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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”

#461

Post by rileyphone »

narrator wrote: post #396
dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

I think the problem with AI being everywhere and ubiquitous is that AI is the first technology in a very long time that requires non-trivial compute power. That compute power costs money. This is why you only get a limited number of messages every few hours from GPT4. It simply costs too much to be a ubiquitous technology. For example, the biggest LLama model only runs on an A100 that costs about $15,000 on ebay. The…

You can run it (quantified at least) on a $4000 Mac thanks to Apple's unified memory. Surely other manufacturers are looking for how to expand VRAM, hopefully Intel or AMD.

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

#462

Post by UncleEntity »

seydor wrote: post #156

Not only they have no moat, Open source models are uncensored and this is huge. Censorship is not just political , it cripples the product to basically an infantile stage and precludes so many applications. For once, it is a liability But this article doesn't state the very obvious: When will google (the inventor of Transformer, and "rightful" godfather of modern LLMs) , release a full open source, tinkerable model b…

> When will google release a full open source, tinkerable model better than LLaMa?

Arguably, Facebook released llama because it had no skin in the game.

Google, on the other hand, has a lot of incentive to claw back the users who went to Bing to get their AI fix. Presumably without being the place for “Ok, google, write me a 500 word essay on the economic advantages of using fish tacos as currency” for peoples’ econ 101 classes causing all kinds of pearl clutching on how they’re destroying civilization.

The open source peeps are well on the path of recreating a llama base model so unless google does something spectacular everyone will be like, meh.

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

#463

Post by TeMPOraL »

jjoonathan wrote: post #454
titzer wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. I...kinda don't want this? UIs have already changed in so many different fits, starts, waves, and cycles. I used to have skills. But I have no skills now. Nothing works like it used to. Yeah they were tricky to use but I cannot imagine that a murky AI interface is going to be any easier to use, and certainly impossible to master. Even if it is easier t…

It was a sad day when I realized I was systematically overinvesting in skills on churning technology and that my investments would never amortize. Suddenly my parents' stubborn unwillingness to bother learning anything technological made complete sense and I had to adjust my own patience threshold sharply downwards.

There are some software tools where the investment pays back, and has been over decades. Microsoft Office (in part because it's not reinventing itself, but rather accrues new features; in part because everyone else copies its UI patterns). Photoshop. Emacs.

With modern software, I find it that there isn't much to learn at all - in the past decade, seems to only be removing features and interaction modes, never adding anything new.

Still, I don't regret having learned so much all those years ago. It gives me an idea what the software could do. What it was supposed to do. This means I often think of multi-step solutions for problems most people around me can't solve unless there's a dedicated SaaS for it. As frustrating as it often is to not be able to do something you could 10 years ago, sometimes I discover that some of the more advanced features still remain in modern toy-like software.

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

#464

Post by standyro »

baryphonic wrote: post #447
unicornmama wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google makes almost all its money from search. These platforms are all there to reinforce its search monopoly. ChatGPT has obsoleted search. ChatGPT will do to Google search what the Internet did to public libraries - make them mostly irrelevant.

How has ChatGPT obsoleted search, when hallucination and the token limits are major problems? It's (sort of) obviated search for certain kinds of queries engineers make, but not normies. I say sort of, because IMO it's pretty bad at spitting out accurate (or even syntactically correct) code for any nontrivial problem. I have to give it lots of corrections, and often it will just invent new code that also is broken in…

I think you're underestimating product-market fit.

Normies don't care about the exact truth

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

#465

Post by james-revisoai »

narrator wrote: post #396
dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

I think the problem with AI being everywhere and ubiquitous is that AI is the first technology in a very long time that requires non-trivial compute power. That compute power costs money. This is why you only get a limited number of messages every few hours from GPT4. It simply costs too much to be a ubiquitous technology. For example, the biggest LLama model only runs on an A100 that costs about $15,000 on ebay. The…

You're right and this is why they didn't heavily use BERT(in the full sense), arguably the game-changing NLP model of the 10s. They couldn't justify bringing the cost per search up.

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

#466

Post by UncleEntity »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #320
jimsimmons wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it’s not 20% then

I think this person is referring to the 80/20 rule. Here are a few examples: 20% of a plant contains 80% of the fruit 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of customers 20% of players result in 80% of points scored I've heard this stated as you can complete 80% of a project with 20% of the effort, and the last 20% of completeness will require 80% of the effort.

The Pareto principle…

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

#468

Post by kelipso »

not2b wrote: post #417
kelipso wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the open source model has been what's been working for the last few decades. The concern with LLMs was that open source (and academia) couldn't do what the big companies are doing because they couldn't get access to enough computing resources. The article is arguing (and I guess open source ML groups are showing) you don't need those computing resources to pave the way. It's still an open question whether…

But none of the "open source" AI models are open source in the classic sense. They are free but they aren't the source code; they are closer to a freely distributable compiled binary where the compiler and the original input hasn't been released. A true open source AI model would need to specify the training data and the code to go from the training data to the model. Certainly it would be very expensive for someone…

I agree with you to the extent that yeah technically it's not open source because the data is not known. But for these foundation models like Llama, the model structure is obviously known, pretty sure (didn't check) the hyperparameters used to train the model is known, the remaining unknown of data, it's pretty much the same for all foundation models, CommonCrawl etc. So replicating Llama once you know all that is a mechanical step and so isn't really closed source in a sense. Though probably some new term open something is more appropriate.

The real sauce is the data you fine tune these foundation models on, so RLHF, specific proprietary data for your subfield, etc. The model definition, basically Transformer architecture and a bunch of tricks to get it to scale are mostly all published material, hyper parameters to train the model are less accessible but also part of published literature; then the data and (probably) niche field you apply it to becomes the key. Gonna be fun times!

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

#469

Post by mesh »

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…

>The point I'm wanting to make is that users will go to whoever has the best model.

Best isn't defined just by quality though. In some instances for some groups, things like whether the model is trained on licensed content (with permission) and / or is safe for commercial use is more important.

This is one reason why Adobe's Firefly has been received relatively well. (I work for Adobe).

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

#470

Post by quickthrower2 »

blowski wrote: post #422
TeMPOraL wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I can't see Google failing here. Like other tech giants, they're sitting on a ridiculously large war chest. Worst case, they can wait for the space to settle a bit and spend a few billion to buy the market leader. If AI really is an existential threat to their business prospects, spending their reserves on this is a no-brainer.

That was true for IBM in the 1970s and Microsoft in the 90s. Despite holding a royal flush, they managed to lose the game through a combination of arrogance, internal fighting, innovator's dilemma, concern over anti-trust, and bureaucratic inertia. It will be hard for Google to pull this off.

Microsoft aint doing so bad now
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