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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”

#281

Post by araes »

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…

The problem with a lot of open source is the long term issue.

The people doing many of these projects often want the short term kudos, upvotes, or research articles. They may iterate fast, and do all kinds of neat advancements, except in a month they'll move to the next "cool" project.

Unfortunately, with a lot of open source projects, they don't want to deal with the legalese, the customer specific integration, your annoying legacy system, the customer support and maintenance, or your weird plethora of high-risk data types (medical industry I'm looking at you)

Not sure what the Wikipedia reference is, since how many people use any form of encyclopedia other than crowdsourced Wikipedia?

However, to note, there are some examples of successful long term open source. Blender for example being a relatively strong competitor for 3D modeling (although Maya still tends to be industry dominant).

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

#282

Post by valine »

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…

Open source works well when the work is inherently cool and challenging enough to keep people engaged. Linux and Blender are two of the most successful open source projects, and the thing they have in common is that problems they solve are problems engineers enjoy working on.

Mapping intersections is extremely boring in comparison. The sheer quantity of boring work needed to bring open street maps up to the quality of google maps in insurmountable.

LLMs are freaking cool, and that bodes well for their viability as open source projects.

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

#283

Post by dragonwriter »

deanc wrote: post #262
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.…

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…

> 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.

Yes, you are right

That’s irrelevant to the point of this, which is about the dynamics of the market over a longer window than “what is available to use immediately today”, because a “moat” is a different thing than “a current lead”.

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

#284

Post by huijzer »

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.…

I also would like to believe that, but there are countless examples which show the difference. Companies have no time to figure out which of the open source offerings is the best. Even worse, they don’t have the time to switch from one project to the other or back to OpenAI if OpenAI releases a new state-of-the-art model.

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

#285

Post by yyyk »

burnished wrote: post #173
yyyk wrote: post #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 any…

How do you distinguish between an opinion you disagree with and 'spin'?

A) When IMHO the underlying argument is not quite honest.

B) When it comes from an interested party.

C) When there's enough of A and B that I feel it's intentional.

The underlying argument here would apply to some extremely profitable existing closed source software, so it's obviously not complete. Even closed source software which is strictly inferior manages to find some very profitable moats.

As for the source, it comes from Google Research, which has done a very poor job of using their knowledge to benefit Google. The article downplays the failures (we couldn't have done anything differently, but it doesn't matter anyway since Open Source will consume all!), and doesn't even think about productization.

The latter does give me a little bit of doubt: the article could also be emblematic of Google Research's failures and not 100% spin...

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

#286

Post by BiteCode_dev »

seydor wrote: post #186
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…

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.

What makes you think open ai won't look at the FOSS improvements, include them in their tech, and make their GPU farm way cheaper, rendering their service even more competitive?

Not to mention it's easy to run stable diffusion, but midjourney is still a good business. I can run sd on my laptop, I still pay for midjourney because it's convenient, the out of the box experience is better than any competition, and it keeps improving.

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

#287

Post by beepbooptheory »

Perhaps something that gets the bulk of its value from the retroactive "participation" of every single person in the world who has written text for one public or another is just not meant to be monetized. Beyond even ethical maxims, that is, perhaps its simply not compatible in its very nature with capitalistic enterprise. I know this is probably naive, but it would be a beautiful outcome to me.

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

#288

Post by yafbum »

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 excellent point. I think the memo is making a different kind of case though - it's saying that large multipurpose models don't matter because people already have the ability to get better performance on the problems they actually care about from isolated training. It's kind of a PC-vs-datacenter argument, or, to bring it back to Maps, it'd be like saying mapping the world is pointless because what interests people is only their neighborhood.

I don't buy this for Maps, but it's worth highlighting that this isn't the usual "community supported stuff will eat commercial stuff once it gets to critical mass" type of argument.

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

#289

Post by mlboss »

jdelman wrote: post #161

While this post champions the progress made by OSS, it also mentions that a huge leap came from Meta releasing Llama. Would the rapid gains in OSS AI have came as quickly without that? Did Meta strategically release Llama knowing it would destroy Google & OpenAI's moats?

I think it would have been some other model if not Meta. Stablility AI also released a OSS model, Cerebras released another.
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