471–480 of 1001 posts
This is not a leaked google memo. I can't believe hackernews believes an article like this is a memo at google. Kudos to the authors for finding a sneaky way to get traffic.
Every piece of application software is a wrapper on other software with a set of opinionated workflows built on top.
Yes, there are some companies that made it hard to switch from - Snowflake, Salesforce - because there are data stores and its a pain to move your record of data. But even they don't have true moats - its just sticker.
So I think Google is right in saying there is no moat. But given their size, Google has layers and bureaucracy, which makes it hard to execute in a new market. That's why OpenAI I think will win - because they are smaller, can move fast, have a great team and can hence, execute...till the day they become a big company too and get disrupted by a new startup, which is the natural circle of life in technology.
Does this mean Google will be releasing OSS LLMs? They could justify it as "commoditizing your competitors business".
That’s what this piece argues for. I predict it will not be reflected in Google’s strategy in the next, say, six months, or morw to the point until and unless the apparent “Stable Diffusion” moment in LLMs becomes harder to ignore, such as via sustained publicity on concrete commercially significant non-demonstration/non-research use.
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…
OpenAI has no moat, but at least they have first mover advantage on a cool product, and may be able to get some chumps (microsoft) to think this will translate into a lasting feature inside of office or bing.
The only moat in technology are the founders and team. I think this concept of having a moat sounds great when VCs write investment memos - but in reality, cold, hard execution everyday is what matters and that all comes from the quality and tenacity of the team. Every piece of application software is a wrapper on other software with a set of opinionated workflows built on top. Yes, there are some companies that made…
Moats don't last forever, doesn't mean they aren't real.
The guy writing the post was writing about AI research at google. Not generally at Google, or for search.
The main area I can see for lock-in is in the fine-tuning of models for specific customers and problem domains. I think this is what OpenAI is focusing on and why their fine-tuning prices are not as expensive as I expected. They make it cheap to fine-tune but then they charge extra when you use the fine-tuned models (they shift the cost to the customer later, over time after some investment/lock-in has been established). But for most problem domains, it's probably not that expensive to finetune a model from scratch on a different provider.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> OpenAI faces the existential risk, not Google. Yes, but the quickest way for anyone to get themselves to state-of-the-art is to buy OpenAI. Their existential risk is whether they continue to be (semi)independent, not whether they shutdown or not. Presumably Microsoft is the obvious acquirer, but there must be a bunch of others who could also be in the running.
But if you wait a month you can get that model for free...