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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”

#181

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…

You are making an assumption that seems very strange to me - that the license matters for important use cases. It doesn't. Access to the technology is the only important factor, because nothing interesting about AI involves commercialising anything. It's a tool and now people have it. Whether they can make a company out of it is so far down the list of how it could make a difference that it doesn't even register.

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

#182

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…

I wonder if OpenAI knew they didn't have a moat, and that's why they've been moving so fast and opening ChatGPT publicly - making the most of their lead in the short time they have left. I find it incredibly cathartic to see these massive tech companies and their gatekeepers get their lunch eaten by OSS.

That is the nature of the singularity. Progress moves faster than any one person or any one company can keep up with.

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

#184
It’s always easier to use a prebuilt server which Google or OpenAI offers. Otherwise it’s built locally into the OS, maybe Apple. Most people is not gonna setup their own servers for these models because they have multiple devices and the costs is still high vs OpenAI.

Having ease of access is a big moat

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 abili…

> 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. If you can afford Colab (which is free if you don’t want to use it too much), you can just click one of the existing A1111 colabs and run that, you don’t need to figure out python, git, or A1111 installs.

Google is cracking down on this recently.

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

#186

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…

That's what a lot of people think until they run Vicuna 13B or equivalent. We're just 5 months in this, there will be many leaps.

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

#188
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying the same things for weeks, right here and in the usual places. Basically - OpenAI will not be able to continue to commercialise chatGPT-3.5, they will have to move to GPT-4 because the open source alternatives will catch up. Their island of exclusivity is shrinking fast. In a few months nobody will want to pay for GPT-4 either when they can have private, cheap equivalents. So GPT-5 it is for OpenAI.…

> I've been saying the same things for weeks, right here and in the usual places. Basically - OpenAI will not be able to continue to commercialise chatGPT-3.5, they will have to move to GPT-4 because the open source alternatives will catch up. Their island of exclusivity is shrinking fast. In a few months nobody will want to pay for GPT-4 either when they can have private, cheap equivalents. So GPT-5 it is for OpenAI…

>It is worth $20 a month to have one UI on one service that does everything.

competition will drive profit margins and prices down to nothing because the number of companies that can spin up an UI is unlimited. Markets don't pay you what something is worth, they pay what the cheapest participant is willing to sell it for.

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

#190
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 because it takes zero technical know-how compared to SD (even with A1111 it took me nearly an hour to walk my competent-but-layman brother through installing it) and doesn't require a high-end gaming PC to run it. (DALL-E lost because they let MJ eat their lunch)

> Midjourney is more popular because it takes zero technical know-how compared to SD

Both take zero technical knowledge to use the base models via first-party online hosts, but Midjourney is superior there.

SD offers a lot more capacity beyond what is available from the first-party online host, though, while with Midjourney, that’s where it begins and ends, there is nothing more.

> and doesn’t require a high-end gaming PC to run it.

Neither does SD (I use a couple-year-old business laptop with a 4GB Nvidia card; no sane person would call it a “highend gaming PC” to run A1111 locally, and there are options besides running it locally.)

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