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

semianalysis.com

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

#241

Post by tasuki »

CSMastermind wrote: post #192

I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps). After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap. Just like Encarta…

Google maps is good at navigation, finding business names etc. OpenStreetMap is much more detailed wherever I've gone.

When I'm lost in a forest, I look at OSM to see where the footpaths are.

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

#242

Post by crazyedgar »

tshadley wrote: post #17
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!

From the article: "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 C…

This is hugely misleading. If your bot just memorizes Shakespeare and output segments from memorization, of course nobody can tell the difference. But as soon as you start interacting with them the difference can't be more pronounced.

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

#243

Post by gerad »

crazygringo wrote: post #141
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…

Well yes, generally in the business world all the "good stuff", the really smart analysis, is extremely confidential. Really smart people are putting these things together, but these types of analyses are a competitive advantage, so they're absolutely never going to share it publicly. This was leaked, not intentionally made public. And it all makes sense -- the people producing these types of business analyses are wo…

Beware that there’s also a ton of bias when something is analyzed internally. As Upton Sinclair once said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

In the case of this analysis - it sounds great but it’s wrong. OpenAI has a huge moat. It has captured the mind share of the world. The software it has shipped is dramatically better than anything anyone else has shipped (the difference between useless and useful). We’ll see if folks catch up, but the race is currently OpenAI’s to lose.

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

#244

Post by balls187 »

My feeling on this is “f** yeah, and f** you [google et al]”

How much computing innovation was pioneered by community enthusiasts and hobbyists that have been leveraged by these huge companies.

I know meta, googlr, msft et al give back in way of opensource, but it really pales in comparison to the value those companies have extracted.

I’m a huge believer in generative AI democratizing tech.

Certainly I’m glad to pay for off-the-shelf custom tuned models, and for software that smartly integrates generative AI to improve usage, but not a fan of gate keeping this technology by a handful of untrustworthy corporations.

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

#245

Post by pphysch »

CSMastermind wrote: post #192

I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps). After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap. Just like Encarta…

Data is still valuable and you can build a moat with it. But this discussion isn't about data, it's about models.

A better analogy would be paywalled general-purpose programming languages, where any access to running code is restricted. Such a programming language would get virtually no mindshare.

This Google employee is just saying, let's not make that mistake.

Even if Google fired all AI researchers tomorrow and just used open source models going forward, they could still build killer products on them due to their data moat. That's the takeaway.

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

#248

Post by selimthegrim »

Krasnol wrote: post #226
CSMastermind wrote: post #192

I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps). After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap. Just like Encarta…

> Of course it's more than a decade later now and I still use Google Maps, Bing Maps still suck, and the view times I've tried OpenStreetMaps I've found it far behind both. The sheer size of the OSM project is staggering. Putting it next to Wikipedia, where missing content at some point wouldn't cause much fuss, makes it a bad example. Besides that, your limited knowledge of the popularity of OSM gives you a wrong pi…

I think ex YU states and former Soviet bloc also really shine in OSM, as well as areas along PRC border where regime forces map jitter (see HK/PRC border road junctions for example)

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

#249

Post by realusername »

mirekrusin wrote: post #142
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…

If you think you can use GPT-4 then you don't know what you're talking about. API access is on waitlist. UI has limit of 25 messages in 3 hours. If you think big, known companies can get ahead of the waitlist and use it - short answer is no, they can't because of their IP. Nobody is going to sign off leaking out all internal knowledge to play with something. ClosedAI seems to have big problem with capacity. Those poe…

That's also why I think OpenAI is in a tough spot in the long run. They just threw as much expensive hardware as they could to build this moat. There's basically two things which can happen from now on:

- Some scalability breakthrough will appear, if that's the case their moat disappears pretty much instantly and the cost of LLMs will plunge close to zero being a commodity. That's the future I'm betting on from what's happening now.

- No scalability breakthrough will appear and then it means that they will have a hard time to expand further as seen as the gpt4 limited access.

Either way, they are in a tough spot.

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

#250

Post by ealexhudson »

dmoy wrote: post #52
ealexhudson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers recognizing ChatGPT might just end up like vacuum cleaners; at least in the UK, people will often just call it a "hoover" but the likelihood of it being a Hoover is low. It is difficult to see where the moat might exist if it's not data and the majority of the workings are published / discoverable. I don't think the document identifies a readily working strategy to defend against the threats it recognises.

> end up like vacuum cleaners The term of art is Generic Trademark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark In US common law (and I'd imagine UK too), it's usually something companies want to avoid if at all possible. Relevant case for Google itself: https://www.intepat.com/blog/is-google-a-generic-trademark/

Well, except that there's no evidence that OpenAI are using the name in a trademark sense, let alone registered it?

Can't really genericise that which was never made specific...

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