I'm always shocked by how many people don't view branding as a moat.
Pepsi is catching up to us in terms of inserting sugar into water.
WE HAVE NO MOAT!
Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
#322Earlier 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
I do exactly this with https://github.com/nsarrazin/serge
Hetzner will install any hardware you send them for $100. So you can send them a $200 P40 24GB to run 33B parameter GPU models at ChatGPT speeds without increasing your monthly cost.
Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
#323Having 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…
A good example of this is Youtube
Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
#324I 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…
> Bing Maps
TIL
Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
#325I 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 will never defeat a company in areas where the work is very, very boring and you have to pay someone to do the grunt work. The last 20% of most tasks are extremely boring so things like data quality can only be accomplished through paid labor.
Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
#326> They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. Does this mean Bard took $10M to train and it has 540B parameters?
Bard is based on PaLM: https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/04/pathways-language-model-pa.... They haven't published training costs but estimates have been in the $10-20M range, so that seems reasonable.
Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
#327Really interesting to look at this from a product perspective. I've been obsessively looking at it from an AI user perspective, but instead of thinking of it as a "moat", I just keep thinking of the line from Disney's The Incredibles, "And when everyone is super, no one will be."
Every app that I might build utilizing AI is really just a window, or a wrapper into the model itself. Everything is easy to replicate. Why would anyone pay for my AI wrapper when they could just build THING themselves? Or just wait until GPT-{current+1} when the model can do THING directly, followed swiftly by free and open source models being able to do THING as well.
Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
#328I 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 o…
My impression is that open street maps problem is not the map quality. In areas I have used it, it often has details (e.g. small hiking paths, presence of bike lanes) that google maps doesn't have.
The issue is search. Searching for things that you don't know precisely (music bars in this area). This type of data/processing on top of the geospatial was always subpar and very hit or miss in my experience.
Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
#329Really interesting to look at this from a product perspective. I've been obsessively looking at it from an AI user perspective, but instead of thinking of it as a "moat", I just keep thinking of the line from Disney's The Incredibles, "And when everyone is super, no one will be." Every app that I might build utilizing AI is really just a window, or a wrapper into the model itself. Everything is easy to replicate. Why…
Just gotta get to the point where we can just ask the model to code the wrapper we want to use it with...
Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
#330Really interesting to look at this from a product perspective. I've been obsessively looking at it from an AI user perspective, but instead of thinking of it as a "moat", I just keep thinking of the line from Disney's The Incredibles, "And when everyone is super, no one will be." Every app that I might build utilizing AI is really just a window, or a wrapper into the model itself. Everything is easy to replicate. Why…
Because people pay for convenience, and may not be technical enough to stay up to date on the latest and best AI company for their use case. Presumably your specialized app would switch to better AI instances for that use case as they come along in which case they're paying for your curation as well.