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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”

#261

Post by criddell »

hgomersall wrote: post #218
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…

In terms of data, OSM is so far ahead of Google maps in my experience. The rendering is much better too. What's not there is obvious and easy to use tooling that anyone can interact with. I mean, there might be, but I don't know about it.

I just looked at OSM for the first time and for my neighborhood it's much worse than Google and Apple. It doesn't have satellite or street view data.

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

#262

Post by deanc »

visarga wrote: post #99
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…

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.…

And where are these open source models where I can go to a url and do all the things I can do in ChatGPT or through api keys for OpenAI? I googled a couple of weeks ago to find hosted versions of these open source models to try, and every one was either down or woefully poor.

OpenAI and MS are going to win because they have a package to go and it’s ready and available and working well - they have set the benchmark. I’m not seeing any evidence of this in the OSS community thus far.

Until I can spin up a docker image capable of the same as OpenAI in hetzner for 30 bucks a month - it’s not in the same league.

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

#263

Post by aamar »

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…

This is an instructive error. From my perspective, there was plenty of evidence even 15 years ago that community efforts (crowd-sourcing, OSS) only win sometimes, on the relevant timeframes.

So the “higher ups” were using too coarse a heuristic or maybe had some other pretty severe error in their reasoning.

The right approach here is to do a more detailed analysis. A crude start: the community approach wins when the MVP can be built by 1-10 people and then find a market where 0.01% of the users can sufficiently maintain it.[1]

Wikipedia’s a questionable comparison point, because it’s such an extraordinary outlier success. Though a sufficiently detailed model could account for it.

1. Yochai Benkler has done much more thorough analysis of win/loss factors. See e.g. his 2006 book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks

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

#264

Post by xiphias2 »

com2kid wrote: post #139
visarga wrote: 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…

I'm paying but hate the UI. I had to add labels myself as a Tampermonkey extension, but it would be much better if they would give API access to what I'm paying for and let UIs compete.

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

#265

Post by egonschiele »

This nicely outlines all the reasons I'm building Chisel [1]. There are other writing apps out there, but they are closed source. It's not clear to me what value they are adding, as the biggest value add -- LLMs -- are already open to the public. It makes a lot more sense to me to develop an open source writing app, where others can pitch in and everyone can reap the benefits.

I think it is fundamentally important to have an open source option. I'd love to have more people pitch in to make it better. One big limitation right now is, users are limited to 50k tokens a month, because everyone is using my API key. I'd like to move it to an electron app where users can put in their own API key, or even use a model they have set up locally.

[1] https://chiseleditor.com

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

#266

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#268

Post by crazyedgar »

Tostino wrote: post #72
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…

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.

This is my experience too. While I'd really love the Open Source models to catch up, currently they struggle even with dead-simple summarization tasks: they hallucinate too much, or omit essential points. ChatGPT don't often hallucinate when summarizing, only when answering questions.

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

#269

Post by galaxyLogic »

cube2222 wrote: post #38
ktbwrestler wrote: post #29

Can someone dumb this down for me because I don’t understand why this is a surprise… people are getting excited and collaborating to improve and innovate the same models that these larger companies are milking to death

Basically, if I understand correctly, the "status quo" was that the big models by OpenAI and Google that are much better (raw) than anything that was open source recently, would remain the greatest, and the moat would be the technical complexity of training and running those big models. However, the open sourcing led to tons of people exploring tons of avenues in an extremely quick fashion, leading to the development…

> big models by OpenAI and Google that are much better (raw) than anything that was open source recently,

When you say "models" do you mean TRAINED models?

Wouldn't the best training and supervised/feedback learning still be in the hands of the big players?

An open source "model" of all content in the open internet is great, but it has the garbage-in/garbage-out problem.

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

#270

Post by 123pie123 »

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…

I think a lot of people use one type of mapping application that doesn't seem to work for them and then say OSM is not great.

I've had to try a fair few mapping applications that works for me (I can recommend Organic Maps on android)

OSM map data easy exeeds Google map data, the only time I do use google maps is for street view images and satalite info.

Bing is good in the UK because that has Ordnance survey maps - OS mapping data is generally better than OSM (for what I need it for)

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