The LLM piracy community are unpaid FB employees; it is not legal for anyone but Meta to use the results of their labor.

I know this might be hard news but it needs to be said... if you want to put your time into working on open source LLMs, you need to get behind something you have a real (and yes, open source) license for.

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

#106

Post by Art9681 » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

sashank_1509 wrote: post #5

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!

If all you’ve done is download the model and perform basic prompts then I understand why you think this. There is a lot more going on behind Bard and GPT than a chat window passing the inputs to the model.

Edit for clarity: You’re comparing a platform (Bard, GPT) to a model (llama, etc). The majority of folks playing with local models are missing the platform.

In order to close the gap, you need to hook up the local models to LangChain and build up different workflows for different use cases.

Consequently, this is also when you start hitting the limits of consumer hardware. It’s easy to download a torrent, double click the binary and pass some simple prompts into the basic model.

Once you add memory, agents, text splitters, loaders, vector db, etc, is when the value of a high end GPU paired with a capable CPU + tons of memory becomes evident.

This still requires a lot of technical experience to put together a solution beyond running the examples in their docs.

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

#107

Post by wahnfrieden » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

tikkun wrote: post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

GPT4 sucks for many use cases because it's SLOW. It will co-exist with ChatGPT variants.

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

#108

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #37

Having enough scale to perpetually offer free/low-cost compute is a moat. The primary reason ChatGPT went viral in the first place was because it was free, with no restrictions. Back in 2019, GPT-2 1.5B was made freely accessible by a single developer via the TalkToTransformers website, which was the very first time many people talking about AI text generation...then the owner got hit with sticker shock from the GPU…

> Having enough scale to perpetually offer free/low-cost compute is a moat.

Its a moat for services, not models, and its only a moat for AI services as long as that compute isn’t hobbled by being used for models which are so inefficient compared to SOTA as to waste the advantage, which underlines why leaning into open source the way this piece urges is in Google’s interests, the same way open source has worked to Google and Amazon’s benefits as service providers in other domains.

(Not so much “the ability to offer free/low-cost compute” but “the advantages of scale and existing need for widely geographically dispersed compute on the cost of both marginal compute and having marginal compute close to the customer where that is relevant”, but those are pretty close to differenly-focussed rephrasings of the same underlying reality.)

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

#109

Post by whimsicalism » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #86

This is easily among the rare highest quality articles/comments I've read in the past weeks, perhaps months (on LLMs/AI since that's what I am particularly interested in). And this was for internal consumption before it was made public. Reinforces my recent impression that so much that's being made for public consumption now is shallow and it is hard to find the good stuff. And sadly, increasing so even on HN. As I w…

If you feel like your criteria for quality is beyond what you can typically find in the popular public consumption, just start reading papers directly?

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

#110

Post by jimsimmons » Thu, May 04, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

lysecret wrote: post #67

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…

Then it’s not 20% then